You come down a loft ladder at half four and there’s a message from whoever was minding the phone: “Booked you a boiler job Thursday, nice lady, other side of town.” Thursday turns out to be a warm air unit you don’t touch, forty minutes away, at a rented flat where the tenant didn’t know anyone was coming. Nobody did anything wrong. They just didn’t have your rules, because your rules have only ever lived in your head. This is the sheet to get them out.
The rules are already in your head
Every time you answer the phone you run through a checklist without noticing. Is it work I do? Is it on my patch? Is it an emergency, or does it just feel like one to them? Can I price it over the phone, or do I need to see it? Who’s letting me in?
You do that in about ten seconds because you’ve done it thousands of times. Anyone else taking bookings for you, whether that’s your partner, an apprentice, an answering service or software, has to do the same thing without the ten years behind it. If the rules aren’t written down, they guess. And a guess on a booking costs you a wasted morning at best.
So write them down before you hand the phone over to anyone. It takes an evening. Print the headings below, or copy them into a note on your phone, and fill in the blanks in your own words. Plain English beats clever. “No LPG, ever” is a perfect rule.
The work you take, and the work you don’t
Start with the work, because it’s the rule people get wrong most often. Whoever answers your phone can’t tell a system boiler from a combi, and they shouldn’t have to. They just need a clear list. Be honest about what you actually want, not only what you’re able to do. Plenty of engineers are qualified for power flushes and would still rather not do them in February.
The “never” line matters as much as the “always” line. A clear no on the phone is a kindness to the customer, who can ring someone else straight away instead of waiting two days for a callback that ends in “not my thing”. If you employ engineers, the last line saves you sending someone to a job they aren’t ticketed for.
Where, when and how much
“Leeds and around” is not a service area. Postcode districts are. They’re how customers describe where they live, they’re easy to check, and they make the edge of your patch a list rather than a feeling. Most people end up with three lists: yes, ask me, and no.
Two of those lines deserve a second look. The call-out fee: say it out loud on the phone, every time, before the booking is made. It’s the single most common source of a sour invoice conversation, and it’s entirely avoidable. And emergencies: what the caller calls urgent and what you call urgent are different things. A dripping trap is not an emergency at 7pm on a Sunday, however upset they are. Write down your version, so whoever’s answering isn’t making that call on your behalf.
The gas smell line isn’t about diagnosing anything over the phone. Nobody taking your bookings should be doing that. It’s about making sure the call goes the way you’d want, every time, and that you hear about it. The number is the one the HSE points people to, but how you word it is your decision.
If the rule isn’t written down, whoever’s on the phone guesses. A guess on a booking costs you a morning.
Visits, access and holding slots
The last sheet covers the things that turn a booked job into a wasted trip. Most of them are about the gap between the person who rings and the person who opens the door.
Landlord and tenant jobs are where this sheet earns its keep. The person paying, the person booking and the person at the door can be three different people, and only one of them needs to forget for you to be stood on a step in the rain. If you do a lot of rented work, our piece on landlord gas safety records goes through the paperwork side.
Putting the sheet to work
A filled-in sheet is useful the day you finish it. Stick it by the phone at home. Send it to whoever covers when you’re on holiday. Read it back to yourself in a month and you’ll find a rule you’ve quietly changed.
It’s also exactly what we ask for when we set Datify up with a business. We go through it with you on a call, and it becomes your booking rules: the jobs, area, hours and engineers Datify is allowed to book on its own. It checks your connected diary before it books, and anything outside the rules comes to you on WhatsApp instead. That covers an unusual job, a postcode you don’t usually cover, or a price you haven’t set. Rules are written in plain English, and you can change one by message whenever your mind changes.
Start with fewer rules than you think you need. It’s easier to loosen a tight rule after a few weeks of seeing how it goes than to tighten one after a bad booking. We wrote about that in trust is a dial.
Before anyone takes bookings for you, write down what’s in your head: the work you take and refuse, your postcodes, your call-out fee, what counts as an emergency, what needs a look before a price, who lets you in, and how long you hold a slot. Plain English, one evening. Whoever answers your phone, person or software, then books like you would, and asks you about everything else.
Writes about what actually happens when you put an AI in charge of real business operations — including the parts that go wrong.