Rebooking software for every UK trade

Every trade with repeat work loses most of it. Not because the customers didn't like you, but because two people forgot at the same time: the customer forgot which tradesperson did the job last year, and you forgot to remind them. Both memory failures are completely predictable, and both are fixable with software - but they happen so quietly that most trade businesses don't realise how much repeat work is silently leaving out the back door.

The maths is the same across every trade. If a customer's average lifetime value with you should be, say, £2,000 over ten years of annual work, but you actually see them for one £200 job and never again, you've lost £1,800 of already-earned revenue on that customer. Multiply that across a full customer list and it's not small money.

Marketing agencies will tell you the fix is more leads. It isn't. The fix is closing the loop on the customers you've already got - reminding them at the right moment, in a way that makes rebooking one tap instead of a phone call.

You log a customer once and set the interval for the job you want to repeat. Any interval works - weekly for a window round, fortnightly for a lawn cut, monthly, 6-monthly, annually for a boiler service, every 2 or 3 years for moss treatment, every 5 years for a landlord EICR, every 10 years for an owner-occupier EICR. Bookso doesn't care whether the cycle is a week or a decade; it just remembers.

When the job is due, Bookso sends the customer an email from your business name with a one-tap booking link. On the paid plans it can also send by SMS. The customer picks a slot from the times you've said you're available and the job lands in your diary as a confirmed booking, not just a reminder that got sent.

If the customer doesn't respond within a few days, an automatic chaser goes out, and on the paid plans one SMS follow-up. After that Bookso stops - the customer stays visible in your pipeline so you can phone them yourself or leave them. Bookso is not a nagging tool; it's a booking tool.

Every job type has its own price, interval and reminder copy. Every customer can have their own mix of jobs and intervals. And the whole customer side runs on a mobile-friendly page with your name, your prices and your availability - no app, no login, no password.

There's a difference that matters, and it's worth naming it clearly. A reminder tool sends the customer a message saying 'your service is due, please call to book' - and then stops. Its job is done when the message is sent. Whether the customer actually calls back is not something the software tracks or cares about. In practice, most don't.

Rebooking software is different. Rebooking software closes the loop. It doesn't stop at 'message sent'; it stops at 'job booked in the diary'. The customer taps a link, picks a slot from your live availability, and the booking lands back in your pipeline as a confirmed job. You get notified. The customer gets a confirmation. Nobody phones anybody.

This is the category Bookso exists in. Bookso is rebooking software, not a reminder tool. That single distinction is why the numbers are different: reminder tools convert something like 5-10% of nudges into bookings, because most customers won't pick up the phone. Rebooking software converts far more, because tapping a link at 9pm on the sofa is friction most humans will actually go through with.

If you already use a reminder tool and you're happy with it, keep it. But if the reason you got a reminder tool was to actually get customers back into your diary, rebooking software is the tool for that job.

Anyone with recurring service intervals. That covers most of the practical trades in the UK: gas engineers on annual boiler services and CP12s, plumbers on annual check-ups and unvented cylinder services, electricians on 5-year and 10-year EICRs and PAT testing, gardeners on seasonal rounds, window cleaners on 4-8 weekly cycles, chimney sweeps on annual sweeps, roofers on annual roof MOTs and gutter cleans.

It also fits trades that don't always think of themselves as repeat: aerial installers doing yearly signal checks, locksmiths offering annual lock and hinge servicing to landlords, pest control on quarterly commercial contracts, appliance engineers on annual cooker or dishwasher services, mobile valeters on monthly car cleans, chimney and stove specialists, HVAC engineers on air-con servicing, painter-decorators offering yearly touch-up rounds, handymen with regular property-care customers.

The pattern is always the same: a customer, a job, an interval, a reminder that turns into a confirmed booking. If any of that describes work you already do, Bookso fits.

Because it's the only tool designed specifically for the rebooking loop, priced for a real self-employed trade business, and set up in about 5 minutes. Full job-management suites (Commusoft, Joblogic, Fergus, Tradify) cost £30 to £70 per user per month and take a weekend to configure. Bookso is £14.99/month for unlimited customers on Pro and does one thing brilliantly instead of ten things adequately.

Plenty of tradespeople use both: a job-management tool or invoicing app for the paperwork and Bookso alongside it for the rebooking. You don't have to move anything to try it.