The way I see it, the repair shop is your client. They're the ones that are bringing the repair to you and are responsible for the repair bill; their client is generally of no concern to you unless he/she has some relevant information to the repair that the other shop hasn't reported to you. Your price of repair to them will, no doubt, be marked to their end client up as they surely can't be doing this for free (normally).

Wow, Thank you marc! this info helped me thank you.

No problem, Dulce. The service centre I work at gets this all the time. A company takes in a client's unit for repair. They can't fix it and they send it to us. That company is our client rather than the actual owner of the equipment. That company gets the bill; what they do thereafter is their business and not ours. On ocassion, a company will contact us for their client as we're a warranty centre for several manufacturers. In that case we need to gather the original owner's full information including a copy of their bill-of-sale to bill the equipment manufacturer for the warranty repair. We complete the repair and ship it back to the company that sent it in. This is about the only exception I can think of.

You might note I use the term "client" rather than "customer". A professional organisation like an electronics repair facility is one step above a "store" (like a supermarket or a WalMart) - they have customers. We, as professional technicians, are one step beyond that.

I too will chime in here. I have specialized equipment to handle some repairs that many shops do not. Up until recently, I was the only one in my area that had a microscope and performed surfaced mount repairs. This is more common these days, but at the time was rare. I had (and have) many shops that perform phone repairs but send me boards that require parts replacement. I often get requests for connector replacements. (I don't do phone repair per se.) Again, this is a common practice. In these cases, my "customer" is the repair shop. I do, however reference the shop's repair tag number along with my own as a way to keep accurate records of work done. This makes it easier for the shop to track expenses. But, other than that tag number, I don't know or care about the end user information as it is not relevant to my work.

I hope this helps,
Dan

Same here, Dan. We do carefullly track ths client's reference number if there happens to be one. Simply can't afford to not have full documentation of each piece of gear. When I first started at my present position some 11 years ago, the tracking was poor at best with some units sitting for months on end. Took me the better part of 7 or 8 months to fully correct that. But to recap the entire thread here, anyone sending in a piece of equipment for service is the client, regardless if they're the owner or not, they're still the client of record to whom you're responsible.

Hope this helps. Stay well.

The following goes without saying, but being critical, I will say it anyway. Keep accurate documentation of all pieces received regardless of the source. Accurate documentation saved me in a court battle once. I would recommend that a shop purchase what is called an "Engineering" notebook. This is a bound notebook with numbered paged. I listed my tag number, the customer's tag number (if there was one), the incoming date and the outgoing date. LEAVE NO SPACES!! This could save you in the case (like mine) when I was accused of selling a piece that was taken in for repair. A scan of the log (notebook) showed that I never received the unit for repair. It turns out that I had never seen that particular make/model EVER. With the numbered pages and no spaces showing this, there was no possibility to losing a page to "cover my tracks". I cannot emphasize enough the need for complete documentation.

In a less critical situation, I had an end customer call me because my customer (local repair shop) told the customer that I had their unit still. Not true, my log showed that the unit had been returned to the shop weeks before. In this case, the shop lost the unit and tried to blame me. Not going to happen. The log saved the day here too.

Hope thishelps,

You definitely don't need the customer's info and it serves no purpose to have it in your records. You are dealing with the business and not his customers.