01
Day 1
A 20-minute call
No sales script. We listen, ask about your trade, your team, your week. If we're not a fit, we'll say so on the call.
7-day onboarding · operator-led
How OptitechAutomation Works — From Sign-Up to Live in 7 Days
This is how trades booking software works in practice — at least, how it works at OptitechAutomation. Seven days from the first call to your booking page taking real customers. Built personally by Cristian from Torbay, Devon. No sales team handoff, no offshore implementation partner, no 90-day "kickoff" before you see anything live.
The three-step build
Three steps. Live in a week.
From discovery call to your first booked customer — set up personally, watched end-to-end by Cristian. Most platforms quote 30-90 days. Honestly, we don't know what they're doing for 30 days.
02
Day 2–3
Your intake form
25 short questions sent to your inbox — services, pricing, working hours, your engineers, your certs. About 30 minutes over a brew.
03
Day 4–7
We build, you approve
Your booking page, calendar, owner dashboard and worker app — built around your form. Preview link, your final word, then we go live.
Day 1 · The discovery call
Twenty minutes that decide whether we should work together.
Most trades booking software demos start with a 45-minute slide deck and end with a sales rep pushing you to "secure your founder pricing today". Ours is a phone call with Cristian. No deck. No pressure. The point is to find out whether OptitechAutomation actually fits how your trade runs — and whether we're the right people to build it for you.
What we ask
Five things, roughly. What's your trade and what does your week look like. How many engineers, and how do they get jobs today. Which platforms or aggregators are you on now. What broke recently that made you look at booking software. What does "going well" look like in six months.
What we tell you back
Whether OptitechAutomation is actually a fit. Sometimes the honest answer is "you'd be better off with a £15/month invoicing tool than our £599 platform — give us a ring in a year when you've got two more vans". I'd rather lose a £599/month sale than land a customer who isn't ready and churn in three months.
What happens if we're not a fit
We tell you who is. We've sent at least a dozen prospects to Tradify, Workever, Powered Now, and even back to Checkatrade where the volume justified it. No referral fee, no kickback, no upsell. Just a name and a sentence about why they'd do you better than us.
Day 2-3 · The intake form
25 questions, 30 minutes, your whole booking system in writing.
The intake form is the most important document in how trades booking software works at OptitechAutomation. It's the spec we build from. Get this right and your booking page goes live exactly as you'd run it on paper. Get it wrong and we end up rebuilding things in week 3.
The five sections
Services. What you do, in your own words. "Boiler service, breakdown call-out, CP12, full system install." Not categories from a dropdown. Pricing. Your call-out fee, hourly rate, fixed quotes. With a separate line for emergencies. Hours. When you take calls, when you don't, when emergency overtime kicks in. Engineers. Who they are, what they're qualified for, which postcodes they prefer. Certifications. Gas Safe, NICEIC, Part P, F-Gas, Water Regs — we tag jobs against the right engineer automatically.
Why we make you write it out
Most trades booking software lets you click through a setup wizard. The wizard makes assumptions. The assumptions don't fit a 4-engineer shop in Torbay, Devon any better than they fit a 40-engineer commercial operation in Manchester. So we ask. The intake form is a written record of how your business actually runs, and we keep it on file forever — it's how we onboard new engineers six months in without you having to re-explain the basics.
If you get stuck
Phone Cristian. The intake form has my mobile number at the top. Most owners ring once during the form fill, usually about whether to treat "supply only" jobs as a separate service or a discount on an install. Both work; we'll talk it through in ten minutes.
Day 4-7 · The build
We build. You watch. No surprises.
Day 4 starts with us cloning a base platform from our template and customising it to your intake form. Day 5 is your booking page wired up to your Stripe account, your domain (or a temporary subdomain if your DNS isn't ready). Day 6 is the dashboard, the worker app, the engineer accounts, and the test bookings going through. Day 7 you approve, we DNS-cut over, and you're live.
The preview link
You get a preview URL on Day 5 — something like your-shop.preview.optitechautomation.co.uk — that's a fully working copy of your future live site. Click through every page. Try to book yourself. Send the link to your wife, your senior engineer, your accountant. If something's wrong, message Cristian directly — average response time during onboarding is 18 minutes UK hours.
The 24-hour approval window
We don't push live without your written sign-off. The day-7 email lands at 9am with a checklist: booking flow works, Xero connected, engineer logins work, payment processor verified. You reply with "go" or with a list of fixes. Most owners reply within 4 hours. The fixes are usually small — a tweak to the call-out fee, an engineer who's also Gas Safe registered, a service line we missed.
DNS cutover
We send DNS instructions for your domain. Usually one CNAME record. Your booking page goes live at book.your-shop.co.uk or wherever you point it. DNS propagation takes 0-15 minutes for most UK registrars. Then we run one final booking through it together on a call.
After Day 7
What happens after you go live.
A platform without someone supervising it is just software that breaks quietly. So the first 14 days after go-live are operator-monitored. Cristian watches your dashboard, your bookings, your dispatch latency, your Stripe webhook deliveries. If something looks wrong, you'll get a message before you spot it yourself.
Week 1 — daily check-in email
Every morning at 7am you get a one-screen email: bookings yesterday, today's dispatch, any alerts that came through overnight. If a booking failed (rare — usually a Stripe verification issue), it's flagged. If an engineer's app stopped syncing, it's flagged. The email is signed by Cristian, not auto-generated.
Week 2 — first business review
14 days in, a 30-minute call to walk through the numbers. Was the deposit amount right? Are bookings landing in slots that make sense? Are engineers finding the mobile app obvious? We adjust at this point — adjusting the deposit, splitting a service line, changing the booking lead-time. Most shops change something at week 2.
Month 2 onwards — bi-weekly (Growth) or monthly (Standard)
After the first month, supervision dials down to a rhythm that matches your tier. Growth gets bi-weekly business reviews with Cristian. Standard gets a monthly performance report by email. Dominator gets weekly. Either way, the operator is always nearby — message him directly when you need to.
If we're not a fit
We'll tell you who is.
Honest signalling, conservatively given. This is part of how trades booking software works for serious UK shops — knowing when a platform is over-built or under-built for where you actually are.
If you're a solo trader with one van
You probably want Tradify (£29/month) or Powered Now (£19/month) until you get to 2-3 vans. £599/month is genuine money for a single trader, and most of our platform is wasted on you. Honest conversation: come back when you've hired your second engineer.
If you're 40+ engineers across multiple sites
Empire tier might fit, but it's not launching until Q4 2026. Until then, you're probably better served by ServiceTitan (US-priced, but built for scale) or Joblogic (UK, mid-sized commercial). We can ring them on your behalf if that helps.
If you mostly want lead generation
We're not a lead-gen marketplace. We don't send you bookings — your existing customers, website traffic, and Google search bring the bookings, and we manage them. If you have no existing customer base, Checkatrade or MyBuilder are still — bluntly — the realistic answer for the first 12 months while you build a name.
Start the seven days
Day 1 is a phone call.
Twenty minutes, UK hours, no sales script. We'll work out whether OptitechAutomation is the right fit for your trade — and if not, who is. This is exactly how trades booking software works should start: with a conversation, not a sign-up form.