Questions, answered.

Two people, and they are not the same person — anywhere in the world. This is built for dealers in several countries from the first release rather than for one market with the others bolted on later.

The dealer — somebody with a tyre shop trying to sell tyres. He is the one who pays. TyrePOS, the fleet book, the vans and the connections to his accounting package are his.

The motorist — somebody who needs tyres and does not know what he is looking at. He is the one who arrives. The size calculator, the garage and the reviews are his, and they are free.

Everything on this site is one or the other. Where a question has no clean answer about which of the two it is for, it is usually a sign the thing should not be built.

Start here. It takes about two minutes, and your shop exists as soon as you open the link we email you.

What you need:

• the country you trade in
• your name, and an email address you can open now
• a password of at least twelve characters
• your shop's name

Your mobile number, your tax number and a branch name are optional. There is no card to enter. While you look round, your password alone signs you in. When you make the shop yours, you set up an authenticator app on your phone — from then on your sign-in needs it as well as your password, because yours is the account that can see the money.

The link in the email lasts an hour. If it has run out, the page it opens sends you a new one.

Nothing. 14 days on Pro, everything switched on, no card — and we move your data across from whatever you run today ourselves, at no charge.

The reason is not generosity. The thing standing between a dealer and better software is almost never the monthly price — it is the fortnight of pain in the middle, with two systems running and nobody sure which one is right. If that fortnight is ours to carry rather than yours, the decision becomes a much smaller one.

If you would rather talk to a person first, the enquiry form is still there.

You pay per user, per month, and the figures are on the pricing page — pick your country and they appear, in your own money. There is no free plan.

A user is a named login: an owner, a manager, somebody on the counter. Fitters are not users — a fitter is a person on your job cards, with no login and no PIN, and he never counts. Neither do counters or devices, and there is no limit on either. So a three-bay shop with an owner, a manager and one counter hand is three users whatever its headcount.

There are four plans:

Paying for a year costs ten months.

Prices are fixed per country, not converted. The figure you see in your own money is the figure you pay, and it is reviewed quarterly by a person rather than moving with an exchange rate.

On day 14 your shop moves from Pro to the plan you picked when you signed up. If you did not pick one, it moves to Free — never to nothing: the size search and your TyreFinder listing keep working, and the rest waits, with nothing of yours deleted, until you pick a plan. You can change your pick at any time.

We take no card at sign-up. How you pay is set up when billing starts, and nobody is charged before they have been told by email what the first charge will be and when it lands.

No. Moving them is our job.

Most fitment centres run one of a handful of older systems, and a migration that reads those databases and lands your products, customers and history in a TyreSpace account is part of the offer rather than a favour we might do. The 14 days free are not worth much if the first week of them is spent typing.

Which systems we can read depends on what is common where you are, so it is worth asking: the list starts with the ones we have already met and grows with the markets we open in.

Any phone, tablet or computer with a web browser. There is nothing to install and no special hardware to buy.

A printer is optional. If you want paper, TyrePOS prints an A4 invoice or an 80mm slip on a receipt printer, through your device's own print button — so any printer your phone, tablet or computer can already print to will do.

It keeps working with the line down: the day is kept on the device and goes up when the connection comes back.

No. Every tyre you stock arrives complete and correct.

The size, the load and speed rating, the label grades, what it fits and the pictures are already there, so nobody at the counter types a tyre twice. Your products, your codes and your prices stay yours.

It never fills in a price. What you sell a tyre for is yours and nobody else's business, and we will not tell every dealer in the country the same number.

The details keep getting better on their own, and anything you change yourself stays the way you set it.

One product with sections.

One account, one login, one set of your data. Inside it are TyrePOS, Vans, Fleet, Stock and Connections, and your plan decides which of them are open. They are windows onto the same shop rather than separate programs that send each other messages — a booking is the job card, a fitting marked done is the stock movement and the invoice line, because there was only ever one record.

That is why there is no integration story between our own modules, and why there never needs to be one.

Yes. TyrePOS is in every plan, and on Solo and Basic it is the whole of it.

Pro and Max add the rest — more branches and your accounting package on Pro, then vans, a storefront and fleets on Max. You move up a plan rather than buying a section at a time, so nobody has to work out what vans cost on their own.

One account, one login, one set of your data either way. What changes is what is on the screen, not where anything lives.

The counter itself is enrolled once, carefully, by somebody with the authority. After that your people sign in with a short PIN.

That is how every counter in the world works, and the reason is the queue: the screen is shared, somebody is waiting, and an email address and a password at a counter is a system people work around by never signing out. A PIN on its own is worth nothing; a PIN on a counter that has already been enrolled is a different thing entirely.

You, on your own phone, get the full sign-in — your password and an authenticator app — because that device can see the money.

Because in this trade it walks down the road to the competitor with them when they leave, and every dealer already knows it.

So the roles are drawn around what a person may see first and what they may do second, which is the opposite of how most software does it. A counter salesman gets the selling price, the stock and the customer. A manager runs a branch and is judged on its margin, so he sees cost and margin but not the other branch. You see everything.

And it is not hidden — it is not sent. Hiding a number in the interface is what a user sees; refusing to put it on the wire at all is what is true.

The one you are signed in at.

Stock is physical and lives somewhere. A dealer with three shops does not have one pile of tyres, and software that pretends he does produces a stock figure nobody can act on — "we have four" is useless if three of them are ninety kilometres away.

So every counter is signed in at a branch, and "have you got four" is answered for that branch first, the other branch second, and the supplier third. In that order, because it is the order the customer standing in front of you cares about: in stock here is fitted today, from the other shop is a van and an afternoon, from the supplier is days.

Yes. Any of them.

Shops use different words for the same things — bay, ramp, lift; workshop, yard, floor; fitter, technician; job card, work order. The whole of TyrePOS reads one small vocabulary table per account, so changing a word changes it everywhere rather than in the four screens somebody remembered.

The words you start with come from the country you signed up in, not from ours. Each market has a set got right once — the words a fitter in that country actually uses — and you can change any of them you want to.

However you want it worked out — and the screen always says which.

Every product carries a cost: what you paid for it when it came in. The selling price comes off that cost by a rule you set: markup on cost, or margin on selling price. You choose which, per account.

They are not the same number and the difference is real money. A tyre bought for a thousand and sold for fifteen hundred is a 50% markup and a 33% margin. A shop that sets "30" meaning one and gets the other is running at a margin it did not choose, so the screen shows the rule that is in force and the resulting price beside the cost, and never leaves you to work out which one you are looking at.

Rules apply by tier first, then brand, then size group. The fitted price is the selling price plus your fitting, valve and disposal charges.

Yes — a minimum gross profit, per tier or on a single product where that line genuinely is different.

Below it TyrePOS warns the person at the counter. Whether it also refuses the sale is your choice, per account, and the default is to warn.

That default is deliberate rather than timid. A counter that refuses gets worked around — the tyre goes out at full price and the discount comes off the fitting instead, or the sale is written on a pad and typed in later by somebody who will round it. Both of those destroy the margin figure the floor exists to protect, and both take the decision out of your sight. A warning keeps it where you can read it afterwards: every sale that went out under the floor is on a list with the person's name on it.

Yours, and it is set when you open the account.

Your country decides the currency every price is in, how numbers and dates are written, what your sales tax is called — it is not the same word everywhere, and in some markets there is none — what the rate is, and whether it sits inside the price on the tyre or is added at the counter. All of those are settings rather than assumptions, which is what lets a dealer in one country and a dealer in another use the same software and each see their own.

Prices are stored as whole units of the smallest denomination of your currency, never as a decimal, so a total can never drift a fraction away from the sum of its parts. Times are recorded universally and shown on your shop's clock, which is what lets two branches in two time zones be read against each other.

It is the first question the sign-up asks, for exactly that reason.

A bay is a place. A fitter is a person. Neither stands in for the other, and both are watched.

A job has a bay and a fitter, and a fitter may be on any bay or none. The reason to keep them apart is that they answer different questions: "which bays are busy" is about whether you can take the next car, and "who did what" is about a man's week.

The second one matters more than it looks. Most shops in this trade count a fitter's work by invoicing his name as a product line, which is a workaround that makes a year's revenue split unrecoverable. A fitting belongs to a fitter, per tyre, with a time on it — so "how many did he do in March" is a question with an answer rather than an afternoon's arithmetic.

Yes, and it is recorded as a change.

Tap the price, type a new one. The line then shows who changed it and the price it was, for the rest of the sale — and that is on the quote where the next person to look at it, you walking past, can see it without asking. Who may do it is an access level.

A counter that cannot move a price is a counter where the salesman goes to find you in front of the customer, which is the conversation every dealer says he wants to stop having.

Cash, card, bank transfer, on account, a split across more than one of those, or a deposit now and the balance on collection.

The exact list is per account, because what a shop can actually take differs by country — and so does what people call it. Your card provider is a setting rather than a fixture: we plug in the one that works where you are.

Cash and on-account work with no connection at all. Card only works when the reader answers, which is a fact about the card machine rather than about this software.

The counter keeps trading.

Everything the shop has done that day lives on the phone or the tablet itself — the stock, the cars in the yard, a stocktake half finished, a quote four lines in — and it is written there before it is shown on the screen, not after. Close the tab, drop the phone, let the battery die at four o'clock: the day is still there when it comes back.

When the line returns, what the counter did goes up and what everybody else did comes down.

Both sales exist, and the shop is told it is a set short.

Nothing here stores "we have four". It stores what happened — took in eight, sold four, wrote one off — and the number is added up on demand. Two counters that have not seen each other both record what they did, and when they meet, both movements are there.

The alternative is the one that costs money: two counters each read four, each sell two, each write two, one write lands on top of the other, and one of the two sales has silently ceased to exist. Nobody finds out until stocktake, and by then there is no way to know which sale it was.

Stock that reads minus two is not a bug. It is the only honest way to say that two more were sold than the shop had, and somebody can be told about it the same afternoon.

No. That is a rule rather than a feature.

Everything about the tyre is on the screen he is already using — the size, the rating, the label grades, what it fits, what the other branch has in stock. The moment he leaves the counter to check a manufacturer's website or to find a picture, the sale is competing with whatever else is in that browser.

No.

Everything you look up or change is checked against your account before anything else happens, and anything that does not say whose shop it is for is turned away. That check does not depend on somebody remembering to add it, so it does not go missing on a busy day.

And it is tested by trying to break it. A second, invented dealer exists only to be somebody we try to see and cannot. That attempt runs on every change to the software, and a change that lets it through does not go out.

No.

Not to a broken phone, a closed tab or a power cut: the day is kept on the device before it reaches the screen, and it goes up to us when the line comes back.

Not to us losing it either. Everything is copied as it happens, and we can wind your shop back to any minute in the last thirty days. Each shop is also copied on its own every night, so one shop can be put back without touching anybody else's. And we have practised putting it all back from a copy, more than once, rather than assumed it would work.

Nobody can promise you that, and anyone who does is selling something.

What we can tell you is what is in the way. Your own sign-in needs an authenticator app on your phone as well as your password, and if you lose the phone, the backup codes you were given when you set it up get you back in. Five wrong tries at a password, or at one person's PIN, shut that door for a quarter of an hour, and you are told. A wrong PIN and a counter we have never heard of give exactly the same answer, so guessing tells an attacker nothing. Keys are stored where even we cannot read them back.

Yes. Your customers, your prices, your history, your staff. Download all of it whenever you like, and if you leave, you take it.

That is written into the terms rather than left to our good intentions, which is what makes it worth writing here.

From the owner's menu on the counter. Two things are there, and they are separate on purpose:

• Download everything — an export of your products, customers, sales, job cards and staff, in files you keep. Take it before you go, or whenever you like.
• Close the account. Your shop stops, your staff can no longer sign in, and nothing is charged from then on.

What is kept after you close is what the law makes us keep: your invoices and the log of changes behind them, for as long as the tax rules where you trade require — between five and seven years, depending on the country; the counter tells you the exact number before you close — and nothing else is used for anything. Everything that is not needed for that is deleted.

Your own — the country you choose when you sign up.

The baseline is written to the strictest of the major privacy regimes rather than to any one country's, because they overlap almost entirely and the strictest of them is a sensible floor everywhere. Where a market you trade in asks for something further, that is added for that market rather than for everybody.

You can, and so can we — and neither of us can change what it says.

Every change to anything a person can edit writes one row: who, what, when, from which counter, what it was before and what it is now. Not afterwards, and not best-effort — in the same database transaction as the change itself. If the row cannot be written, the change does not happen.

That is a stronger promise than it sounds. A log written after the fact is a log that is missing rows, and it is missing exactly the ones somebody will one day come looking for — the ones where something went wrong between the two writes. A gap in it then cannot be told apart from nothing having happened.

The log is append-only. Nobody edits it and nobody deletes from it, including us with a database open, because that is enforced by the database rather than by everybody remembering.

What it is for, in the order the questions arrive: you asking what changed; an argument with a member of staff who says he never did that; a customer asking what you hold about him.

Only if you switch it on. The sign-up asks, in plain words, with the box left empty.

The offer is a real one: pooled across enough dealers, anonymised numbers tell you how your shop compares on things no single dealer can see — what sizes move, what margin is normal, what a slow month looks like. What we will never do is put your name or your prices in front of a competitor.

It is a separate, opt-in consent rather than a line buried in the terms, because the "nobody sees your data" promise on this page breaks the day benchmarks launch if it was not asked for properly at the start.

Very little, and the full answer is on its own page.

Measurement here is cookieless by default. Google Analytics runs only if you say yes to it, and nothing loads until you do — an unanswered banner is a refusal rather than a maybe.

See the privacy page for the whole of it, which is one page for the entire estate rather than a different one per module, and the cookies page for exactly what is kept in your browser.