A repair shop POS is not a café till with extra buttons.
Plenty of shops run their counter on a generic retail POS — and pay for
it daily in workarounds. A repair business sells work on someone else's property,
across multiple visits, with deposits, warranties and second-hand goods. That's a
different transaction model, and it needs a till built for it.
Where retail POS systems break at a repair counter
The sale isn't finished when the customer leaves. Drop-off today,
payment at collection, sometimes a deposit in between. A retail till wants one basket,
one payment, one moment — so shops invent "fake products" and sticky notes to bridge it.
The ticket and the till don't talk. The repair lives in one app,
the payment in another; at hand-back somebody retypes the amount, and the warranty
start-date lives nowhere.
Used devices are taxed differently. Buy a phone from a customer,
resell it, and in the UK and EU the margin scheme applies — VAT on your margin, per
device, no VAT shown on the invoice. Retail POS systems have no concept of this.
Split and partial payments are daily, not edge cases. Half card,
half cash; a gift card plus the difference; a deposit against a special-order part.
The drawer must reconcile per branch. A daily cash-up (Z-report)
your bookkeeper accepts, per location, with refunds and payouts audit-trailed.
What a repair shop POS must do — the checklist
Open a sale from the repair ticket — parts, labour and warranty
flow into the receipt without retyping
Deposits and part-payments that follow the ticket until collection
Split tender: card, cash, gift card, store credit in one transaction
Sell repairs, accessories and used devices on one receipt — each taxed correctly,
including margin-scheme items
Buy-ins (trade-ins) handled as what they are: a payout with a per-device record,
not a negative sale hack
Daily Z-report per branch; gap-free invoice numbering behind every receipt
Warranty start set automatically at hand-back
The test to run on any vendor: ask them to demo
"customer pays a 300 deposit today, collects next week, pays the rest half card half
cash, and the receipt shows the 12-month warranty." If the demo needs a workaround,
the daily reality will too.
How a1RepairFlow's POS does it
The POS is one module of a platform where the ticket, inventory, invoice and
customer already live — so the checklist above isn't integration work, it's just how
it behaves. Deposits attach to tickets; buy-ins create per-device margin records;
the Z-report closes each branch's drawer; and every receipt stands on a sequentially
numbered invoice your accountant can defend. Starter is €59/month, Pro €69/month with
the booking widget, SMS and webshop sync included — billed monthly, no contract.
Put your counter on it for two weeks.
Full Pro access, no credit card. Or get a personalised demo built from your own
shop's website in about a minute — then run the deposit test on us.