Operator guide

Why pinball machines need their own software

General amusement and asset software models a machine as a box that depreciates and takes coins. A pinball machine is a titled, editioned capital asset with a public resale market, a specialist parts supply, and maintenance rules that change with the year it was built. Four places that difference shows up.

A thirty-year-old machine is still worth four thousand dollars

Pinside publishes a price guide built from what its members report paying. Read on September 19, 2026, the median across 232 machines made in 2018 or later is $7,500, and the middle half runs $5,600 to $9,850. Individual titles: Godzilla (Stern, 2021) at $8,600 from 210 data points, JAWS (Stern, 2024) at $9,400, Jurassic Park (Stern, 2019) at $7,997.

Older eras, from the same guide:

• Machines from the 1990s, now thirty years old or more: median $4,200.
• Solid-state machines from 1977 to 1989: median $2,025.

Three decades on, these machines still trade in the thousands, and your books have to say so. Pinventory carries a cost basis on every machine, the money you have put into it since, a condition grade, and a current market value. Sell one and it writes a realized figure against what you paid, then keeps the machine's full history on file.

The title, the year and the edition decide everything else

Two machines with the same title are routinely not the same machine. Pro, Premium and Limited Edition differ in parts, in playfield features, and in what they are worth. An asset tag and a free-text name cannot express that, so any software that offers you a name field has already lost the thread.

Add a machine in Pinventory by searching the catalog, and the manufacturer, the release year, the edition and the backglass art come with it. Nothing below has to ask you for them again.

Let Pinventory work out which machines need regular battery replacement

A solid-state machine built between 1977 and 2005 has a battery on the board that will leak and take the board with it. Whether a given machine has one comes down to two things: the year it was built, and whether it is electromechanical or solid state.

Pinventory has pinball operation in its DNA, so a machine tracked here already knows whether it needs battery replacement. Based on the game and the year, that answer comes from the catalog rather than from you. Machines that qualify raise a battery alert on their own, and you can suppress it on one you have converted to NVRAM.

In a general maintenance system you would have to know this rule yourself, then set the schedule by hand on each machine it applies to, and revisit it every time you buy.

The parts come from a handful of pinball suppliers

Rubber rings, flipper rebuild kits, boards, coils, playfield plastics. The vendors are specific and the manufacturer part numbers matter, because the wrong ring size is a different ring.

The Pinventory parts catalog carries manufacturer part numbers and links each part to the pinball suppliers that stock it, so reordering starts from the part rather than from a web search. Fit a part to a machine and its value moves out of your inventory and onto that machine's cost basis.

Revenue collections, splits and payouts work the same on any cabinet

Recording a collection, splitting what came out of the machine, and paying the location its share work the same way whatever the cabinet holds. Pinventory tracks arcade and amusement machines alongside pinball for that reason, and an operator running a mixed floor records all of it one way.

Everything wrapped around the money is where pinball asks for more: what the machine is, what it is worth, what it needs, and where the part comes from.

Related

Moving a route off a spreadsheet walks through the same ground screen by screen. Choosing route software compares the categories of tool that exist. Or see how Pinventory works for operators.

Price figures are Pinside's published community estimates, read on September 19, 2026. They are what members report paying, not transaction records, and they move. Pinventory publishes no figures about what any machine earns on location.