How to take bookings for a home service

Somebody wants a price for cleaning a three-bed, and you've never seen the house.

Four things make that answerable. Publish a minimum call-out so tiny jobs stop costing you money. Quote a band rather than a number, and say out loud what moves it up or down. Ask four questions before the band comes out of your mouth. And settle access at the booking, not at the door, because a locked gate at 8am is forty minutes you will never bill. A $95 minimum and a two-hour floor is a normal starting position in most US markets, and it will lose you the customers you want to lose.

Everything else in this article is those four things in detail.

Publish a minimum, and stop apologising for it

The job is not the work. The job is the drive, the parking, the setup, the work, the pack-down and the drive back. A twenty-five minute drive each way is fifty unpaid minutes attached to whatever you're actually charging for.

So the minimum exists to protect the drive. Two shapes, and most people need both:

A minimum charge. "$95 minimum for any visit." It doesn't matter if the job takes eleven minutes. It's the number that makes it worth arriving.

A minimum duration. "Cleans are booked in two-hour blocks." It stops the request for "just a quick tidy, maybe an hour" that fills a slot you could have sold properly.

Say it on the page, before the price list, in one line. Not buried, not apologetic. Something like: "Minimum visit is $95 or two hours, whichever is greater. That covers travel and setup."

The customers who walk away from that were going to be your worst customers. The ones who stay have quietly learned that you run a business rather than a favour.

The same logic applies to travel. Draw two or three zones by drive time, not by miles, because fifteen miles across a city is not fifteen miles down a highway:

Zone	Drive time	Charge
A	Under 20 minutes	Included
B	20 to 40 minutes	Plus $25
C	Over 40 minutes	Plus $60, and only on days I'm already out that way

Publishing the zones does something subtle. It tells a customer forty minutes away that you'll come, which is better than a vague no, and it prices the answer honestly.

Quote a band, and say what moves it

A single number quoted sight-unseen is a number you'll either regret or have to raise, and raising it is where the trust goes.

Quote a range and attach the reasons:

"A standard clean on a three-bed, two-bath runs $140 to $180. It's at the low end if it's been done regularly, and at the high end if it's the first time, if there are pets, or if the oven is included. I'll confirm the exact number before I start, and I'll never go above the top of the range without asking you first."

That last clause is the whole thing. You've capped their risk, which is what they were actually worried about, and you've kept yourself room to be right.

For repair work the equivalent is a diagnostic fee that converts:

"$95 to come out and diagnose. If you go ahead with the repair, that $95 comes off the bill. Parts are quoted separately before I order anything."

Both structures do the same job: they let you commit to a number without having seen the thing, and they make the variable part visible instead of surprising.

The four questions that make a sight-unseen quote safe

Ask these before you say any number. It takes ninety seconds and it's the difference between a profitable Thursday and an unpaid extra hour.

1. How many bathrooms, and how big is the kitchen?

Bathrooms are the hours, not bedrooms. A four-bed with one bathroom is a faster job than a two-bed with three, and quoting by bedroom count is exactly how people end up working an unpaid hour every Thursday and never quite knowing why. Bedrooms are floor and a surface. Bathrooms are grout, glass, tile, fixtures and time.

2. When was it last done properly?

A first clean on a place that hasn't had one is commonly one and a half to two times a maintenance clean. If you charge maintenance rates for a first visit, you'll do a bad job or a long one, and both cost you. Price the first visit separately and say why: "First visits are longer because of the build-up. After that it drops to the regular rate."

3. Pets? Smokers? Anyone with allergies or products they need you to use?

A shedding dog adds real time to a clean. Someone's own products change what you carry. Both are fine, and both need to be known.

4. Parking, access and who'll be there?

Covered properly below, but ask it here, in the same breath as the rest, so it feels routine rather than fussy.

For repairs, replace the first two with the make, the model and the age, and ask for one specific photograph.

Photos before you quote, and the one that matters most

For anything you're going to fix, ask for photos and don't quote until you have them. Four is usually enough: the whole appliance or room, the specific problem, the surroundings for access, and the label.

The label is the one. Ask for the photo of the model and serial plate before you quote a repair. On a fridge that's usually inside the door or behind the crisper drawer; on a washer it's often around the door opening; on a furnace it's inside the panel. That plate tells you the model, the age, and whether parts are still available.

Half the call-outs that lose money lose it the same way: you arrive, you diagnose it in ten minutes, and the part is something you have to order, which means a second trip you didn't price into the job. The label photograph turns that into a phone call the day before, where you say "I'll need to order the pump, so let's book Thursday and I'll come once with the part in the van."

For cleaning, ask for photos of the kitchen and the worst bathroom. People send them happily, and what you're looking for is scale rather than mess: an eight-foot run of counter and a walk-in shower are different jobs from a galley kitchen and a tub.

Access is what actually ruins your day

The work is predictable. The getting-in is not. Every experienced tradesperson has a story about a forty-minute wait outside a gate.

Turn it into a checklist that's part of the booking, not part of the conversation on the day:

• Is someone home, or is it a key, a lockbox or a code? If it's a code, get the code at booking. If it's a key under a pot, get a photo of the pot.
• Where do I park? Permit zones, gated communities, a driveway that fits one car, a building with a loading bay you have to book.
• Is there a gate, and does it have a lock?
• Pets: where will they be? "The dog is friendly" is not an access plan. Ask for them to be in a room with the door shut.
• Is the water on? Is the power on? Relevant far more often than you'd think, especially in empty properties and rentals between tenants.
• Stairs, elevators, floor number. In a condo or apartment building, ask whether the elevator needs to be reserved, because in some buildings it does and nobody mentions it until you're standing in the lobby with a machine.
• Anything I should know about? The open question at the end catches the thing you didn't think to ask about.

Send that list back to them in the booking confirmation as a short summary they can correct. "Booked Thursday 9am, code 4471 on the side gate, dog in the back bedroom, park on the street. Anything wrong there?" Two minutes on Tuesday saves forty on Thursday.

Sailo's service listings carry a duration, a location and a notice period, and the order arrives written out rather than as a conversation you have to reconstruct. Where those pieces fit together for any kind of appointment-based work is covered in how to take bookings for a service.

Here's the honest limitation, and it's a real one for this trade specifically. There's no Sailo app. You're checking bookings in a phone browser between jobs, sometimes with dusty hands, sometimes with one bar of signal in a basement. It works, and it's not the same as a native app with a push notification. If your whole day depends on a notification arriving the second a booking lands, know that before you build around it.

Cancellations, no-shows and why new customers pay a deposit

A no-show isn't one lost job. It's a lost slot you could have sold, plus the drive.

The policy that works and that customers accept:

• 24 hours' notice to cancel or move, free.
• Inside 24 hours, 50% of the booking, or the deposit, whichever is less.
• Nobody home on arrival, full charge. State it plainly. You drove there.

Then take a deposit from every new customer. Not from regulars, from new ones. $25 to $50, or the diagnostic fee, credited against the job. It's small enough that a real customer doesn't blink and large enough that a time-waster books someone else.

The deposit does a second, quieter job: it makes the booking feel real to them. People turn up for things they've paid for. The wording that makes this land without friction is in taking a deposit before you start, and the policy language for the reschedule itself is in rescheduling and cancellations.

On manual payment rails, the deposit confirmation is on you. Sailo takes nothing on a bank transfer or a cash job because it never touches the money, and by the same token it can't tell you the deposit landed. That's a two-minute check in your banking app each morning, and it needs to be a habit rather than an intention.

Recurring work is the business; one-offs are the marketing

Do the arithmetic once and it changes how you sell.

A one-off deep clean at $260 is a good day. A biweekly clean at $150 is $3,900 a year from one address, and it fills a slot you never have to sell again. Twelve of those and your calendar is a business rather than a lottery.

So price recurring work below one-off work, deliberately and visibly:

Frequency	Price	Why
One-off / first clean	$260	Highest effort, no future value
Monthly	$175	Some build-up between visits
Biweekly	$150	The sweet spot for most households
Weekly	$130	Lowest effort per visit, highest certainty for you

The discount isn't generosity. A weekly house is cleaner, so it's faster, and you sold it once instead of fifty times.

Then ask for it. At the end of a good one-off job, while you're packing up: "If you want this kept up, I've got a Tuesday morning slot every other week." That one sentence, said out loud in the hallway, converts better than any marketing you'll do, and most people never say it.

For repair work the recurring equivalent is the annual service and the maintenance reminder. A note in your calendar to message a customer eleven months after you serviced their system is worth more than an ad. Doing it without becoming the person who pesters is covered in how to follow up without being annoying.

The licensing question, briefly

Requirements for home services in the US vary by state and often by city, and they vary by trade. Some kinds of work are commonly unlicensed. Others, particularly anything touching gas, electrical, plumbing or heating and cooling, usually aren't, and there are frequently thresholds where a job above a certain dollar value needs a licensed contractor even if smaller work doesn't.

Insurance is a separate question from licensing, and customers ask about it. "Are you insured?" comes up early in the conversation for anyone letting a stranger into their home with a key.

Don't take this article's word for any of it. Look up your own state and city's requirements on their own websites, and ask an insurance broker what cover is normal for your trade in your area. It's an afternoon, once, and it's the difference between a business and a problem.

Whatever you find, put the answer on your page in one line. Customers who ask about insurance are the customers who book.

Worked example: Ray, Tucson

Ray fixes appliances out of a van, working alone, six days some weeks and four others.

His structure: $95 diagnostic, waived if the repair goes ahead. Zone A is central Tucson at no surcharge, zone B is out to the edges at plus $25, and anything past that he only takes if he's already going that way.

A representative week: eleven call-outs. Eight convert to repairs averaging $210 in labour plus parts at cost plus 20%. Two are diagnostics only, where the machine is past economic repair and he says so, which earns $190 and a good reputation. One is a no-show, which costs him the slot and forty minutes of driving, and which is why he now takes a $40 deposit from anyone he hasn't worked for before.

Gross for the week is around $2,050 including parts markup. Fuel, van costs, insurance and the parts float take a meaningful bite out of that, and he'd tell you the number that actually matters is jobs-per-day, not dollars-per-job.

The change that made the most difference: he started asking for a photo of the model plate before quoting anything. His second-trip rate, the calls where he had to come back with a part, went from roughly a third of jobs to under one in ten. Same number of call-outs, three more completed repairs a week, and no extra driving.

The change that made the second most difference was slower. He built a list of every customer he'd ever served, and once a year he sends a short message about dryer vents before summer. That message books him about a fortnight of work every year from people who already trust him. Setting the expectations that make those customers easy in the first place is worked through in setting expectations before the sale.

What to do next

Write your minimum on one line and put it at the top of your booking page, above the prices.

Then write your four qualifying questions into your booking form so they're answered before you ever see the enquiry. For repair work, make the model plate photograph a required field.

Then take the next new customer's deposit. Just one, to see what happens. Almost nothing will, and that's the point.