Welcome

Everything a bike shop needs to open its CrankPal account, set it up around the way it actually works, and use it at the counter every day.

This documentation follows a workshop from first contact with CrankPal all the way to daily work: signing up, setting up and daily use. It is written for the person at the counter, not for a developer.

If you are in a hurry: register the workshop and run your first loop of work straight away — quote, order, document — with nothing set up beforehand. It takes fifteen minutes and it's the page Your first 15 minutes. Hours, messaging channels and staff accounts come later, when they're genuinely needed.

Sign-up

How a workshop registers, which plan to pick, and what happens at first login.

Setup

Workshop details, opening hours, staff, messaging channels, checkout and stock.

Daily use

The everyday work: bookings, work orders, parts, invoices, customers.

Cyclist app

What your customers see on the iPhone app: bikes, predictions, bookings.

Reference

Tables: what each plan includes, what each role can do, glossary and FAQ.

Where to start#

It depends on where you are right now.

I don't have an account yet
Start from How signing up works. In about ten minutes your workshop is registered and you can log in.
I just registered
Go to Your first 15 minutes and do your first job. Nothing needs setting up first: a quote can be written with no customer and none of your workshop details.
I'm already working and looking for a feature
Use the search box at the top (or press /). If you hit a term you don't recognise, the glossary translates CrankPal vocabulary into workshop language.

How to read this documentation#

Some features are not available on every plan, and not every member of staff sees everything. Rather than repeat that on every line, we use two signals.

A plan badge marks the minimum plan required: Free Premium Pro Enterprise. If your plan doesn't include it, the menu entry stays visible but opens a panel explaining what it unlocks.

A permission badge such as manage_users marks the permission your user account needs. Without it the entry doesn't appear at all: ask whoever administers the workshop to grant it.

Paths inside the app are written like this: SettingsWorkshopOpening hours.

Conventions#

Workshop is the business registered on CrankPal: it has a VAT number, an address and a subscription.
User is the person logging in: owner, mechanic, counter staff. A workshop has several users.
Customer is the cyclist who brings the bike in. They have a record, bikes and a history.
Work order is a single job on one bike, from check-in to handover.

Your workshop has its own address on CrankPal, for example laciclabile.crankpal.com, and it is a public address: anyone who opens it without an account sees your shop front — contacts, opening hours with a live open-or-closed badge, a map, and the list of bookable services — and can request an appointment without signing up. Your customers, once they log in, find their own area there: jobs in progress, quotes and extra parts to approve, invoices and payments, appointments, their bikes, and messages with you.

The app for staff sits at the same address, behind /login: laciclabile.crankpal.com/login. Open the bare address — even after logging in — and you land on the customer portal, not the dashboard. It's one front door with two bells: the street one is for customers, the service one for the people who work there.

Getting help#

Inside the app you'll find Cranky, the assistant that answers in chat and, when a question gets complicated, hands the conversation over to a human on our support team. It is the fastest route: it already knows which page you are on and what data you are looking at. See Cranky assistant.