A busy counter feels like a healthy business, and feelings are how repair shops go broke slowly. Eight numbers, each checkable in minutes if your system records tickets and payments properly, tell you where the money actually leaks.
Revenue ÷ completed tickets, per month. The cheapest lever in the shop: a screen protector, a case or a battery health check offered at drop-off moves this 10–15% with zero extra footfall. If you don't know this number, start here.
Monthly totals hide the one repair type you do at a loss. Price-eroded screen models and "quick jobs" with forgotten small parts are the usual culprits. You want margin visible per repair type, so the loss-maker has nowhere to hide.
Measured per repair type, as a median. Customers forgive a fair quote; they don't forgive "it'll be ready Tuesday" three times. Rising turnaround is the earliest symptom of a parts-ordering problem.
Booked slots that never arrive are inventory you paid for and threw away. Above ~15%, fix it with an SMS reminder the day before — the highest-ROI automation a repair shop can switch on.
Returns ÷ completed repairs, per repair type and per technician. This is your quality number and your parts-supplier scorecard in one. A spike on one model is a bad parts batch; a spike on one tech is a training conversation.
What fraction of this month's tickets came from someone who's been in before? A repair shop's real moat is a customer list that comes back and refers. Below ~25%, you're paying full acquisition cost for every job.
Finished repairs sitting on the shelf are cash you already spent (part + labour) that nobody collected. Count devices and kroner/euros weekly; chase with an SMS, and have a written policy for devices abandoned past 90 days.
The capacity truth-teller: revenue ÷ paid technician hours. It tells you whether the next hire should be a technician (number is high, counter is saturated) or a marketing spend (number is low, bench is idle).
The only rule: a KPI you compute by hand once a quarter is a history lesson, not a dashboard. These eight are all by-products of tickets, bookings and payments recorded in one system — in a1RepairFlow they're on the reports screen without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.
a1RepairFlow is the full platform for repair shops — POS, tickets, invoicing, inventory, online booking and webshop sync, from €59/month. Try everything free for 14 days, no credit card.