For Repair Technicians: Parts, Labour, and Warranty Slips Without the Paper Chase

2026-05-25

A repair shop’s real product isn’t the fix — it’s the trust that the fix is documented. The phone you swapped a screen on today might come back in eight months with a hairline crack, and the customer will want to know what was replaced, when, and at what cost. No invoice, no warranty argument.

Most repair techs we talk to are great at the soldering iron and worse at the paperwork.

Meet Tomas

Tomas runs a small repair workshop in a side street in Vilnius. He does about eight jobs a day — phone screens, laptop batteries, a few appliance call-outs each week. Roughly a third of customers are walk-ins paying on the spot. The rest are small businesses or insurance referrals who want net-14 terms and a proper invoice on company letterhead.

He used to write everything by hand in a carbon-copy receipt book. It worked when he did three repairs a day. At eight, the warranty queries started catching him: “Can you send me the invoice from February? My screen popped again.” Half an hour of digging through a folder for one PDF.

The Real Billing Reality

Every repair has the same shape: one or two parts (sourced from two or three suppliers, marked up), plus labour. The customer wants a single invoice showing both. The shop needs that same record kept somewhere searchable, because:

Warranty claims come back weeks or months later, and the invoice is the only proof of what was installed.
Parts costs need to be tracked separately — what you paid the supplier vs. what you billed the customer — to know if a category of repair is actually profitable.
B2B customers (small offices, insurance, schools) almost always ask for delayed payment and proper VAT-compliant invoices.

A drawer full of receipt-book carbons is fine until the year you need to find one fast.

How Haiku Fits a Repair Workshop

Three pieces of Haiku do most of the work:

Create an invoice per repair in under a minute — parts as separate lines, labour as its own line, customer details reused from previous jobs. How to create an invoice.
Set net-7 or net-14 terms for business customers so the due date is on the invoice and the system flags overdue payments without you tracking a spreadsheet. Due dates and payment terms.
Log supplier invoices as expenses — upload the PDF or e-invoice, let Haiku extract amount and supplier, and the record is searchable by part name, supplier, or date. When the warranty query lands, both the customer invoice and the supplier source are one search away. Expense tracking.

Whether the workshop fixes appliances, phones, laptops, or industrial electronics, the pattern is the same: parts + labour out, supplier costs in, searchable forever.

When It’s Not the Right Fit

If you do fewer than 5 repairs a month and accept only cash on the spot, a notebook is genuinely simpler. If your workshop uses a dedicated repair-management system that already issues invoices, you don’t need a second one — though many of those systems lack proper expense tracking, and Haiku still earns its keep on the supplier side.

Getting Started in 3 Steps

Sign up free at haiku.lt — the free plan covers 500 invoices, which is plenty for a small workshop.
Create your first repair invoice with two lines: the replacement part and the labour. The customer’s details get saved automatically for next time.
Upload your next supplier invoice PDF to the Expenses page. It becomes searchable by part name — and when a warranty claim comes in months later, both sides of the transaction are one click away.

Stop Losing Mondays to Receipt Hunts

Questions? Email dalius.dobravolskas@gmail.com.