Booking software for tradesmen UK, eight straight answers.
The fear of being trapped is the right question to ask. Most software companies bank on migration being too painful to bother with. So we wrote the exit in first. Thirty days notice. No exit fee. Your data, bookings, customers, workers, payments and your worker invoices, exported in full as CSV from your own settings page, any time, and promised in writing on the way out. That's not a policy. It's Clause 2 of The Pledge, written into your contract. We made leaving easy on purpose. The businesses that stay, stay because it's working, not because they can't get out.
Mostly. The worker app keeps the rota month view readable when signal drops, and a status change or note made on a job that is already open queues on the phone and sends the moment the connection is back. Photos need a connection to upload.
Marking a job done on site raises the invoice. Every completed job gets a numbered invoice with the line items and UK VAT worked out, sent to the customer by email automatically. You can record a payment against it from your dashboard, and if the customer paid in full at booking the invoice goes out already marked paid.
Yes. The Onboarding Investment is waived in full for the first ten businesses to join, on any Stage, the Start-up Stage included. Standard is otherwise £599 a month plus a one-off £249 Onboarding Investment, £848 to start. Once those ten places are taken, standard onboarding applies. Ask Cristian where the count stands before you sign up and he will tell you straight.
A small firm does not start at £599. The Start-up Stage is £199 a month plus a one-off £129 Onboarding Investment, £328 to start, for up to 5 workers. That is the honest entry point. Even so, £199 a month is real money and you are right to challenge it. So run your own maths, not ours. What does one no-show call-out cost you in a lost van day? What does your accountant charge to chase invoices the system could have raised and sent for you? What is one enquiry a week worth, the one that currently disappears into WhatsApp? The real question is not the price. It is whether the way you work today catches every job, holds every slot, and gets every invoice out the door. If it does, stay where you are. If it does not, bring your real numbers to a call, monthly bookings, no-show rate, what you use today and what it costs, and we will run them on your business before you decide.
OptiTech Automation is built and run by a named, accountable founder, Cristian Moise-Putanu, and that is a deliberate product decision, not a gap in the team. You get a direct line to the person who built the platform and knows every part of it, not a ticket queue and a rotating support team who have never seen a van or a toolbox. The platform itself runs on the same cloud infrastructure large companies run on, with EU-region data storage. OptiTech Automation operates in full compliance with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and is ICO registered. For any business query: hello@optitechautomation.co.uk.
You are right to question this. The trades software space is full of promises that collapse under scrutiny. Checkatrade earns money when you fail to build direct customer relationships. That is the model. Jobber is built for North American companies and adapted for UK compliance afterwards. ServiceTitan is excellent, if you are a large national operation with the budget and the ops team to run it. OptiTech Automation is built in Devon, for UK trades, with your customer data staying yours and a contract that lets you leave the day you decide to. It is not a cheaper version of the same product. It solves a different problem: getting the job booked and the deposit taken before anyone picks up a phone. The /vs pages have the line-by-line comparison if you want to check the specifics.
That is the most important thing you could say, and the honest answer is: OptiTech Automation will also fail to stick if you set it up wrong. Software built for a back-office manager rarely survives contact with someone on a van at 7am. This is why every signup goes through a personal review: the founder checks the configuration, confirms it is set up for your trade and your area, and only switches you live when it is ready to work. You can run your own jobs through the full workflow before your subscription is ever charged. And if it still does not work? Thirty days' notice. Your customers, your bookings, your data, all yours, in full.