What I saw
You are not short of software. Syncro runs the tickets, QuickBooks runs the books, and between them they hold twelve years of records — 20,235 work orders. What you are short of is the ability to ask them a question and get an answer you'd bet money on.
Here is the specific problem, and it is worse than it looks. The Type field on a ticket — the one that says whether this was a phone, a laptop or a PlayStation — was filled in on most tickets through 2019 and on almost none after that. In 2024, out of 1,164 tickets, exactly one had a type set.
That means every category number you have looked at since reopening was inferred from what somebody typed in a subject line, not from a recorded fact. It happens to be roughly right — I checked the classifier against the 8,908 older tickets that do carry a type and it agreed 88% of the time — but roughly right is not a number you use to decide where to spend money.
There is a second, quieter problem sitting next to it. About a thousand records in Syncro are not repair work at all: inbound text messages that auto-created tickets, failed-subscription notices, referral reminders, and a handful of phishing emails that became tickets when somebody replied. They are inflating your ticket count by about 5%, and they are in every report you have ever run.
Worth doing now
- 01$X,XXX
Classify every ticket at check-in, automatically
The four check-in workflows already fix this going forward. What they don't fix is the six years of history behind you. A classifier reading subject lines and problem text can label the whole back catalogue in an afternoon and keep labelling new ones as they arrive — so the next time you ask what this shop actually does, the answer comes from data instead of an estimate.
- 02$X,XXX
Get the thousand non-repairs out of the reporting
Auto-created SMS tickets, billing failures and referral reminders are not work orders and should never have been counted as any. A rule that routes them somewhere else on arrival, and retro-tags the existing ones, makes every number on your dashboard about 5% more honest overnight. This is the cheapest item on the list and it should have been done years ago.
Worth doing later
Revenue by category. Right now you know that consoles and gadgets are 30.6% of tickets and computers are 29.0% — a statistical tie — and phones are 20.1%. What you do not know is what any of them are worth, because ticket volume is not revenue, and a console repair and a laptop repair do not bill the same.
The line-item data is already in Syncro. Joining it to properly classified tickets would tell you which of your two co-leading categories is actually paying the rent. That is probably the single most valuable question this shop could answer — and it is worth nothing until items 01 and 02 are done, because you would be joining good money data to bad category data.
Not worth doing
A chatbot on the website
You asked. Don't. This is a walk-in and word-of-mouth business in a town where people know where you are. A bot would cost real money to annoy the small number of people who were going to call anyway. If you want to reduce phone interruptions, the answer is a better hours-and-pricing page, not a conversation.
Leading the phone-repair rebuild with social media
This is the one I expect you to argue with. Phone repair is not a category waiting to be reawakened — it is the worst-trending line of work in the shop, down from 38.6% of tickets in 2016 to about 20% now, while game consoles grew 91% and are the only category bigger today than at the peak. Push the thing that is already growing. That is not an argument against marketing phones eventually. It is an argument against funding it first.
What it costs
- 01 · Ticket classifier, history plus ongoing
- once $X,XXX
- 02 · Non-repair routing and retro-tagging
- once $X,XXX
- Running cost of both, per month
- under $X,XXX
- Hours a month this takes off your desk
- XX hrs
Dollars are blacked out here the same way yours would be if I ever showed your assessment to anyone. That part isn't a sample — it's the policy.
What I’d do first
Item 02, then item 01, and nothing else until both have run for a month. Two is a rule and an afternoon; one is a model and a week. Doing the cheap one first means the expensive one gets built against clean data instead of against a 5% error you have stopped noticing.
Then, and only then, the revenue question. If it turns out consoles bill lower than computers, your whole growth story changes and you will want to have found that out before you spent a season marketing them.