Forum Discussion

martellapp's avatar
martellapp
Contributor 2
21 days ago

Inventory Management

Hi Everyone,

I run a small appliance repair company in Nova Scotia. Our current strain with using jobber is lack of inventory management. We keep essentially inventory in 2 different places, the technicians truck and in the shop. The shop is split into 2 sections. Customer parts that we receive in for specific jobs and just warehouse stock of parts we keep around.

We have seriously been considering switching to a different program for lack of features that fit with jobber on this. If anyone has any recommendations that you have personally used I would love to hear about it.

In my ideal world a technician would be able to add a line item and enter a part number and it would say "you have this in your truck" so he can select it and it will alert us that he is using it from his truck to reorder. 

This is a strain on our growing business and I am hoping there is a solution so we do not have to leave jobber.

Thanks, Jacob.

appliance repair
software

7 Replies

  • Fred1's avatar
    Fred1
    Contributor 2
    21 days ago

    Try quickbooks it does have features for stocking and should be able to integrate with Jobber up to a certain point. I think Jobber is mainly for the actual   " service" part, not really design as an E-commerce or stocking software so that inventory can be tracked. There is the apps(App market place) on jobber where it could link in to other apps if you look at other apps that may help.

    -We are a landscaping company and for example we have people who do irrigation or irrigation repairs where they dont have the part and a side note has to be made to  "order" the new parts or even get them from the shop, its the drivers responsability to keep track of this and send the request to our office for orders. we struglled but its not really the softwares fault but our system.

    -Same for plant installers

    So in another words what i suggest is looking into the system you have for your crew and see what your business is really about, is servicing more important or item tracking more important, from there you can select the best software for you and then have a secondary software for the stocking, you wont really find a software that does it all and when they do they tend to complicate things and lack others. Jobber really helps with customer communication, something that has been getting lost with time and our customers really apreciate that communication. depending on your ops it may be worth it to have some one in the office to help with the stocking data etc.. hope it helps and best wishes

  • krista's avatar
    krista
    Jobber Support Team
    20 days ago

    Hi martellapp​ 

    Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experience and detailed feedback. We truly appreciate hearing how Jobber is working for your appliance repair business — and where it's falling short. Inventory management is an area we know is important to many of our users, and your real-world example helps bring that need to life.

    We’d love the opportunity to learn more about your workflow and challenges so we can better share that context with our development team as they consider future enhancements. If you’re open to it, please reach out to our team at 1-888-721-1115 (option 1) or support@getjobber.com. We’d be grateful to gather a bit more insight from you.

    Thanks again for being part of the Jobber community. Your feedback plays a big role in helping us build a better platform.

  • JohnB's avatar
    JohnB
    Contributor 2
    13 days ago

    Hi,  I use Jobber to manage my repair service.  This is one feature I would love to be added.  The ability to store customers' product details in their client record would be a real time-saver.  Currently I have to look for previous jobs and re-enter the relevant details in custom fields on the new Job record.  It would be great to have these details linked to the clients record, so we can see at a glance the equipment they have.  We can store multiple properties, now multiple contacts, but NO customer inventory details.  Otherwise Jobber works well for us.  Thanks

  • EnergizeUs's avatar
    EnergizeUs
    Contributor 5
    12 days ago

    I just ran into the same issue with tracking parts between trucks and the shop.

    I just downloaded PLY, it’s available right inside Jobber’s app marketplace. I am using this because in my electrical business It helps track inventory per technician, per truck, or per job.

    You can add part numbers, link them to jobs, and it’ll even notify you when stock is low or when it’s time to reorder. my guys love to have a cushion and then we do one order instead of the typical head to the supply house kill 2 hours before showing up on site. 

    Might be worth checking out before switching platforms entirely. I’m testing it this week, but on paper, it looks like exactly what you’re describing.

     

    • jaf's avatar
      jaf
      Contributor 2
      9 days ago

      EnergizeUs​ Would love to hear how PLY works out for you! 

      We're in house cleaning, so our challenge is a bit different - we need to track which teams are taking supplies from our stock room. Right now we have our operations manager use a ChatGPT setup where she voice inputs what supplies each team takes (written on a sign-out sheet), our current stock levels, and when we restock. It outputs an itemized list plus an Excel sheet so we can cross-check that team usage + current stock + starting inventory all add up correctly. 

      Planning to connect that to Google Sheets and use Gemini to help track usage patterns and know when to reorder, plus catch any discrepancies before they become bigger issues.

      Curious if PLY might work for supply tracking across teams too, or if it's more geared toward the appliance/parts inventory side of things.

      martellapp​ Jacob - hope you find a good solution that keeps you on Jobber!

      • EnergizeUs's avatar
        EnergizeUs
        Contributor 5
        8 days ago

        WIll do ! 

        I love how you are planning to apply it to your cleaning business, very interesting. I feel like people just get into the work work work mode, so the fact you thinking ahead is very impressive brother. 

  • wesleyparker's avatar
    wesleyparker
    Contributor 3
    7 days ago

    We use Monday.com and really like it. Every week we do a visual inspection of the inventory locker and choose the inventory levels from a drop down menu. This keeps a great audit trail of what was ordered, what ran low, etc. week by week. 

    If you wanted to integrate this with Jobber and make it more automatic, I think you could easily write a Zap for it. Have your tech add line items such as "Compressor fitting 12XF" and every time that invoice is issued, have the zap reduce your inventory on hand by the correct number. Set automations for low inventory thresholds. I think this is pretty doable for anyone remotely comfortable with software. And you will find a million other ways to use Monday.com and Zapier for operations!