The £87 Deposit and the Economics of UK Trades No-Shows

I'm Cristian, the founder of OptitechAutomation, based in Torbay, Devon. In November 2025 we introduced an £87 refundable booking deposit to the OptitechAutomation booking flow as a Trial — applied to all new bookings on the platform, refundable in full if the engineer couldn't attend within the booked ETA, deducted from the final invoice on a successful job.

Six months later, the numbers have settled enough to write the full report. This is what an £87 deposit does to the economics of a UK trades shop, what the secondary effects look like, and the one patch we shipped fourteen days in that fixed a customer cohort we'd accidentally locked out.

Why we picked £87 specifically

The number is not random. Across the 23 UK trades shops live on OptitechAutomation in November 2025, the median call-out fee was £85 and the mean was £91. The £87 number sat just slightly above the median — high enough to feel real to a customer making a deposit decision, low enough to not destroy bookings in the under-£100 segment (small drain unblocks, single-tap installs, EV charger surveys).

We also tested £49 and £125 in a controlled experiment across two pilot shops in October 2025. £49 had a marginal effect on no-shows (23% → 18%). £125 felt punitive and dropped overall booking volume by 14% over a two-week window. £87 was the local maximum.

What the £87 deposit was supposed to do

The point of the £87 holding fee was to filter the call-outs that aren't real bookings. Across November and December 2024 (the pre-deposit baseline), our 23 trades shops logged 43 incidents of the same pattern: customer books a free survey, gets one, then disappears or asks to "have a think and call back". Average dispatch cost per dead survey: £68 in van time, £41 in lost slot capacity. Total cost across the pre-deposit baseline period: roughly £4,700 across the 23 shops.

The £87 deposit was meant to move that conversation from the doorstep to the booking page. If the customer isn't willing to put up £87 against a job they're actually planning to do, the £87 deposit no-show economics says we should find that out before the engineer drives to them.

The headline number: no-show rate down 84%

Pre-deposit baseline (Oct-Nov 2024): no-show rate of 23% across all bookings, weighted average across the 23 shops.

First fourteen days of the deposit trial: 7.4%. The drop was almost immediate.

Month three onward: 3.8%, and it has stayed there. The remaining 3.8% is a mix of genuine emergencies (medical issues, family bereavements) that no deposit policy will catch and a handful of customers who pay the £87 and then drop out anyway — typically refunded within 90 minutes per the platform's standard policy.

Annualised across the 23 shops, the no-show reduction is worth approximately £41,000 in recovered van time and slot capacity. The £87 deposit no-show economics works as designed.

The first surprise: average ticket up 28%

This one we didn't predict. Across the same six months, average ticket size per visit went up 28%. We assumed at first the deposit was selecting for wealthier postcodes. The postcode mix barely changed. What changed was the scope of the bookings.

When a customer pays £87 to hold a slot, they don't book "a quick look at the boiler". They book "a quick look at the boiler, and could you also check the radiator on the landing while you're here, and the smoke alarm beep". The £87 deposit creates a small, healthy pressure for the customer to use the visit fully. The engineers loved it. The customers didn't seem to notice it had happened.

The numbers:

• Average jobs per visit: 1.0 → 1.6
• Average ticket: £141 → £180 (excluding VAT)
• Repeat-customer rate within 90 days: +11 percentage points
• Dispatch-slot waste from no-shows: −84%

The repeat-customer line is the one I'd flag for any trade reading this. The customers who pay a deposit and have a positive visit come back faster. It's not a huge effect (+11pt over baseline), but it compounds. Across a six-month window the cohort that paid a deposit and re-booked within 90 days was worth, on average, £312 in lifetime value vs £214 for the pre-deposit cohort.

The second surprise: insurance loss-adjusters loved it

Within ninety days of the trial starting, two insurance loss-adjusters formally named the booking flow as evidence of "professional intent" in dispute paperwork. One of those disputes had been open since 2024. It closed in our favour in eleven days.

We hadn't written the £87 deposit no-show economics with insurance disputes in mind. But it turns out that a timestamped, refundable, pre-payment with a postcode and a job description is, accidentally, a very clean piece of evidence that work was scheduled in good faith. Loss adjusters working on contested-job paperwork (water damage, gas leak, electrical-fire investigations) have started referencing the Stripe holding receipt as supporting documentation.

"We don't pay you to filter time-wasters," one loss adjuster said in a follow-up call. "We pay you because when you say a job was booked at 14:32 on a Tuesday, the receipt agrees with you."

This is the upside we should have predicted. Stripe-routed pre-payments are a strong audit trail for any work involving disputed timing. Across the six months of trial we logged seven loss-adjuster cases that referenced the booking receipt. All resolved in the trade's favour.

The thing we didn't predict — and patched at day 14

For about ten days in November-December 2025, we lost a customer cohort entirely. Specifically: elderly customers booking by phone on behalf of their parents. They would not enter card details over a hand-typed booking link, and we hadn't built a mechanism for the trade to take the deposit on the doorstep.

We caught it because Mike Khan, who works mostly across TQ2, told us in plain language at a Tuesday operator call. "I had three of them this week. Lovely couples. They want me. They cannot give a deposit to a website." We shipped a one-line patch the following Thursday: any booking flagged as "vulnerable customer" or "over-70 booking via phone" can be confirmed without an upfront £87 deposit. The trade absorbs the no-show risk on those, and we cap them at one slot per engineer per day. No-show rate on that cohort, since the patch: zero.

The £87 deposit no-show economics has to work alongside the human realities of who is actually booking your trade. For most of the 23 shops, 4-9% of bookings now run via the vulnerable-customer path. The trade absorbs that risk consciously; the deposit-protected flow covers the other 91-96%.

"The over-70 patch has saved me twice in the last fortnight. Both lovely jobs that wouldn't have happened on the old flow. Worth the risk we're carrying."

— Mike Khan, self-employed gas engineer, TQ2 · February 2026

When the £87 deposit doesn't make sense

Two scenarios where the £87 deposit no-show economics is actively wrong for a UK trade.

Scenario one: very low average-ticket trades. If most of your jobs are under £40 (single-tap installs, basic appliance plug-ins, gardening visits), a £87 deposit is a higher proportion of the job total than most customers will tolerate. We're currently piloting a £29 deposit option for under-£40 jobs and the early data is mixed — the no-show reduction is smaller (23% → 13%) but the booking-conversion rate stays acceptable.

Scenario two: emergency-only operations. If your shop only does 24/7 emergency call-outs (burst pipes, gas-leak responses, drain blockages at 2am), customers in that moment do not pause to consider a deposit. We disable the £87 deposit on emergency-lane bookings and run those as confirmed-on-completion. The no-show rate on those is naturally very low (under 4%) because by the time someone has phoned at 2am they really do want the engineer.

What we're keeping. What we're changing.

Keeping: the £87 amount, the ninety-minute refund SLA, the Stripe holding receipt, and the full refund on emergency-lane bookings the platform can't dispatch within ETA. None of that flexes.

Changing: from June 1st 2026 we'll publish the holding-fee receipt URL inside the customer-facing booking confirmation. Some of the 23 shops have been pasting it manually into invoice notes. We'd rather just put it there.

Trialling: the £29 deposit for under-£40 bookings, and a "deposit-on-doorstep" workflow for trades who want the option of taking card payment via the engineer's mobile app at the job rather than at booking. Both being tested across June-September 2026.

The bottom-line £87 deposit no-show economics

For a 5-engineer UK trade shop, the £87 deposit policy across six months has been worth approximately:

• £8,200 in recovered van time from reduced no-shows
• £11,400 in additional revenue from higher average ticket per visit
• £3,600 in increased repeat-customer revenue within the 90-day window

Total six-month value: approximately £23,200. Net of the £87 deposits refunded to customers (about 5% of bookings refund the full £87 for emergencies and dispatch issues), the figure is roughly £22,800. Annualised, that's £45,600 of additional gross margin for an average 5-engineer trade shop — meaningfully more than the cost of the OptitechAutomation Growth subscription itself.

Founder note

The £87 deposit no-show economics is one of the most-discussed mechanisms on the platform. Most discovery calls touch on it. The conversation usually starts with "but won't my customers refuse to book if I ask for £87 up front?" and ends, six months later, with "I should have done this years ago."

If you're a UK trade thinking about introducing a deposit policy — on our platform or otherwise — book a 20-minute call. I'll walk through the configuration options, the vulnerable-customer patch, and the emergency-lane bypass. Twenty minutes, UK hours, Torbay-based, Cristian answers personally.

— Cristian, OptitechAutomation, Torbay, Devon. May 2026.

Further reading

• Plumber booking software UK — deposit policy live for plumber shops.
• Drainage booking software UK — emergency-lane bypass for drainage.
• Pricing — deposit handling included in every tier.
• The pledge — including data-export rights.
• Why trades leave Checkatrade — adjacent post on aggregator economics.