Products + services, hire & repairs
For businesses that sell, repair and hire the same stock — where every unit carries a serial number and a history.
This page is for businesses whose products live on after despatch: two-way radios sold, serviced and hired across customer fleets; dental equipment that returns for repair year after year; safety wearables shipped with a data subscription attached; academic gowns hired out by the ceremony, back for cleaning, out again. Selling is one movement among many, and each unit is an individual — identified by its serial number, not counted as an anonymous quantity. Standard stock systems track quantities of interchangeable items. These businesses need the system to know each unit.
Every unit arrives with a history
A dental handpiece comes in for repair. The first questions aren’t about stock — they’re about this unit: whose is it, when was it last serviced, is it under warranty or a service contract?
The repair itself is a job, with parts and labour booked against that serial, and often a loan unit out to the customer in the meantime.
When serials live in a spreadsheet, repairs in a diary and history in an inbox, every one of those questions is a search.
If a unit’s service history takes longer to find than the fault, you’re in the right place.
Stock that comes back
A radio dealer hires out handsets by the fleet: fifty units to one site, thirty to an event, each with a return date. Availability isn’t what’s on hand.
It’s what’s back, checked and ready for the next hire. And the return is half the work: which units came back, which didn’t, what condition they’re in, and what to charge for damage and loss.
If nobody can say how many radios are actually in the building, that’s the gap.
The contract follows the unit
A safety-tech business ships wearable trackers with a monitoring subscription. The contract isn’t for “ten trackers” — it’s for these ten serials, and when a faulty unit is swapped, the contract has to follow the replacement.
Renewals bill against what’s actually deployed at the customer, so the recurring revenue and the stock record are two views of the same thing — and keeping them in separate systems means they disagree.
If a serial swap means updating three systems, this is the pattern.
One record per serial
In Workhorse, every serialised unit has one record for its whole life. Sale, hire, repair, loan, return, swap — each movement is logged against the serial, so the service history, the current location and the contract it belongs to are one lookup, not three.
Repair jobs consume parts and labour against the unit. Hire contracts hold what’s out, with whom and due back when, and returns settle condition, damage and loss. Customer contracts link to the deployed serials and survive swaps. Invoices — one-off and recurring — sync to Xero.
Every Workhorse system starts as the complete platform
Quotes, sales orders, stock, purchasing, work orders, despatch, invoicing and reporting — and is configured to the life your units lead during a managed implementation: your repair stages, your hire terms and return checks, your contract structures. Where a unit’s life takes a turn no off-the-shelf system anticipates, we build for it. How that works is set out on our configuration & customisation page.
Product-plus-service businesses run on Workhorse across two-way radios, dental equipment and safety wearables — businesses whose customers keep sending the same serials back.
"Customisation to our specific requirements, including managing serial numbers, RMAs and subscriptions."
- Eleanor Barnard, Director - Reactec
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Read their stories on our customers page.
If you sell products outright and never see them again
No repairs, no hire, no ongoing contracts — you don't need unit-level control, and our wholesale & distribution page describes your operation better. It's when the same serial keeps coming back that the system has to know each unit by name.
Pick one serial number
A radio, a handpiece, a tracker — and we’ll show you its whole life in Workhorse: sold, hired, repaired, swapped and billed.