Trades and projects

A request for a price from a customer’s assistant can say what the job is, how urgent, whether you should see it first, where it is, when suits, and bring the photos. You decide where you go, your call-out fee, and which requests go into the tool you run your jobs in.

Settings → Area and Work.

Where you work

• Postal codes, or their start: 04 covers every code from 04000 to 04999; in the UK, SW1 covers SW1A 1AA, and M1 covers M1 1AE and not M12. Each country’s codes are checked in their own shape. Most assistants send a postal code, so this is the one that is checked most often.
• A distance, measured from your premises (as Settings → General has them on the map) or from where your phone is when you set it: Where I am now. Neither is ever shown to anyone. Agents are told the distance, and a site is told back to you as a band: inside your area · within 10 km, never a distance to your door. From your phone’s place, the distance is measured from the middle of the few kilometres around it, so nobody can find your door by asking: its edge is approximate, by up to about 4 km. A distance is checked only when an assistant sends the site’s location.
• Anywhere.

A request from outside is yours to decide, or declined, as you choose. When a site cannot be checked — no location for a distance, a postal code that is not one — the request comes to you: nothing is ever said to be inside when it is not known.

How you take work

• Call-out fee, and whether accepting your quote takes it off.
• Outside opening hours, what a visit adds: a fixed amount, or a percentage. Opening hours are in Settings → Availability.
• Free estimates, said in your public profile.
• Emergencies online: off, only while you are open, or at any hour. An emergency comes first in your inbox; one whose site cannot be placed comes to you to decide. One you do not take is answered with what to do instead: ask within 24 hours, or call you, on your phone number when Settings has it.
• Site visits: choose the service a visit is booked as, or add a Site visit service in one press, and a customer’s assistant books one beside the request it is for. You confirm it.

Photos and plans

A request can carry up to six files: photos (JPEG, PNG or WebP) and plans (PDF), up to 10 MB each. An iPhone’s HEIC photo is refused with send it as a JPEG; most phones can share a photo as JPEG.

• Where a photo was taken is taken out. Every photo is cleaned on arrival: its location, the time, the phone, any thumbnail of what was cropped. Only which way up it is stays. A PDF is kept as it was sent, with any photos inside it as they were.
• Yours alone. They are kept in your inbox, never published, never sent to a network. You open them from the request, through links that work for ten minutes.
• Gone with the customer. Erasing a customer erases their files.
• A hosted inbox keeps up to 100 MB of files. Files waiting for a request have their own room (60 MB, 30 MB from any one sender), so nobody can fill it with uploads they never send.

Quotes in stages

On a request, Quote in stages…: an estimate or a fixed price, the total, and up to four stages that add up to it — a deposit now, a stage by a date, the rest on site. The last stage is always the rest, so a deposit and the balance take one amount. Your call-out fee from Settings → Work, taken off the price or not. Whether your prices include tax; when they do not, the tax on top, and the total with it is what the customer agrees to. The customer’s assistant shows your person the whole of it before they say yes: This is an estimate. It is paid in stages: Deposit A$1,000.00 now; Balance A$3,400.00 on site. Prices are before tax: A$4,000.00 + GST A$400.00 = A$4,400.00.

An accepted quote in stages asks for no payment of the whole: you ask for each stage when it is due.

Your job tool

Settings → Integrations → Job tool. See Job tools for what each one does.

Which requests go in is yours to choose, in Settings → Work:

• Only ones I take on (the default): a request goes in when you quote it, or when you press Send to … on it.
• Every request, as it arrives.
• Never.

A test request never goes in.