How signing up works

Registering a workshop on CrankPal is self-service, from the website, and takes a few minutes: you fill in a five-step form, confirm your email with a code, and land inside the app at your workshop's own address.

This page is the map of the section: what to have ready, what happens at each step, and what to do next. The other four pages go into the detail of each piece.

What to have ready#

To create the account you only need your workshop name, your own name, an email address and a password. Nothing else is required, either to sign up or to start working.

• An email address you actually read. The verification code arrives there, and so does everything about your subscription afterwards.
• Your workshop address, meaning the word before .crankpal.com. Give it some thought: it is a public address — the shop front your customers see and book from — and your staff will use it, followed by /login, to get into the app.
• Your VAT number and your e-invoicing recipient code or certified email address. Not needed to sign up, and not needed for quotes and work orders: they're needed to issue invoices and receipts, to be invoiced on a paid plan, and to appear on the public workshop map.

Your street address, town, phone and opening hours are not asked for at sign-up. They come later, each at the moment it's genuinely needed: your contact details at the first print, your hours when you want customers to book by themselves.

The five steps of the form#

The form opens from the website, from the create-account button on the page for workshops.

1. Workshop details

   Workshop name, your name, your app address (checked as you type), email and password; the invite code is optional. At the top the form states your sign-up country, with a link to change it. See Registering your workshop.

2. Plan choice

   Two cards: start free, or try the best plan available in your country. Where no paid plan is open yet, the second card is marked "coming soon" and can't be selected. See Choosing your plan.

3. Terms, privacy and consents

   You read and accept the Terms of Service, the DPA and the privacy notice, and separately approve the clauses under articles 1341 and 1342 of the Italian civil code. Marketing consent is optional and can be withdrawn.

4. Email verification

   A six-digit code arrives at the address you entered. You type it in and the account is created at that moment: before verification no workshop exists yet.

5. Account created

   You see your app address and the button to go in. Where a card is required at sign-up, the form to register it appears here.

How long it takes#

The form itself is barely five minutes. The email code arrives straight away and stays valid for fifteen minutes. Budget another quarter of an hour for your first loop of real work: quote, order, document.

Fiscal data is the one thing that may not close the same day: verification is automatic and usually takes minutes, but when a manual check is needed it can take one or two working days. It's needed to issue invoices and receipts, not to work.

What happens right after#

You log in from your workshop's subdomain with the email and password you just chose. First login may pass through one or two screens — two-factor verification, payment method — before showing you the dashboard: they're all listed in First login.

The administrator gets a short welcome prologue with a single question ("how many mechanics work in your workshop?") and, on the dashboard, a checklist that ticks itself off as the workshop genuinely works. The first step isn't setting anything up: it's writing a quote, which you can do empty-handed. The whole loop is in Your first 15 minutes.

The pages in this section#