How it works for plumbers

1. Setting your availability window

A window is the time you're free today. It isn't a setting that stays switched on. You set:

• Free from and free until. For example, from one until five.
• Where you're starting from. Usually where you are now, or where you'll be when you're free.
• How far you'll travel. Jobs further away than this won't reach you.

Set the end time for when you actually need to stop, not when the day ends. If you have to collect the kids at half four or be on another job at five, that's your end time. Be honest about travel too: eight miles across the city at school-run time is not eight miles on a quiet morning.

Your window ends on its own at the time you set. You can also close it early if something else comes up. There's nothing to remember to switch off.

2. Telling us what you do

Plumbing covers a lot of different jobs. Fitting a tap, tracing a leak behind a kitchen unit, replacing a radiator valve and fitting a whole bathroom are not the same work, and a customer with a dripping tap doesn't need a heating specialist.

So when you join, you say which kinds of work you do. Matching follows that. The more accurately you describe your work, the better the jobs you're sent will fit. Gas work, such as boilers and gas hobs, is only for Gas Safe registered engineers.

3. How jobs are matched to you

A job only reaches you if it fits all three:

• its timing overlaps your window
• it's inside your travel distance
• it's the kind of work you do

Matching jobs arrive as a notification on your phone, because you're in a van, not refreshing an app. If a notification can't reach you, an email follows. You choose which notifications you get, so you can turn things down rather than off.

4. Reading a job

Each job shows what the customer needs, roughly where, when it suits them, and any photos they've added. Here's the kind of thing you'll see:

Photos matter. A picture of the tap and the make on its base tells you whether you've got the part in the van before you reply.

5. Sending your price

If a job suits you, reply with your price. Make it easy to say yes to:

• Say what's included. Labour only, or parts too? If you'll need to see it first, say so.
• Say when you can arrive. "Can be there by two" is what the customer most wants to know.
• Keep it plain. One or two sentences is enough.

If a job isn't right, ignore it or decline it. There's no charge for being sent jobs or for replying.

6. When a customer picks you

When a customer accepts your price, messaging opens between you for that job. Use it to agree access, parking and anything you need to know before you arrive, so there's a record of what was agreed.

You do the job and the customer pays you directly, the way you've agreed with them. No money goes through the app at launch.

7. Reviews both ways

After the job, the customer reviews you and you review the customer. Good reviews and a growing count of completed jobs help you win the next one, and customers know plumbers can review them too.