The short answer
Your own app pays off as soon as your business has to juggle several appointments, several people and several customers every day. At that point, the back and forth between chat, spreadsheet and phone costs more time than you’d think. An app replaces it with one place where everyone can see what needs doing.
For a business with two appointments a week, on the other hand, it’s too much. A calendar and a good contact form will do.
Five signs it’s time
- Your team asks the same questions every morning. Who’s going where, who has the key, what needs doing? The answers are scattered across messages.
- Proof is missing. A customer asks when the last cleaning or service took place, and you’re searching for photos on three phones.
- Hours are filled in at night. From memory, on scraps of paper or not at all.
- Invoices are created twice. First the job is in the calendar, then it’s typed out again for the invoice.
- Customers call to find out where things stand. Every one of those calls interrupts someone at work.
If two or more of these apply, an app usually pays for itself sooner than expected.
What a good business app should be able to do
A business app usually consists of three connected parts:
- An office view or dashboard for the owner and the office: plan jobs, manage customers and properties, see what’s done and what can be invoiced. Which figures belong there is covered in Dashboard for small businesses.
- A team app for the phone: the day at a glance, address with navigation, checklist, photos, working time per job. Why it works better than a group chat is explained in Team app instead of a WhatsApp group.
- A customer portal, if your customers have regular appointments: next appointment, proof of work, files and messages to your office. More on this in Customer portal for businesses.
Not every business needs all three. What matters is that everything runs on the same data. When someone in the team ticks off a checklist, the office sees it straight away, and the completed job becomes an invoice with one click.
How it all fits together – office view, team app and customer portal – is shown on our Apps page.
Off-the-shelf software or your own app?
There are plenty of ready-made programs for job planning. They’re quick to set up and a good choice for many businesses. Your own app is worth it if
- your processes don’t fit the mould of the standard solution,
- you’d like to show your customers a portal with your name on it rather than a software vendor’s,
- you want to connect programs you already use, such as your invoicing software or your website,
- and you don’t want to pay for every feature you don’t need.
Do you need an app store?
No. Modern apps run in the browser and can be added to your phone’s home screen like any other app, on iPhone and Android alike. Push notifications work this way too. That saves the review by Apple and Google and makes updates simpler: a change reaches everyone at once.
What does your own app cost?
That depends on which features you need and which programs should be connected. With us, you pay for the setup once. If you wish, we take care of running it, updates and backups for a monthly price. Both are set out in your quote.
Our apps are built on features that are already in everyday use at other businesses. The database sits on servers in Frankfurt, each person only sees what belongs to their role, and everything is backed up once a week.
How to find out whether it suits you
Write down a normal working day: who finds out what, when and how? Where is something entered twice, where does something get lost? With this list, any conversation about an app becomes concrete. Feel free to bring it to your free intro call, and we’ll tell you honestly whether your own app is worth it for you or whether a simpler solution will do.