More than forty changes went live in October. Most of them started as someone telling us something did not work the way they expected, which is the useful half of running a small software company: the list below is not a roadmap, it is a month of answers.
Here is what actually changed, and who it matters to.
The AI receptionist learned your business
Eleven of the month's changes were to the phone answering service, and together they move it from a receptionist that can take a booking to one that knows what you sell.
It now answers questions about your packages from the packages you actually sell, and can text the caller a link to buy one. A caller who already holds a package can have one of their prepaid lessons used for the booking, once they say yes on the call, and a cancelled lesson goes back on their balance. It also knows the suburbs you cover and which of your services are paid for before the booking is held, so it stops promising work you do not do in places you do not go.
Two smaller ones matter more than they sound:
Call recording is now your choice. There is a Record calls switch for owners and admins, off to begin with, on lines using the premium voice. When it is on, callers are told the call is recorded, and an owner or admin can play, download or delete each recording from the call's page for seven days.
You can get your number during the trial. Picking a number used to mean waiting for us to ask you for a card. Now you pay the number's first month on the Numbers page as you choose it, and it is yours straight away.
The AI receptionist is a paid add-on, and call recording needs the premium voice.
Booking requests finally have a home
If someone asked for a booking without naming a time, that request used to either show a made-up time on your calendar or hide under Past. Both were wrong, and both lost work.
Every booking still waiting on you now sits under Waiting for you at the top of Bookings, oldest first. You pick a time before you accept, so nothing fictional ever lands on the calendar.
Alongside that, customers can now do more without ringing you:
- When a booking takes a card payment up front, the card step offers Change time and a cancel button. Either one stops the card payment first, then releases the held time and takes them back to fresh times with what they typed still filled in.
- Editing a booking lets you switch it to a different service, and the name, length and price follow unless you change them. Where a lesson is paid from a prepaid package, making it longer draws the extra lessons from the package and making it shorter puts them back.
- A booking that gets rescheduled now takes its job with it, and a return visit confirms itself to the customer.
OneBookPlus runs quoting, invoicing, bookings, jobs and GST-ready accounting in one Australian app. See what that looks like for tradies.
Discount codes
New in October, and the one most people had asked for by name: discount codes on your booking page.
A code can take a percentage or a dollar amount off, run between a first and last day, cap how many times it can be used in total or per customer, and apply only to the services you choose. Customers enter it on your booking page or on the booking form on your own website and see the new price before they commit.
Discount codes are on Starter and higher.
Parts, products and what you charge for them
Four changes for anyone who puts parts on a job.
Bulk editing. Tick products on the list to give them all one category, status or weight, or to put them on or off your online shop. For anything that differs per product, such as every weight or every price, download your products as a spreadsheet, edit the column and upload it back.
Saved parts lists. A minor service is the same oil filter, air filter, oil and sump washer every time, and each one used to be a separate hunt through the parts list. Save that list under its own code, pick it on a job, and every part goes on as its own line, priced and counted exactly as if you had picked each one.
Cost-based pricing. Set the margin you want by what a part costs you: cheap parts at one percentage, dearer parts at another, in as many steps as you need. A part with a cost but no margin of its own is then priced off those steps when it goes on a job, instead of going on at exactly what you paid.
Consumables and disposal. Rags, brake clean, degreaser and oil and tyre disposal can now go on by themselves: a flat amount per invoice, a percentage of the labour or a percentage of the whole job, with a cap and a minimum, and the wording your customer reads is yours. It lands as its own line on the invoice you raise from a job.
The iPhone app caught up with the office
Eight of the month's changes were to the iPhone app, and the release carrying most of them reached the App Store on 1 November as version 1.11.19. If your phone has not updated itself yet, it is worth doing.
Rescheduling a booking from the phone now moves it the way the office does. Reschedule used to open the edit screen and change the time, and that was all it did: nobody was told, nothing checked whether the new time was already taken, a connected calendar kept the old time, and the job the booking was made for stayed on its old day. It now checks the new time is free and says what is in the way if it is not, moves the job with the booking, updates a connected calendar, and tells the customer when that is what you have chosen. Everybody on a group booking moves together.
Add visit, while you are still standing there. A job that is booked in, under way or on hold now offers Add visit, so the trip back gets booked before you leave instead of remembered later.
The forms your office wrote open on the job screen. A handover, a safety check, a brake check, whatever your office has written, including the form tied to the service you are there for. Tick, type and sign off, and every answer saves on its own, so a form half filled in is still half filled in after the phone locks.
Job photos go up in batches. Twenty five at a time from your gallery, each one made smaller to fit before it uploads. If one photo cannot be prepared, the rest still go up instead of the batch stopping there.
Three smaller ones:
- You can pick the customer's car when you take a booking, with its odometer reading at drop off. Only that customer's cars are listed.
- The jobs list has an On hold heading, so a job you put on hold has somewhere to be found, and work you marked as no charge is filed under No charge instead of sitting under Completed badged Done.
- A booking request you answered with a quote now says what the quote did, with a row that opens it, instead of reading as Cancelled.
Earlier in the month: tapping a running timer on your lock screen opens the job on the first tap instead of stopping at a loading error, there is a Next Job widget for your Home Screen, and the app tells you when a newer version is in the App Store.
A few things that were quietly wrong
Not everything in a month is new. Some of it is us finding something that had been behaving badly for a while, and these three are worth naming because each one was costing somebody something.
Supplier credits were not reaching the books. A credit from a supplier brought the bill's balance down and what you owed that supplier down, and stopped there. Payables in the ledger stayed high by the amount of every credit ever entered, and the GST claimed on returned parts stayed claimed. A credit now writes the entry properly, dated to the month on the credit note.
STOP now actually stops. When a customer replies STOP to your receptionist number, it is recorded, and every text your business sends checks it first: reminders, campaigns, review requests, on-the-way texts and confirmations. Texting START turns them back on.
Jobs-only logins no longer show customer contact details. Staff whose login shows only their own jobs could still see the customer's phone number and email. An owner can switch that off under Settings, Team, and Call, Text and Email come off those job screens.
A new app: Guest Experience Suite
For anyone running accommodation, guest messages can now send themselves. Set them once and every confirmed stay gets a message a week out, before arrival, on arrival day and after checkout, by email, text or both, in your local time. Each one carries your arrival guide with check-in time, address, parking, wifi and house rules, and every message with a guest sits in one conversation instead of scattered across threads.
Guest Experience Suite is a separate app.
Also in October
- A paid lesson that is cancelled now becomes a lesson credit on the learner's balance, used automatically on their next booking of that kind. Part of the Driving School Suite, Music School Suite and Class Pack Tracker.
- Your own custom fields, a scope of works or a reference, can now go on quotes as well as invoices and sales orders, and you choose which documents they appear on.
- A learner opening their own booking link is no longer asked who they are.
- How-to videos, filmed in the app, now sit inside the pages they explain.
- Your service sheet opens itself on the jobs it belongs to, and stays off the rest. Tick which services a checklist belongs to, and a booking for one of them arrives with that sheet already started, so a half hour brake check no longer carries the full service sheet.
- Finished work you decided not to charge for leaves the Done list. A ten minute favour, a warranty return or a quick second look: choose Nothing to invoice and it comes out of the Done count and the urgent list, and sits under its own No charge heading.
- You can write your own post-job check-in. The message that goes to a customer the day after you finish a job was written for you every time. Write it yourself in AI Companion settings, drop in the customer's first name, the job and the day you finished, and read it back exactly as your customer will get it.
- Review automation now says which wording is actually going out. A review text in your own words needs your own sender name approved first, and until it is we send our standard wording. That was in the small print and nowhere else, so a saved template could sit on the page looking correct while customers received different words.
- Salon Suite: your services sit on one Services page, each with a price per stylist level and the stylists who do it, and the book again reminder is set on the service and goes out after each visit. The booking form and the AI Receptionist now charge the stylist's price.
- Your booking page sits better on a phone. A compact header, your other booking pages as one row of pills, and the calendar layout drawing the same board a desktop shows. The job request, call back and table forms now make a photo smaller in the browser first, so a phone photo of 3 to 12MB goes up instead of being refused.
The full list, and how to get something on it
Everything above, with the detail, is on the changelog. It is written in plain language on purpose: if a change does not make sense to the person it affects, it is not finished.
Most of what shipped in October exists because somebody said so. If something in your day takes more taps than it should, or does something you did not expect, tell us. That is genuinely how this list gets written.