Operations software
Scheduling that is not held together by a shared inbox.
Scheduling and booking software puts bookings, staff availability and customer updates in one place, so delivery stops depending on someone remembering. AGMM scopes it in a fixed £2,000, 14-day audit and builds it by proposal, connected to the tools you already run.
Or call 0161 543 7189
Two of the papers this work handles. Demonstration with sample documents. In the Audit we draw your real lines.
The problem
Scheduling depends on somebody remembering, so the busier you get the more it costs you.
Booking, availability and keeping customers informed are three jobs that usually end up in one inbox and one person's head. That works until it does not, and it fails at exactly the moment you are busiest.
Scheduling by memory works, right up until the week it matters. The failures cluster exactly where they cost the most: the busiest fortnight, the day somebody is off, the job that was confirmed verbally and never written down. And the damage is rarely the missed booking itself. It is the phone call afterwards, the apology, the customer who now checks up on you, and the hour somebody spends reconstructing what was agreed. Underneath that sits a quieter cost. If nobody can see current availability without asking, then every booking takes two people instead of one, and the person answering is usually the person you would rather have doing the work.
Now picture yours
The same work, three ways.
Pick a line of work, press a stage, then step through the papers it handles. Each step shows the real document, and where a person stays in charge.
Operations Confirmed without the back and forth
Hello, our boiler is due its annual service. Mornings are best for us.
We are in Chorlton.
From a call, an email or the website.
What is booked, who is available and what is still open.
Lead times, working hours, skills and travel, applied automatically.
A new customer, an unusual job, a slot that breaks a travel rule: a person accepts it.
Confirmed, and in the calendar.
Customer service Sent on the rules you set
- BK-3092 moved from Thu 22 Oct to Fri 23 Oct, 8:30
- Reason: engineer called to an emergency
- Customer to be told
A booking is made, moved or confirmed.
Confirmations, reminders and changes, written once.
Sent when the rules say, not when somebody remembers.
Out, and logged. Rules you can stop at any time.
Replies come back to the booking they belong to.
Operations Visible without asking anybody
Every booking in one place.
Double bookings and near misses caught before they happen.
Who is where, and when.
Everyone sees the same week.
- As it runs now
Booking, availability and customer updates in one inbox and one person’s head. It works until the busiest week, which is exactly when it fails.
- Organised
Bookings and availability in one place, visible without asking anybody, with rules that reflect how you actually work.
- Agentified
Routine bookings confirm themselves and updates send on the rules you set. A new customer or an unusual job lands as a request for a person to accept.
Signs you have it
You will recognise some of these.
- Booking is a back-and-forth of emails or calls before anything is confirmed.
- Double bookings happen, or nearly happen often enough to worry about.
- Nobody can see current availability without asking.
- Customers chase you for updates you meant to send.
- The busiest weeks are when bookings get missed, which is when it costs most.
What we build
What does the work include?
Bookings and availability in one place
What is booked, who is available and what is still open, visible without asking anybody.
Customer updates that send themselves
Confirmations, reminders and changes go out on the rules you set, rather than when somebody remembers.
Rules that reflect how you work
Lead times, working hours, skills, travel and the exceptions you make, applied automatically.
What it costs
What does it cost? The audit is £2,000; the build is proposed after it
- The AI Constraint Audit
- £2,00014 days, fixed
- The build
- By proposalPriced against what the audit found
- Ongoing support
- By proposalOnly if you want it
The published price on this page is the diagnostic: £2,000 for the AI Constraint Audit, fourteen days, three sixty-minute working sessions. A scheduling build is proposed after it and priced separately, because the cost of this kind of system follows the rules rather than the screens. Fixed slots against one calendar is a small build. Skills, travel time, several teams and the exceptions you make is a larger one, since every rule interacts with the others. The audit fee is not credited against the build.
What does the £2,000 cover before anything is built?
Four documents that are yours whatever you decide: a business-wide constraint map, an AI opportunity map, an economic case for each option worth considering, and a ranked order for spending. On scheduling the first question is whether an off-the-shelf booking tool would do it, and the audit is where that gets answered with your own availability rules on the table rather than in the abstract. If the answer is buy rather than build, you keep the documents and we have sold you nothing.
The whole ladder, including what a build costs and what we do not bill for, is on what it costs.
How long
How long does it take?
Fourteen days from the first session to the written recommendation. The build runs in stages afterwards, and bookings and availability usually land before the automatic customer updates do, so something is in real use while the rest is still being shaped.
- Day 1First working session
- Day 14Written recommendation, yours to keep
- ThenFirst stage of the build, in real use
- ThenNext stage, only once the first is working
Not in the price
What this does not include
Calendar, messaging and payment licences
Connecting to the calendar, SMS gateway or payment provider you already use is part of the work. Those accounts stay yours, you pay those providers directly, and we take no margin on any of them.
Support and hosting, inside the build price
Reminders that must go out at seven in the morning need somebody watching them. Hosting, monitoring and changes after go-live are quoted as a running cost rather than folded into the build.
Data migration beyond what the audit scoped
Existing bookings, customer records and recurring appointments have to be read before they can be moved. What is in scope is settled during the audit and priced in the proposal.
A guarantee of fewer missed bookings
We will not publish a percentage we cannot source. Before anything is built you agree what you are counting, usually double bookings, no-shows and the time spent confirming by hand, and you keep counting it yourself.
What you can check
What can you check before you believe any of this?
The nearest thing you can inspect today is how we run our own business. One of our knowledge bases holds 4,535 notes and 5.9 million words, and the systems that run on it, from the model fleet to the outreach engines, keep a receipt for every run and are drawn on Inside AGMM. It shows the standard we hold a delivered system to. It says nothing about your bookings and we will not pretend otherwise. What we cannot show you yet is a named scheduling client with a published before and after.
People and machines
Where does a person stay in the loop?
Some bookings should not be confirmed automatically, and deciding which is a business decision rather than a technical one. A new customer, an unusual job, a slot that breaks a travel rule: those can land as a request for a person to accept, while the routine ones confirm themselves. Reminders and updates run on rules you set and can stop. Nothing is cancelled, moved or charged by the system without an explicit rule somebody agreed, because the moment a customer is moved by software with no traceable reason, the phone call you were trying to avoid arrives anyway, and it is a worse one.
- Unusual ones to a personBookingsA new customer, an unusual job, a slot that breaks a travel rule: a person accepts it.
Proof it worked
How do we know it worked?
Count three things now and count them the same way later: how many messages it takes to confirm one booking, how many double bookings or near misses happen in a month, and how much time goes on chasing and confirming by hand. All three come from your own inbox and calendar rather than from an industry figure we would have to source. We do not measure bookings taken, because a busier month inflates it regardless of the software. If the confirmation count has not fallen, the rules were the problem rather than the tooling, and the fix is cheaper than another build.
- Messages it takes to confirm one booking
- Double bookings or near misses in a month
- Time spent chasing and confirming by hand
Same definition both times. If the number has not moved, that is a finding, not a failure.
Known risks
What tends to go wrong on this kind of build?
Three. The first is availability rules that turn out to be preferences, where two people describe the same week differently and the build has to stop until somebody decides. The second is the integration surface: calendars, messaging and payment providers all change their own rules, so a live booking system needs maintenance rather than only a launch. The third is over-automating the front door. Every extra step between an enquiry and a confirmed booking costs you bookings, so the default stays a link that works in a browser with no app and no account.
Fit, stated plainly
What do we need from you?
- Your real availability rules, including the exceptions you make for good customers.
- Access to the calendar and the inbox where booking currently lives.
- The people who take bookings today, including whoever covers when they are away.
- A decision on what happens when two requests collide, before the software has to make it.
Who this is not for
- A business a standard booking tool would fit, where the objection is the monthly fee.
- Availability rules nobody has agreed, where a system would freeze an argument rather than settle it.
- A booking problem that is really a staffing problem.
- A specification already written that needs implementation hands only.
Questions
What do people ask before they start?
- Will it work with our existing calendar and job system?
- Usually yes. Connecting to the calendar and the job system your team already lives in is nearly always better than asking everyone to check a second place. What each of them exposes is checked in the audit, before anything is promised.
- What about jobs that do not fit a standard slot?
- Those are the ones worth designing for. A scheduler that only handles the easy bookings just moves the hard ones back into the inbox.
- What does scheduling software cost to build?
- It follows the rules, not the screens. Fixed slots against one calendar is a small build. Skills, travel time, multiple teams and exceptions you make is a larger one, because every rule interacts with the others. Our guide on what custom software costs explains what to ask anyone quoting you.
- How long does it take to set up?
- We build in stages, so booking and availability usually land before the automatic customer updates do. Something is in real use early rather than everything arriving at once.
- Do our customers need an app or an account?
- Not unless there is a reason. Anything that adds a step between an enquiry and a confirmed booking tends to cost you bookings, so the default is a link that works in a browser.
- Should we just buy an off-the-shelf booking tool?
- If one fits, yes, and we will tell you so. Standard tools handle standard bookings well and cost far less than a build. It stops being the right answer when your availability rules are the awkward part, because that is exactly what those tools assume away.
- What does a booking system cost to run each year?
- Hosting, the messages you send, and the changes a live system needs are running costs, and we quote them as running costs rather than folding them into a build price. Ask anyone quoting you what year two looks like. A figure covering only the build is incomplete rather than cheap.
- What happens when two customers want the same slot?
- That rule is a business decision and it is made before anything is built: first confirmed wins, a provisional hold with an expiry, or a named person who arbitrates. A scheduler that leaves the collision unresolved has simply moved the argument back into the inbox.
Free to read first
Would you rather work it out yourself?
Everything below is free, with no account and no paywall. If it solves the problem without us, that is a good outcome.
Tell us where the business is getting stuck.
A short call to map the constraint and give you a clear next step. That might be software, automation, training or no build at all.
- Before day 1Fit callFree, 30 minutes
- Day 01Map the businessConstraints and weak points
- Day 07Price the opportunitiesWhat could save or earn
- Day 14Rank the investmentFour outputs you keep
Then the proposal. The fuller audit is always part of it.