Hearing Aid Repair - Lab
On this page
Head office's repair bench. Dealers and sub-dealers send hearing aids in from their portal, your staff book their own, and every job gets a tracking number, a timeline, a printable slip and a page the customer opens without a password.
A dealer's own workshop is Hearing Aid Repair - Dealer; moulds and shells are Earmould / Earshell - Lab.
Switching it on
A premium addon, sold on its own. It runs when your licence package carries repair-lab or its addon key is on Admin → License (a purchase arrives by itself; Collect purchases now fetches it at once). Then press Enable on its card on Admin → Addons. See The licence key and addon keys.
The admin sidebar then shows Repairs (for roles with View invoices) and Repair Setup (for Change system settings) in the Addons group. The dealer portal shows Sent for Repair and Send a Repair under More.
Booking a repair
Admin → Repairs → + New repair. Sent in by takes the dealer, or walk-in / head office; choosing a dealer puts the job in their portal and notifies them. Then the customer (Customer name is required, and a Mobile or an E-mail), the device (Brand, Model, Serial number, Ear side, Warranty, Bought on, Receipt number, Bought from, Sold by us?, What is wrong), the money (Estimated cost, Advance taken, Show the estimate on the tracking page) and Priority with an Internal note nobody outside head office sees.
Choose Both under Ear side and each ear gets its own Model, Serial number and What is wrong with this one. Book it numbers the job and opens it.
Repairs sent in by dealers
Dealer portal → Send a Repair is the same form without Sent in by; Sent for Repair lists what the dealer has sent. Each new one notifies head office (Repair sent in).
From then on the job is head office's. The dealer can read it, add a note, print the slip and send the update; their Edit button shows only while the job is still Booked. Status, charges and deleting are head office's. A note a dealer adds always goes on the customer's tracking page.
Working a job
Admin → Repairs lists the jobs with a search box (tracking ID, name, phone, serial, model), date filters, a chip per status and the Value and Still owed of the list.
- Move it on: Booked, Received, Diagnosing, Sent to lab, Repairing, Ready, Delivered, Cancelled, in any order. What to say about it shows on the tracking page unless Internal only is ticked. A public change e-mails the customer (if set to) and notifies the dealer.
- Charges: Final charge, Received so far, Show the cost on the tracking page, and under Outside lab Lab, Sent on, Their bill and What they found. Still owed is the final charge (or the estimate) less what was received. The dealer sees the totals and what the lab found, read-only.
- Add a note writes to the timeline. Internal only - keep it off the customer's page hides it from the customer, not from the dealer who sent the job in. Keep head-office-only remarks in the Internal note.
- WhatsApp opens a ready-written message; E-mail an update sends one now; Delete this repair takes the job off the lists.
The slip and the tracking page
Slip / token opens the booking token: your logo and address, the tracking number with a QR code drawn on your own server, how far the job has got, the details, the money (when the job's cost is set to show) and the slip note. It has Print, Send on WhatsApp, Send to mail (only to the address on the booking, at most once every two minutes) and Track it.
The tracking page, track.php?id=AHR-202601, needs no sign-in, and the front page offers a Where is my hearing aid? box once a job exists. The slip shows the customer's name and mobile to anyone holding the number. A lab job always carries head office's name, even when a dealer sent it in.
Repair Setup
Admin → Repair Setup. Its slip note and tracking-page ticks apply to all four addons.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tracking number prefix | {Y} becomes the year: AHR-{Y} gives AHR-202601, AHR-202602, and restarts each January. |
| Where the customer looks | The tracking page's address, with Copy. |
| Note printed on every slip | Collection terms and the like; also in the e-mails. |
| What the public tracking page shows | The customer name, The device or the mould type, What was reported, The cost, The timeline of what happened, Which outside lab has it. |
| Brands | The names offered in the Brand box: Add it, or × to remove. |
Extra fields on the booking form take one line each, key | Label | type (type: text, date, number or textarea). They appear on every repair form, head office's and dealers', and on the job and the slip, named after the key with underscores turned into spaces. Press Save the setup.
Addon settings
Settings on the addon's card on Admin → Addons:
- E-mail the customer when a job is booked and E-mail them again on every status change - both on at the start.
- Dealers can see the jobs they sent in - untick it to take the two entries out of the dealer portal menu.
- The prefix, the slip note and the two Show ... boxes only seed Repair Setup when the addon is switched on. Afterwards, change them on Repair Setup.
The message wording is in Message templates on Admin → Settings → WhatsApp and in the e-mail templates on Admin → E-mail Setup (E-mail, SMS and WhatsApp).
Tip: mark a job Received the day it arrives. The dealer is told, and their Edit button goes away.