Daily use
Reminders and reports
Call customers back when their bike needs a check, keep the team's own reminders, and read your workshop's numbers without opening a spreadsheet.
Two different jobs that hold hands. Reminders fill the diary: CrankPal looks at the health of the bikes it knows about and tells you who is worth calling back. Reports tell you whether what you're doing is working.
Neither needs updating by hand: the data comes from work orders, bookings and the bike census.
Maintenance reminders#
Reminders in the menu opens three tabs. The first, To contact, is the list of customers CrankPal suggests you call back. Each card shows the bike, the customer and one or more reasons:
- Health at {n}% — the bike's estimated health has dropped below 70%.
- {n} km ridden — the bike has passed 1,500 km since the last reading.
- No service recorded — there is no record of it ever coming in.
- Last service over 6 months ago — too much time has passed.
Under each card there is one button per channel: Email, WhatsApp, SMS and App. Email only appears if the customer has an address, WhatsApp and SMS only if they have a phone number. CrankPal writes the message itself and it cannot be edited: it names the bike and the reason, and asks whether they'd like to book a service.
The Sent tab is the read-only history: customer, bike, reason, channel and date. It is there so you don't chase the same person twice.
Internal reminders for the team#
The third tab, Internal, holds the reminders the workshop writes to itself: call about the service in three months, order the gear cable, whatever you must not forget.
They are not created from this page: they start when you close a work order, from the button that creates a reminder linked to the customer. There you set the text, an optional due date and who can see it — Only me or The whole team.
There is also a box to notify the customer: tick it and they get the reminder on their preferred channel, either straight away or on the due date you set. Each card shows the note, the due date, the customer, the originating order and who wrote it. The Done button files it and removes it from the list.
The seven-day numbers#
Reports opens with four tiles. It's worth knowing exactly what they count, because they don't all look at the same window:
| Tile | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Revenue, 7 days | The value of orders closed in the last seven days, plus counter sales |
| Closed orders (7 days) | How many work orders were actually finished in the last seven days |
| Work in progress | Orders currently open or in progress, with no date limit |
| Leads to contact | Contacts still to be worked, with no date limit |
The first two tiles look at a seven-day window, the other two are snapshots of right now: each one states its own window under the number, so you don't have to remember it.
Below, Daily trend breaks the same period down day by day, with orders and revenue and a bar scaled to your best day. It's the chart that tells you whether Mondays really are dead or whether you just say so. Export CSV, top right, downloads exactly those rows — day, closed orders and revenue — to open in your spreadsheet. It is not the accountant CSV on the Invoices page: that one covers the whole tax year.
Operational insights and margins#
Operational insights looks further back: 30 days, 90 days or 12 months.
- Average turnaround time — how many hours pass on average between opening an order and closing it. This is the number to watch when customers complain about waiting.
- Extras approval rate — the share of extra-parts requests customers approved, counting only the requests they actually answered.
- Average rating — the average star rating for the period, with the number of reviews it is based on.
Most-used parts lists the eight parts you got through in the period, by quantity and by value, combining work order lines with counter sale lines.
Margins is visible only to the administrator and manager roles, over a 7, 30 or 90-day window. It shows revenue, parts cost (taken from the purchase cost in stock), labour cost estimated from the hours actually clocked, and the margin that comes out, with an order-by-order breakdown.
Where your customers come from#
Acquisition requires Pro and answers one question: who brings you work.
At the top you get total customers, the booking → order conversion over the last 90 days, and returning customers, meaning those who came back at least a second time. Below, one bar per source — created in the workshop, portal, portal booking, invitation, app — showing your share and, in orange, the CrankPal network's average share for that channel.
The comparison with the network is the useful part: if the portal brings you 5% of your customers and brings the network 20%, the problem isn't the portal.
Customer reports and reviews#
Customer reports requires Premium. It is the list of post-service reports handed to customers: who received one, on which channel, and whether they opened it. Open shows the report as the customer sees it — a summary of the job, the work done with amounts, component health before and after, and any note about the next service.
Once a customer has opened their report, a button appears to ask for a Google review: you paste the link to your reviews page once, pick a channel, and the message goes out. The Google review request requires Pro.
Separately from all this, when you tell a customer their bike is ready CrankPal sends them a rating email, provided they have an email address. They give one to five stars and, if they feel like it, leave a comment. The average of those stars is the "Average rating" in the insights.
Common problems#
Why isn't a customer whose bike is in a bad state showing up in the suggestions?
Three possible reasons: the bike doesn't meet any of the four criteria, the customer isn't linked to your workshop, or you already contacted them in the last 30 days.
Closed orders looks like an odd number.
It counts orders finished (completed or invoiced) in the seven days, not orders opened: an order started on Monday and still on the stand isn't in there, you'll find it under Work in progress. To see how long you take to finish a job, look at average turnaround time in the insights.
I want to turn off the automatic review email.
There is no setting for it: the request goes out when you tell the customer their bike is ready and they have an email address. Individual reviews cannot be read one by one in the app — you see the average.
Acquisition or Customer reports is greyed out with a padlock.
They are plan features: Acquisition requires Pro, Customer reports requires Premium. See features by plan.