Built for the shop, not the demo
SlickCell Pro exists because the software a repair shop can actually buy tends to be a till with repairs bolted on, or a ticket system that knows nothing about money.
The gap between the job and the money
Walk into a busy repair shop and you will usually find three systems running at once: a board or a notebook for the jobs, a till for the money, and somebody's memory for everything in between. Each one works. The trouble is what happens where they meet.
A deposit gets taken and noted on a ticket, but never against the bill. A part comes out of the drawer and the count is corrected at the weekend, if anyone remembers. A customer pays most of it and the rest becomes a discount because that is the only field that fits. None of this is carelessness — it is what happens when the record of the work and the record of the money are two different records.
So the product was built around one idea rather than a feature list: a part used should reduce stock, that movement should land in cost of goods, cost of goods should land in the month's profit, and none of it should be changeable without leaving a trace. Everything else follows from that.
Three principles
They sound obvious. Most software for this trade breaks at least one of them.
- Money must reconcile
- A part payment is a balance, not a discount. Change is not revenue. Once money is settled, history gets corrected by adding to it rather than by overwriting it.
- Stock must match the shelf
- Quantity is derived from real units, not typed. A device is an individual record with its own cost and history, because that is what it is in the drawer.
- Honest numbers
- A figure should open onto the records that produced it. If a total cannot be traced back to the invoices behind it, it is a guess with a decimal point.
Where the work is going
Directions rather than dates. Anything below that is not live today is described as not live.
- Finishing the verification pass
- Much of the product is built and in use, but the difference between built and proven matters. Claims on this site are being tested end to end before they are published as fact, which is why some pages describe less than the software does.
- The supplier side, deepened
- Ordering between two businesses that both use SlickCell Pro is live, and suppliers run their own orders, catalogues and dispatches on it. What is not built is the view across all of that at once — a working day's orders and deliveries on one screen, and figures a wholesaler can read without opening records one by one. That is where the next work on it goes.
- The trade's own tools
- Calculators and guides for the parts of the job that are genuinely hard to get right — margin-scheme VAT being the obvious one — built to be useful whether or not you ever buy anything.
- Listening to shops that say no
- The objections that come out of sales conversations change the product and the copy. A shop explaining why this would not work for them is more useful than one saying it looks good.
Judge it on the paperwork
The fastest way to find out whether any of this is true is to put your own awkward job through it.