For the owner who came off the tools and became the diary
Somewhere around the second van, the job changed. You stopped fixing boilers and started fixing schedules. If you are searching for software for a plumbing company with employees, or an electrical firm at the same stage, you have probably noticed the market is not built for you. OptiTech Automation is: a rota that takes bookings, dispatch by qualification, every engineer's day on one screen, and a flat, published price for your plan: £599 a month to ten on the tools, £1,749 to twenty-five. No per-user meter, no quote call.
Software for a plumbing company with employees is strangely hard to find
Owners at this stage end up asking each other in forums, because a straight answer is genuinely hard to get. The reason is structural. Trade software splits into two camps: on one side, tools built for the one-man band, a diary and an invoice pad for a business that fits in one head. On the other, big fleet suites sold through demo calls and sales teams, priced and shaped for firms with an office manager to run them.
The business with two vans and six employees sits in the middle, and the middle is where the pain actually lives. You are too big for a diary in your pocket: you cannot hold four engineers' days in your head, and the WhatsApp group stopped scaling months ago. But you are too small to want an enterprise sales process, an implementation project, and a per-seat bill that punishes you for hiring.
OptiTech Automation is built for exactly that middle. The ideal customer is not the sole trader and not the fleet. It is the owner with an employed team, the one who used to be the best pair of hands in the business and is now its switchboard. The product exists to give that owner their job back.
Manage multiple engineers without being the middleman
Four things carry the weight. Together they take the coordination that currently lives in your head and your group chat, and move it into a system that runs whether you are watching or not.
- 01
The rota that takes bookings
You publish your team's shifts, and the published shifts become the bookable hours on your booking page. A customer can only ever book into capacity that actually exists: a real engineer, on a real shift. No published shift, no bookable slot. The diary can never promise hours you do not have, because the rota is the diary.
- 02
Dispatch by qualification
When a booking lands, the job goes straight to the right engineer's app: matched by rota and by qualifications, so gas work goes to the engineer who can sign it off and the fault find goes to someone actually on shift that day. Subcontractors get an offer they can accept or decline instead. Either way you keep the final say: reassign in two taps if you know something the system does not, and stop being the person who makes every routine call.
- 03
Every engineer's day, visible
Each engineer runs their day from the worker app on their phone: the jobs, the details, the status updates. You see the whole team from one screen. The morning WhatsApp rota, the who-is-where phone calls, the job details read out loud from a text thread: all of it replaced by everyone simply looking at the same system.
- 04
Told, not asked
This is the philosophy in three words. A system that asks you to approve every routine step has just given you a second job as its operator. OptiTech Automation makes the routine decisions, carries them out, and tells you what happened. Your attention goes to the exceptions, the big quotes, and the work only an owner can do.
Van five costs the same as van two
Most software in this market is priced per user. That sounds fair until you notice what it does: every hire raises your software bill, so the tool quietly taxes the exact thing you are trying to do, which is grow the team. The month you take on a new engineer is the month your costs are already up. Your software should not pile on.
OptiTech Automation is a flat, published price per plan, not a per-user meter. Standard is £599 per month plus a one-off £249 setup and covers a team of up to ten on the tools. Growth is £1,749 per month and covers up to twenty-five. Within your plan, adding a van, an engineer, or an apprentice does not move the bill. The maths of hiring stays about wages, tools, and work won, where it belongs, not about software seats.
The rest of the operation comes with it: deposits taken automatically at booking through Stripe into your own account, two-way Xero sync so completed jobs flow into your accounts, and UK GDPR handling on EU servers with ICO registration. One system, one price, set out in full on the pricing page.
Questions team owners actually ask
Judge it on three tests. Does the booking side understand shifts, so customers only ever book hours a real employed engineer covers? Does dispatch respect qualifications, so the right person gets the right job without you brokering it? And does the price stay flat when you hire, instead of metering every new engineer? OptiTech Automation is built to pass all three for teams of roughly 2 to 25 on the tools. Run your own numbers through the calculator at /worth-it, then judge it on a 15-minute call rather than on anyone's claims, including ours.
All UK trades. Plumbing, gas and heating, electrical, drainage, HVAC and more. The centre of the range is the same in every trade: an owner with an employed team of roughly 2 to 25 on the tools, who has become the bottleneck their own growth created.
Through the rota and the dispatch engine. You publish shifts, and those shifts become the bookable hours on your page. Each confirmed job goes straight to the right engineer by rota and qualification, each engineer sees their own day in the worker app, and you see everyone from one screen. The coordination that used to live in your head moves into the system.
Within your plan, nothing. OptiTech Automation is priced as a flat monthly amount per plan, not per user: Standard is £599 per month with a £249 one-off setup and covers up to ten on the tools, and Growth is £1,749 per month covering up to twenty-five. Hiring your fifth engineer costs the same in software as running your second did. The bill only changes if your team outgrows the plan, and both prices are published, so you will never hear a number for the first time on a sales call.
The worker app is deliberately simple: today's jobs, the customer details, the status updates, on the phone already in their pocket. It is built for someone standing in a loft with one hand free, not for someone at a desk. Most of the learning is realising there is no longer a group chat to scroll back through.
The rota stays truthful, so the booking page does too. Hours that no published shift covers are simply not bookable, and jobs only go to engineers who are actually available. Time off does not create double bookings. It just removes those hours from what customers can book.
Two published plans cover the range. Standard is £599 a month for teams of up to ten on the tools. Growth is £1,749 a month and covers up to twenty-five. Past twenty-five is the honest ceiling: OptiTech Automation is not built for fleet scale, and if you are running 40 engineers across three depots we will say so on the call rather than waste your time. Inside the range, the system is built precisely for you.
Keep reading: the booking-first system explained · how it works end to end · the no lock-in pledge
Get your job back from the diary
Book a 15-minute call with the founder. Bring your team size and your messiest week. If the fit is wrong, you will hear it straight on the call.