Bookkeeping for Repair Shops: Parts, Labour, and Deposits

Repair money is not retail money. A shop that sells chocolate bars has a simple day: money in, stock out, done by closing time. A repair shop lives in a different world — every job is a small story with its own dates, its own costs and its own risks, and forty of those stories are open at once. This guide shows how phone, bike and appliance repair shops can keep clean books with about one minute of effort per job.

Why repair shops are harder to track than retail

Follow one job: a customer brings in a phone on Monday. You order a screen on Tuesday — €38 leaves your pocket. You do the repair on Thursday. The customer collects on Saturday and pays €90. One job, four dates, money moving in both directions, and a part sitting in a drawer in between. Now multiply by every open job on your shelf, add deposits taken up front and the occasional warranty redo, and you can see why a simple daily till count — perfect for retail — tells a repair shop almost nothing. Retail bookkeeping tracks days. Repair bookkeeping has to track jobs, because the job is where the money is won or lost.

Separating parts, labour, and markup per job

Every repair price hides two businesses: a parts dealer and a skilled pair of hands. Take that screen replacement: you charged €90 and the screen cost €38, so your hands earned €52 — for maybe forty minutes of work. Excellent. Now compare a water-damaged laptop: you charged €70, used almost no parts, but spent five hours across three days drying, cleaning and testing. That is €14 an hour — a favour, not a business. If you only record '€90 in' and '€70 in', both jobs look like income and you will happily keep doing the bad one. The fix is recording the part cost against its job the day you buy the part. That single habit splits every job into parts money and labour money, and it is the foundation for everything else in this guide.

Deposits and unfinished jobs: money you can't spend yet

A customer leaves €40 on a €120 job so you will order the part. That €40 is in your till, but it is not yours yet — if the part is faulty or the customer cancels, some of it may go back. The practical method, no accounting jargon needed: write it as 'deposit, job 214', never as a sale, and keep a running list of open deposits so you always know how much of your till is actually promises. The mirror image matters just as much: parts you have already paid for, sitting inside devices nobody has collected. A shelf of finished, uncollected repairs is frozen money. Once a month, list every job open longer than 30 days and send each customer a short message. Most owners recover a surprising amount — one bike shop found €700 of finished repairs waiting on that shelf the first time they looked.

Warranty returns and redos without losing track

Redos are the cost nobody writes down: the part again, the time again, income zero — and because they feel like failure, they quietly vanish from the record. Write them down anyway: 'job 198 redo, part €22, 1 hour'. Two good reasons. First, pattern spotting: if one supplier's screens come back three times more often than another's, the cheap part is actually the expensive one, and only your records can prove it. Second, honesty about margin: if one in six water-damage jobs comes back, the true earnings of that repair type are lower than your price list suggests — which should change either your price or your warranty terms.

A one-minute job-by-job record that actually works

• When the job comes in: job number or customer name, device, agreed price, deposit if any — '214 Ana, phone screen, €90, dep €40'.
• When you buy the part: cost against the job number — '214 screen €38'.
• When it is collected: final payment and how it was paid — '214 paid €50 card'.
• If it comes back: a redo note with the extra cost — '214 redo, new screen €38'.
• Four short lines across the life of a job — under a minute in total, and enough to answer every money question that matters.

Reading your numbers: which repairs really pay

Once the job records exist, the monthly read takes twenty minutes. Group finished jobs by type — screens, batteries, charging ports, water damage, software fixes — and for each type note: how many jobs, average price, average part cost, and a rough average of hands-on time. The discoveries are usually sharp. Battery swaps at €35 with a €12 part and twenty minutes of work turn out to be the best money in the shop. Water damage at €60 average, with hours of labour and the highest redo rate, turns out to be the worst. That single page tells you what to advertise, what to reprice, and what to politely decline — decisions that no amount of hard work at the bench can make for you.