From the founder

Why track your pinball business with software

The case for recording everything about your machines: what running on memory costs, what a complete record pays back, and why generic tools never fit pinball.

Adapted from the talk I give to operators and collectors at pinball shows. I'm Ed, and I build Pinventory.

The $1.50 battery that eats a $400 board

Ask a room of pinball owners who has opened a backbox and found a leaked battery all over the MPU. Every hand goes up. Then ask who knew how old that battery was before they opened the door. The hands drop.

That gap, between what we own and what we know about it, is what this page is about. The corroded board is just the loudest symptom. The same gap swallows collection money, location splits, tax deductions, and the real value of your games, quietly, all year.

I watch small businesses fly blind for a living

My day job is building software for small landscaping companies. The story repeats constantly: a company starts as one person and a lawnmower, grows, and still struggles. Not because they cannot do the work. Because they are operating in the dark about whether they actually make money, and they cannot see where it goes. The thing that turns it around, every time, is visibility.

Swap the truck full of mowers for a route of pinball machines, or a basement of them, and it is the same blind spot. Except now it is our games on the line.

How most of us track today

Spreadsheets, notebooks, and memory. We run real businesses and real collections on tools that were never built for it. A spreadsheet does not know a battery is due. A notebook cannot show your location partner their split. Memory fails exactly when it is most expensive, at tax time, at selling time, at insurance time. And none of it scales, in a hobby that is all about collecting more.

What running on memory costs

• Revenue you cannot see leaking. Without meter readings recorded against cash counts, a coin jam or drift between plays and box just looks like a slow month.
• Split disputes. A payout computed from memory is a disagreement waiting for a bar owner to have a bad week.
• Boards. The $1.50 battery, again. Every unlogged battery is a timer running against a $400 MPU.
• Value you cannot prove. No maintenance history, no purchase records, no serial documentation means a weaker insurance claim and a weaker asking price.
• A lost week every April. Rebuilding a year of income and expenses from bank statements and memory is the most expensive way to do bookkeeping.

What recording everything pays back

Here is the question I ask every room: who is logging the miles they drive to service their games? Almost nobody. Service miles are a legal deduction. Ten thousand miles a year at the federal rate is about seven thousand dollars, gone, because nobody wrote it down.

And it is not just miles. Parts, tools, gas, the storage unit, bench time. The whole point of tracking is simple: the more you record, the more this hobby, or this route, pays you back. The record does not cost you money. The missing record does.

The three reasons people do not, and why they do not hold up

• "It is too time-consuming." Recording a collection takes about twenty seconds standing at the game, and maintenance reminders do the remembering for you. The real time sink is reconstructing a year from memory in April.
• "I am a cash business, why record it?" Cash is the whole reason. Nothing else proves it happened, and the miles, parts, and gas behind that cash are thousands of dollars in legal deductions you can only claim if they are written down.
• "What about privacy?" Your numbers should be yours. In Pinventory every account's data is isolated, nothing is sold, you can export everything at any time, and the only public page is the QR fault report a player sees.

None of these hold up. Which leaves one question: record it with what?

Why not a spreadsheet, or a generic tool

I tried the generic options first: asset trackers, maintenance software, better spreadsheets. They all fall apart in the same spot. They do not speak pinball. Batteries and ROMs, playfields and toppers, locations and revenue splits, market value by title and edition. The data model of pinball is specific, so the tool has to be.

That is why I built Pinventory: one trustworthy record of every machine you touch, built for this hobby. Operators get the route side, collections, splits, payouts, and QR fault reports from players. Collectors get the ownership side, valuation, battery due dates, maintenance history, parts and manuals. It is the same record underneath.

Comparing tools first? Pinball route management software: how to choose covers the kinds of tools and what each one does.