Wickenden Cycles
North Slope
Piper & Sons Bootmakers
The Sail Loft
Marchetti
Everleigh Repair
Ridgeway Device
Fennimore & Co
Ashgrove Cyclery
Halloway & Sons
Halberd
Brantwood Audio
Orrery
Cadence Cycle Works
Pinegrove Music
Corvid Instruments
Vantage Ski
Nine Elms Repair
Kestrel
Stanmore Bootmakers
Luthiers and band-instrument workshops run the longest jobs here
Two to four weeks is normal, and the person who left the instrument is more attached to it than any other customer in any other trade. Silence is not neutral to them.
h/week less admin time
Hours a week off the phone. On a three-week job, the update call arrives around day nine unless something answers it first.
Days to turn a job around
Days from booked in to ready, median across all trades. Instrument work runs three to four times that, and the number that matters is whether it holds.
jobs/month completed
The median instrument workshop on Benchtop, counting finished jobs. Fewer jobs than other trades, and far more hours in each one.
Three weeks is a long time to say nothing
The owner ringing on day nine is not impatient, they are uninformed, and from behind a counter those look identical. A photograph and one line on the job is the difference, and it costs fifteen seconds.
Every note carries a name and a date
Two people work on a long instrument job and only one of them knows what happened on Tuesday. Notes are stamped with who wrote them, in order, so a handover is reading rather than asking.
The collection conversation, already had
By the time the owner arrives they have seen the photographs, the notes and the total. Collection stops being the moment the price is discovered.
Everything else it does
Booking, scheduling and updates are the spine. This is the rest of it, including where it runs.
The week, not just the queue
Promised dates and booked collections laid out day by day, with a count per day, so an overloaded Thursday is visible on Monday.
Everything that person has brought in
One record per customer with every job, item and total against it. The second visit is faster than the first.
Turnaround and what is still on the shelf
Median days from booked in to finished, jobs completed, and how much finished work nobody has collected.
Who can see what
Roles decide who takes jobs in, changes prices, sees money and administers the account.
Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android
A web application, so there is nothing to install. The layout adapts at each width — a tablet at the counter, a desktop in the office, a phone at home.
Webhooks into the till
Six events and one payload shape, so a paid job can close itself in whatever runs your point of sale.
From the intake photograph to the day it goes home
Condition, estimate, deposit, the photographs along the way and a date the owner can watch move. A long job needs all of it, not some of it.
The instrument, on the record
Make, model, serial and the condition it arrived in, photographed before it leaves the counter. On a vintage instrument that record is the job.
Photographs as the update
Frets out, board levelled, wire seated. Four photographs over three weeks is a job the owner watched rather than waited for.
A date that can move, visibly
Long jobs slip. A promised date that changes on the owner’s page, with the date it changed, is a different thing from one that quietly does not happen.
Estimates before you start
Labour and parts agreed in writing on a four-hundred-dollar refret, so the conversation at collection is about the work.
Deposits on long work
On a six-week job, a deposit is what stops the instrument living on your shelf afterwards.
Notes they can read
You choose which notes are visible. Most workshops show two or three of the twelve, and it is enough.
