Double-booking
It interrupts you. It doesn't overrule you.
You get a dialog naming who's booked or away and why — and you can still save anyway. The scheduler doesn't pretend to know more than the person doing the scheduling; it makes sure the decision is made knowingly.
Who, and where — not a red mark
The panel names the customer and gives the address of the clashing job. “Already booked” isn't actionable. “Already at Mrs Whitfield's on Preston Road” tells you whether the two jobs are five minutes apart or fifty, which is the thing you were about to go and look up.
Approved leave counts the same as a booked job
Someone on holiday appears in the same panel for the same reason: they aren't available. There's no separate place to remember to check.
Back-to-back is not a clash
A job finishing at 11:00 and one starting at 11:00 do not overlap. Software that flags that is software people learn to ignore — and an alert everyone ignores protects nobody.
Someone who's left still shows by name
The name is kept on the job rather than looked up from the current staff list, so last spring's diary still reads properly after somebody moves on.
The hard filter
Which slots are genuinely offerable
Before anything reaches a customer, every candidate is checked against what the firm can actually honour. Nothing gets past this — and one of these deliberately produces nothing at all rather than guessing.
Working patterns
An engineer with no working pattern recorded produces no slots — not an assumed nine-to-five. The firm not having said when it works is a reason to offer nothing, rather than a reason to guess and send someone to a door.
Skills the job requires
A service can require a ticket, and only engineers holding it are eligible. Skills are free text with suggested presets, because every firm has its own shorthand — but the presets exist so nobody types “Gas Safe” and “gas safe registered” and silently fails to match.
Service area
Described the way a trade describes it — “Northampton and fifteen miles round it” — and turned into the postcode districts that covers. Nobody types NN1 through NN29 by hand, and nobody notices they missed NN7. A firm with no area recorded isn't restricted: that's the sole trader who works wherever the work is.
Notice, and how far ahead
The notice period you need before a job, and how far into the future you'll take bookings at all.
How many jobs a day
Set per service and per engineer. Where the two disagree, the tighter of them wins.
Buffers before and after
The buffer belongs to the engineer, not the customer. It widens what the slot consumes in the diary without changing the time the customer is told. The visit has to finish inside the working day; the tidying up afterwards may run past it.
Holds
A slot someone is part-way through booking is held, so two people can't take the same one.
All of it, before anything is offered
Every one of these is a question of eligibility, and eligibility is settled before ranking starts. Customers can book themselves in from a link — see the customer portal — and everything they're shown has already been through here.
Detour cost
The round tightens itself as bookings come in
Once the offerable slots are known, they're ranked by what this job would actually add to that engineer's driving. Nobody planned that round. There's no whiteboard and no morning spent cross-referencing a map.
detour = drive(previous job → this job)
+ drive(this job → next job)
− drive(previous job → next job)
Tuesday morning · four offerable slots, ranked
Tue 09:30
Danny Ash
Tue 11:00
Danny Ash
Tue 08:00
Sam Corrigan
Tue 10:15
Sam Corrigan
The customer picks “Tuesday morning” and never learns it was offered because someone is already two streets away at half nine.
Ranking never overrules the filters
A slot that failed the hard checks stays failed. No score can bring back a slot the firm can't honour — ordering and eligibility are separate questions and they stay separate.
Drive times never hold up a customer
Estimates come from a cache first, then a straight-line distance with a road factor — free, instant, and good enough to answer “on the round or across the county”, which is the only question being asked. Real routing runs in the background to warm the cache, after the customer already has their answer. A slow or broken mapping service can never delay a booking, and a missing postcode scores as neutral rather than excluding the slot: our missing data isn't a reason to refuse someone an appointment.
Good enough to rank slots by. Not a promise of arrival to the minute — for that, see live tracking.
The hole in the day
Not “which slot for this customer” — which customer for this hole in Thursday
The same engine, turned inside out. A round with a ninety-minute gap in the middle is paid for either way: the van is out, the day is committed, and the gap is simply unbilled. Filling it with a job five minutes off the existing route is close to free money.
Everything needed to spot it is already in the system — the diary, the working patterns, and the list of customers whose certificates are due. And the reason nobody does it by hand is obvious the moment you try: it means cross-referencing a renewals list against four engineers' diaries and a map, every morning, before anyone's had a coffee.
Due, and near the route
When a slot comes free
A restraint problem, not a reach problem
Someone cancels Thursday at ten. The risk isn't missing anyone — it's telling the wrong people. A customer emailed about a “slot near you” forty minutes away, or emailed three times in a week, stops reading anything you send.
Four conditions · all must hold
- 01
The request is still live.
- 02
The freed slot falls in the window they actually asked for. Somebody booked for the 20th does not want to hear about the 25th.
- 03
It's the work they wanted.
- 04
It's genuinely near enough to the surrounding jobs that an engineer would want to go.
Then two limits on top
Throttle
How often any one person can be contacted at all.
Cap
How many people hear about a single freed slot.
Two defaults, pointing opposite ways
A job with a time nobody can read does not raise a clash. Blocking a save over a row no one can even see would be maddening, and the cost of missing that one warning is low.
A hold that can't be read is treated as live. Refusing a slot is recoverable — someone picks another one. Double-booking it isn't.
Neither is more careful than the other. Each points toward the cheaper mistake.
The diary itself
The ordinary parts, done properly
Each view can be turned on or off per role, so an engineer's diary isn't the office's diary.
Day, week and list
Three views of the same diary, plus a time summary. Each one on or off per role.
One engineer or several
A job can be assigned to one person or to a team going together.
Arrival windows
“Between ten and twelve” rather than “sometime Tuesday”, where you choose to use them.
On the day
Live tracking for what the customer sees, and the portal for booking themselves in.
Straight answers
Including what it deliberately doesn't do.
01Will it stop me double-booking an engineer?
It checks the diary live while you're choosing who to send, and each engineer shows what they're already on for that time — including the customer name and address of the clashing job. A job finishing at 11:00 and one starting at 11:00 aren't treated as a clash, because they don't overlap.
02Does it know who's on holiday?
Yes. Approved leave shows in the same panel as a booked job, for the same reason — they aren't available. There's no second place to remember to check.
03Can I still book someone who's busy if I need to?
Yes — it asks first. You get a dialog naming who's booked or away and why, and you can save anyway. The scheduler doesn't pretend to know more than you do; it makes sure the decision is a knowing one.
04Can customers book themselves in?
Yes, from a link — no login or app. Everything they're offered has already been through the eligibility checks, so a slot they can see is a slot you can honour. See the customer portal.
05How does it decide which times to offer?
Two stages. First eligibility: working patterns, required skills, service area, notice period, how far ahead you'll book, the daily job limit, buffers and holds. Then the eligible slots are ordered by what the job would add to that engineer's driving. Ranking never resurrects a slot that failed the first stage.
06Does it take travel between jobs into account?
Yes — that's what the ranking is. Each slot is scored by the driving it adds: previous job to this one, plus this one to the next, minus what the previous-to-next leg would have been anyway. Drive times come from a cache or a straight-line estimate with a road factor, which is good enough to tell “on the round” from “across the county”. It isn't live traffic and it isn't an accurate ETA. It also doesn't re-plan a whole day — it ranks the slots for one job.
07Can I require a qualification for a type of job?
Yes. A service can require a skill, and only engineers holding it are eligible. Skills are free text with suggested presets, so your own shorthand works — but the presets stop “Gas Safe” and “gas safe registered” quietly failing to match.
08How do I set my service area?
The way you'd say it out loud — a town and a radius, like “Northampton and fifteen miles round it” — which OnPoint turns into the postcode districts that covers. If you record no area at all you aren't restricted.
09Can I limit how many jobs a day someone gets?
Yes, per service and per engineer. Where the two disagree, the tighter one wins.
10Can I give customers a two-hour arrival window?
Yes, where you choose to use them — “between ten and twelve” rather than “sometime Tuesday”. Buffers before and after a job widen what the slot consumes in your diary without changing the window the customer is told.
11What happens when someone cancels?
The freed slot can be offered to people waiting — but narrowly. Their request has to still be live, the slot has to fall in the window they actually asked for, it has to be the work they wanted, and it has to be near enough to the surrounding jobs to be worth an engineer's while. On top of that there's a limit on how often one person is contacted and a cap on how many people hear about one slot.
12Does it work offline?
The day's appointments and the history behind them are on the device, so an engineer can open the diary and complete jobs with no signal. See field mode.
13What does it cost?
£19 for the first seat and £9 for each seat after. All of the scheduling is on every plan — there's no higher tier. See pricing.
Put next week in it and see what it offers.
14 days free, no card. Record two engineers, a working pattern and a service area, then book a job — the order the slots come back in is the whole argument.