Wattle

What Wattle is

Software for trades and contractors: taking bookings, sending somebody out, then invoicing. The job runs from quotation and online booking through dispatching, taking payment and staying in touch with the customer.

Dispatch automation is the named capability. Rather than deciding by hand who goes where, the system proposes times and assigns crews, with the maker stating that whoever runs the business keeps oversight. Note immediately that its own address is not published — it returns a hosting platform's page saying nothing is configured there — so this comes from indexed pages and directory listings rather than from anything working.

What you can do with it

Customers pick their own appointment online, which for a small trade removes the round of calls that eats the day.

Quoting, job records, payments and customer messages all sit together, so nothing is split between a handset, a paper diary and a spreadsheet. Matching work to people follows rules the software works out, proposing a name and a time, because deciding that by hand each morning is slow and often wrong. Trying it is possible for a month. Charges scale with how many users and technicians, though those figures appear only on directory entries rather than anywhere accessible, and one quote could not be confirmed.

Who it is for

One-person trades — plumbing, electrical work, cleaning, gardening and comparable work — arranging jobs at present by telephone and paper.

Crews of two or three suit what it charges and what dispatch does, since that only counts where several people need assigning instead of one person planning their own hours.

Businesses already running scheduling inside a larger system have little reason to change. The gain belongs to operators whose whole operation currently lives in a van, a telephone and a notebook.

What to watch out for

Start from the fact that its domain shows nothing at all. Something presented for assessment at an address displaying a holding page is either moving, abandoned, or distributed elsewhere, and no outsider can tell which. Treat anything read second-hand as unverified.

Automated dispatch decides which person does which job, and where technicians are paid per job, per hour or by bonus that allocation affects earnings. Insisting a human stays in charge is how it should be built and keeps accountability where it belongs, so long as the proposal can be justified rather than simply shown. Stored against each job are the client's name, where they live, their number, how to enter the property, and how they pay, plus a record of work at their property — a complete picture of a small business's customer base, so handling terms, retention and what happens on leaving belong established before it becomes the only copy. Taking payment inside it draws the platform into how money moves, and duties concerning card details then fall jointly on the business and on whoever processes them. Treat amounts found elsewhere with suspicion: they come from directory entries, while the seller's own page is unreachable and whatever governs the trial sits somewhere nobody can open.