Inventory & Parts

On-demand parts: for shops that hold no stock

Most repair-shop software treats inventory as mandatory. It assumes you stock parts, and it makes you pretend to when you do not. That assumption does not survive contact with the Egyptian market, where a great many shops buy the part from the wholesaler after the customer has approved the price.

On-demand parts mode makes that a first-class way to operate rather than a workaround. A part is recorded against the job with the cost actually paid for it, no stock record required, and the margin is calculated from the real numbers.

The system remembers what the shop last paid for a given part, so the next time it comes up the price is prefilled. That is what turns 'I have no inventory' from a limitation into a margin tool: over time the shop accumulates a private price book for parts it never stocked.

Stock, for shops that do carry it

For shops that hold parts, on-hand quantity is derived from the sum of stock movements rather than stored as a number that is edited in place. A quantity you can overwrite is a quantity that eventually stops matching the shelf; a quantity derived from movements always explains itself.

• Serialized stock units carrying a condition and a status, for items tracked individually rather than by count
• A retail product catalog kept separate from repair parts, because a shop that sells cases and chargers is running a different business from the workshop
• Low-stock alerts at a configurable threshold, deduplicated so a part that sits below the line does not alert every single day
• Purchases and supplier payments recorded against a vendor ledger

Frequently asked questions

Can I use repair shop software if I do not keep any parts in stock?

Yes. Horus Repair has an on-demand parts mode for exactly this. Parts are recorded against the job with the cost actually paid, with no stock record required, and the price paid last time is remembered and prefilled on the next job. This suits the common pattern of ordering a screen from the wholesaler only after the customer approves the quote.

How is on-hand stock calculated?

On-hand quantity is the sum of recorded stock movements rather than a stored number that gets edited. Every change traces to a movement — a purchase, a consumption against a job, a sale, a return — so a quantity can always be explained rather than just asserted.

Does it separate retail products from repair parts?

Yes. The retail catalog of accessories and devices sold over the counter is a separate catalog from the parts consumed by repair jobs, since they have different margins, different reporting and often different staff handling them.

How do low-stock alerts work?

Parts and accessories at or below their stock threshold raise a low-stock notification to the owner and branch managers. The alert is deduplicated — it fires when the item crosses the threshold and resets when the item is restocked, rather than repeating daily while stock stays low.