Move your phone shop off Excel and paper in one week

Before you start: decide the date

Pick a Monday as day one and tell the team. From the following Monday, new repairs go into the new system and the old sheet is read-only. Without a date, the old way never ends.

Day 1: the shop itself

• Your company name, logo, address and tax registration number.
• Branches, if you have more than one, with their opening hours.
• Your invoice numbering, so the new invoices carry on from the old ones and don't start again at 1.
• Your document design: the logo, the colours, the bank details and the terms on the ticket and the invoice.
• Your default repair warranty in days.

Day 2: people

Add your staff with the role that matches what they do: front desk, technician, accountant, manager. Give each one their own login. Shared passwords are how you lose track of who changed what.

Day 3: your price list

Enter your repair services with your own prices: a screen replacement, a battery, a charging port, a diagnosis. Start with the ten models you see most. Twenty common repairs cover most of a normal week, so you don't need all of them on day three.

Day 4: customers, parts and accessories

Export your customer sheet and your parts and accessories sheet as CSV or Excel, tidy the columns (one phone number per column, prices as numbers), and import them. Look at the preview before you confirm. Don't import ten years of history: current customers and what is on the shelf today are enough. Count the shelf as you go, so the opening stock is real. The phones you have for sale are few: enter them one by one, each with its IMEI.

Day 5: a dry run

Take three real repairs from today and run them through end to end: open the repair with the IMEI and the condition, add the service and the part, send the estimate, hand the phone back, invoice it, take the payment. Then sell one accessory at the counter. Do it with the front desk at the counter, not alone in the office. Whatever is awkward shows up here, while there's still time to fix it.

Next Monday: go

Every new repair goes into the new system. Phones already on the bench finish on their paper tickets. Expect the first two days to be slower. By the end of the week most front-desk staff are faster than they were on paper, because the customer and the phone are already on file the second time they come in.

What to leave for later

• Staff payroll and attendance: start them on the first of next month, not in the middle of one.
• The WhatsApp assistant: get the team using the system first, then link the number.
• Old invoices: keep them in the old files; don't re-type them.
• The old ticket book: keep it within reach for as long as your warranty runs. A phone repaired on paper last month is still covered.

How SolderDesk helps

Sign up and you can start with demo data to practise on. Workspace settings take care of day one, including your own numbering, your document design and the default repair warranty. Customers and parts import from CSV or Excel, with a preview before anything is saved. Every list exports back to Excel whenever you want it. If you'd like someone to walk through the week with you, book a demo.