Recurring / Repeating Services
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Tony Moffa
Recurring / repeating sales i.e. if we provide a service where we top-up tubeless sealant every 8 weeks, we need to be able to automate that in CL, currently we will need to do it in Xero so the sales income sits outside of CL which is naff. This one is not Workshop Module related, just CloudPOS related.
To expand on this, we also do scheduled service plans (SSPs) for clients whereby they have a repeating service booking every 3/6 or 12 months for a particular bike. At the moment, we have to manually create these a year ahead and use a creative numbering system to warn us at the last slot that we need to forward create the next year's worth. We have a lot of customers on this SSP so it can be hundreds of manually created entries.
Many of our future services will be recurring and Direct Debit based collections so we need to bring this into our EPOS to make it manageable.
We all need to become more like motor car and motorbike dealerships where the servicing is proactive and this gives us all a more annuity based business. Rather than waiting for customers to come in the door - but the software needs to support the change. It's hapenning a lot in Europe now as the market switches to eBikes predominantly. Really hoping this is included in Workshop 2 (or 2?) this year. Recurring entries is really good for business. Thanks for reading.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Merged in a post:
Recurring Jobs
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Tony Moffa
We have a product called 'Schedule Service Plan' where we automatically schedule services on an ongoing basis for people's bikes. For example, a customer may join the SSP for their summer/main bike and want it services every 6 months, so we schedule them automatically every six months. Currently, there is no functionality for this in the Workshop Module so it's really cumbersome having to manually create all the services. A feature like MS Outlook Calendar has would be good i.e. to book a service on the 1st Monday of every 6th month for example. Something basic like that.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
I'm not sure automating recurring jobs will be part of the version 2.0 overhaul, its a great idea, but I'm not sure there are enough retailers who operate in this manner. Have you considered using a developer to add this functionality via the API? It would be great option on our Cloud POS market place if you wanted to make this available to others and that would allow you to make some money from the development.
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Tony Moffa
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime How would one go about finding a developer who works with CloudPOS then? Sounds interesting.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Tony Moffa The Cloud POS API is REST based, which is the industry standard for API developments so any dev would be able to work with it.
You'd need to insert workorders on a schedule. The complex bit would be managing which customers you create recurring jobs for, and what goes on the jobs, that is going to require a user interface to manage them I would guess. Or at a basic level, perhaps an excel spreadsheet that then gets read into the API.
You'd need someone with some basic IT skills, but its the kind of thing which ChatGPT with a paid license could largely create the code for.
What you want to ask for from us is an API key for your Cloud POS 'demo' account.
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Tony Moffa
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime Thanks Neil, I'll see if I know anyone sufficiently clever! I think there are tonnes of services that could be offered if this was available, bike shops mostly don't offer this sort of thing because they probably haven't thought of it yet and don't have the tech to automate the bookings.