Every Part, and Which Truck It’s On
“3 in stock” cannot tell your tech whether he finishes the job today. Three sitting at the shop while he is forty minutes out is a second trip. One on his own truck is a repair. Same number, two completely different days.
So stock is one pool now, and a bucket just says where a part is sitting. Every shop already has bins in the Parts Store — Washer, Dryer, Range, Fridge, Dishwasher, Microwave, Misc — and you can rename them to match how you actually think about your shelves. Add a truck, say whose it is, and move stock onto it. Your totals never change. You own exactly the same parts; you just know where they are.
The part that earns its keep is the picker. Add a part to an invoice and it tells you “Truck #1 · 2” or “not in stock · 1 on order” right there, with your own van listed first. Use it and it comes off the right truck, not off the shop shelf, and the ledger keeps every move.
Ordering rides along with it. Put a part on a job you do not have and it raises the order against that job on its own — no separate list to remember. When it lands, Pending pickup shows it with the customer’s name on it and which tech it is for. Mark it picked up and it goes onto that tech’s van.
A Week of AI That Does the Typing, Not the Talking
Five places the AI now works for you. Every one of them hands you an answer to check, never a guess to trust.
Shoot the tag. The model and serial plate is the one thing every job needs and the one thing nobody wants to type with a phone in one hand and a flashlight in the other. On the invoice, next to Model and Serial, there is a camera button. Photograph the plate and the numbers land in the right boxes. If it cannot read it, it says so instead of guessing.
Forward the dispatch email. That is the whole integration. No warranty company gives a one-van shop an API. They give you a portal and an email — so we read the email. Your ApplianceOps forwarding address is already in your app under Settings → Payers → Dispatch emails; there is nothing to set up on our side. Point your AHS, Cinch, First American or property-manager dispatches at it and each one becomes a job waiting to confirm, with the customer, address, appliance, model and serial and the claim, authorization, WO and PO numbers filled in. Nothing gets scheduled until one of your people says so. This one is in beta and we would rather say so than oversell it: every warranty company lays theirs out differently. When it gets one wrong, forward it to us and tell us what it should have said.
What to put on the van tomorrow. Every night ApplianceOps looks at tomorrow’s jobs, the appliances, the symptoms and what your own techs have actually used on jobs like them, and writes a short list of what is worth having on the van. It is under Today’s Stock, next to List and Calendar. It only names a real part number when it knows the model number, because a confident wrong part costs you the second trip you were trying to avoid. This one is a test — give it a few days and tell us whether the list was any good.
It is learning, and it knows when to hand you the phone. The text-back assistant has had its biggest month. Every real conversation it has had was read end to end and checked against what actually happened in the shop, and each gap became a rule it now follows. It answers more and invents less. The part that matters most: when it cannot finish a booking it hands that person to you instead of saying “the office will call you” and leaving it there. Those land on your Leads screen with Call, Book it and Mark contacted, and you get a text the moment it happens. It will not diagnose, it will not turn work away, and it never invents an arrival time.
Quick Dispatch, if you had forgotten it is there. Paste a dispatch email or snap a warranty screenshot into Quick Dispatch and the AI fills in the customer, appliance and claim details; you review and carry on into the booking. Same brain as the forwarding address, for the ones that arrive as a text or a photo. And photo handling in Messages is updated — a picture a customer texts you shows up in the thread, and the assistant understands one arrived.
Ask for the Review, and See What Happened
Then there are two ways to ask, from the Review menu on any finished service job. The 1–5★ ask lets the customer tap a star: a 4 or 5 goes straight on to your Google page, and a 1, 2 or 3 comes to you privately — so you get the phone call instead of the one-star. Straight to Google is for the customer who just told you at the door how happy they are; it asks you to confirm, because it skips the private step on purpose.
And under Reports → KPIs there is a review funnel: every ask this month, whether it was opened, the rating, what went private, what reached Google, and who on your team asked. Four asks and one Google review is a real number you can work with. Zero asks is the thing to fix first.
Your Own KPIs, on Every Job
Three counters are on every invoice now — Left a card, Sold a maintenance plan, Photo of the tag. One tap each, as many as apply. Rename them, add your own or take them off entirely in Settings → Team → Your KPIs, and Reports → KPIs shows who is doing what, and what those jobs were worth.
A Return Trip Shows the Money
When you book a second trip to install a part, that visit shares the original job’s invoice — which meant its card on the calendar was showing $0.00, even on a job that had just been paid that morning. It now shows the original job’s figure with a ↩ beside it, so you can tell at a glance it is not a second charge, and the card says Paid or Invoiced instead of just “Completed”. Spotted and reported by a shop using it, which is how most of this list happens.
Your Follow-Ups Send Themselves Now
Finish a job and Campaigns takes it from there: a check-in at a month, three, six and just before the year mark, in your words, with the customer’s name filled in. Completing the invoice is the trigger — you do not schedule anything.
Email campaigns work for every shop today: Campaigns → Email → turn it on, and blanking a stage simply means it does not send. Text campaigns get read in minutes and go out from your own business line; if you have one, Campaigns → Text → turn it on. Ninety-eight percent of finished jobs across our shops have a phone number on file and one in six has an email — text is where the reach is.
The timing used to be locked to 30, 60, 90, 180 and 330 days. Now you pick it: Settings → Email Automation, or Campaigns for texts. Up to six stages, any spacing you like. Just make sure your jobs get marked visited — that is what the follow-ups key off.
The Invoice Email Your Warranty Company Will Actually Open
Some payers bin any invoice whose subject line does not start with their case number, in their format. No bounce, no reply — the invoice simply never existed. Tell us what they need once, on the payer under Settings → Payers: what the subject starts with, and which of the job’s numbers follows it. Every invoice to them carries it, built from the job rather than typed.
New this week: the email body too. Authorization #, WO #, model and serial and what you actually did, in the message itself. And if the job is missing one of those numbers it refuses to send and tells you which box to fill, instead of firing off something that will be ignored.
Coming Next: an AI That Answers the Phone
The text-back assistant catches the call after you have missed it. The next one picks it up.
When you cannot get to the phone — under a machine, driving, sat at somebody’s kitchen table — it answers in your shop’s voice, works out who is calling and what is broken, and books them into your open slots. If it is something it should not decide on its own, it takes a message and hands it to you with the name, the number and the problem already written down. Anything urgent, it transfers to your cell. Every call comes back as a transcript on the job.
And you will prepay for it rather than gamble on it: you buy credits and you watch the meter, so you only pay for the minutes it actually spends talking to your customers and you can see what each call cost. No big monthly number for a robot you are not sure you will use. It rides on your business line, so a shop that already has one is first in the queue. It is in testing now — there is no date yet and we are not going to invent one. If you want it on your phone early, reply and say so.
Set It Up Once, or Let Me Do It
It is built to be robust and that is the point, but it does mean the first hour matters. Set it up once on a computer, where you have room to load your customers, pricing and services, and after that your phone handles the day to day. Or do not do it at all — send me what you have and I will do it with you on the phone, no charge. A spreadsheet, an export from your old system, photos of a price sheet off the wall.
See Something, Say Something
This is always in development, and the shops using it decide what gets built next. Most of what is on this page came from somebody replying to one of these emails — including the return-trip fix further up. Something in your way, something missing, something plain wrong: tell me. I read all of them.
Help the Next Shop Find Us
If ApplianceOps has made your week easier, a quick review is the single biggest thing you can do for us — it is how other repair shops find it. One honest line is plenty. Review us on Google, or pick whichever you already have an account on at applianceops.pro/reviews. And if something is not right, please tell me first instead.