Bookings

"If customers pick their own times, we'd be all over the place."

That's the most common objection working sweeps raise about online booking, and it's a fair one. Let customers grab whatever slot they fancy and you end up in Ilkley at 9, back across town for half 10, then out to Otley for a job that should have been first thing.

Most booking tools work exactly like that, which is why plenty of sweeps won't touch them. We Sweep is built the other way round: the customer never picks a time. They pick a date. The day is yours.

What the customer actually does

1. Enters their postcode — checked against your service area before anything else. If they're outside your radius, they don't book. No wasted quotes from three towns over.
2. Picks a service — and how many chimneys — your services, your prices, on your own website. Where a service has a price for additional chimneys, the customer says how many flues need sweeping and the price and time slot scale to match.
3. Says morning, afternoon, or don't mind — the only say they get in timing, and "don't mind" is the default most people leave alone.
4. Chooses from a handful of dates — only dates their job genuinely fits, worked out from your working hours, time off, the jobs already in the diary and your Google Calendar.
5. Tells you anything you ought to know — and shows you — an optional note and up to three photos of the fireplace or chimney. It's tucked away and most people walk straight past it. The ones who don't are usually the ones with something worth telling you.
6. Pays — your way or theirs — card up front through Stripe, so the job lands in the diary already paid. Or, if you've enabled it, they book now and settle on the day — cash, card at the door or bank transfer. Which options appear is your choice.

And if you've switched on the referral programme, a friend booking on a customer's recommendation can enter their referral code here too — or arrive by a share link with it already filled in.

What they never see is a time picker. Where the job lands within the day is the system's decision, made on real Google drive times between the addresses already booked that day — not straight-line distance, and not whatever gap happened to be showing when the customer looked. How the day gets built is a page in itself: how route planning works.

You hear about the lined flue before you're standing in front of it

Every sweep has driven out to a job that turned out not to be the job that was booked. A wood burner where the form said open fire. A flue nobody's touched in fifteen years. A cowl that needs the long ladder, which is in the other van.

So when a customer fills in their details, there's an optional "Anything we should know?" box, and room for up to three photos of the fireplace or chimney. It's collapsed by default — this isn't another required field standing between a customer and a booking — and plenty of people never open it. The ones who do tend to be the ones with a door rope hanging off or a cracked fire brick they're worried about.

Whatever they write, and whatever they photograph, follows the job everywhere it goes:

• In the office — the note and the photos sit on the booking in your admin panel. You can edit the note or clear it, and you can add one yourself to a job you've booked in over the phone.
• In the technician's app — whoever's doing the job reads the note and sees the photos on their phone before they knock on the door.
• In your Google Calendar — the note rides along in the event description, so it's there even if you're looking at your diary rather than the app.
• In your morning digest — yesterday's new bookings are flagged where a note or photos came with them, so the ones worth a second look stand out.

None of it is clever. It's just the difference between finding out at the doorstep and finding out the week before — enough warning to load the right brushes, ring the customer back, or have a price in mind for the extra work instead of working one out on their hearth rug. And when a job does still grow on arrival, your technician adds it there and then with the customer agreeing the new total.

Customer photos are stored against the booking like every other job photo, and any location data embedded by the phone that took them is stripped on upload. If a booking is never completed, its photos are deleted automatically.

A provisional time now. A confirmed time the day before.

This is the part that makes the whole thing work, so it's worth explaining properly.

When a customer books, their confirmation email carries a provisional arrival time — and says, in plain words, that their confirmed slot will follow 24 hours before the appointment.

Between now and then, the day isn't frozen. Every new booking, reschedule or cancellation re-plans the affected day straight away, so the route keeps tightening as the day fills. A job that came in first doesn't get to anchor the whole day just because it arrived first — the day is ordered by geography, not by who booked when.

24 hours out, the route is made final. The customer gets their confirmed arrival time — automatically, like every other message — and from that moment that booking never moves — no algorithm shuffles a job after the customer has been told when you're coming.

The gap between provisional and confirmed isn't a hedge — it's the design. Tools that confirm an exact time at the moment of booking have to lock the day in arrival order, which is precisely how you end up all over the place. Give the day room to re-plan until it's full, and confirm once it's settled, and you get both things: a tight route for you, and a reliable time for the customer.

Some customers are fixed. Some are fluid.

Every sweep has customers who need a set time — the letting agent with a tenant handover, the school that only allows access at 4pm, the regular who's been "Tuesday, first thing" for fifteen years. Online booking is the wrong tool for them, and we don't pretend otherwise.

• You book fixed customers in yourself — any booking you create in the admin panel is locked to its time. The system treats it as immovable and routes every online booking around it.
• You can move anything — put any job wherever you want it. The system re-plans the rest of the day around your decision, not the other way round.
• Working hours, time off and blocked days are respected — block out a morning for a flue liner install or a fortnight in Spain and nothing gets booked into it.

The system optimises the fluid jobs. You stay in charge of the diary.

The other version of this objection — "my jobs aren't all the same size, so I can't put one price on a website" — has an answer too. Services can carry a per-chimney price, so the customer says how many flues they've got and the price and the length of the slot scale before the job ever hits the diary. And if the day itself turns up a surprise, your technician can add agreed extra work on the spot — the customer approves the new total at the door.

What it costs

There's no monthly fee and no tiers. We Sweep takes 2% per booking — quiet months cost you nothing. The full picture, including how VAT is handled, is on the payments page, with more in the FAQs. If you're weighing this against a monthly-subscription tool, there's a straight comparison on our best chimney sweep software page.

Frequently asked questions