BOOTMARK Help Center

Create an account with email and password or with Google, then complete the two-step registration: your company basics (name, business type, currency, address) and the service categories you offer. You get a unique web address, you become the Owner, and your workspace is live immediately.

Yes. Registration activates your workspace immediately on the Free plan — there is no review queue. You land on your dashboard with a setup checklist that walks you through your first client, service, crew member and estimate.

Follow the setup checklist on the dashboard in order: add a client, build two or three catalog services, invite one crew member, then send a real estimate. That single pass exercises the whole pipeline and leaves you with something usable rather than a half-configured account.

Yes. It is an installable progressive web app — add it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app, including push notifications and offline support for crew screens. Crew Mobile is a purpose-built phone view of just the jobs assigned to you.

Crew screens keep working. Actions and GPS pings queue on the device and sync automatically when the connection returns, so a basement or a rural site does not cost you the record of the work.

On the Employees page choose Add Employee and either invite an existing user or create a new login — credentials are emailed. Then pick a role (owner, admin, manager, staff, crew) and fine-tune access area by area. Permission changes take effect live, without the person re-logging in.

No. Crew Mobile only lists jobs assigned to that person, and the server enforces it — a crew member cannot open or edit somebody else's work order even by guessing the address.

Enrol an authenticator app from your account settings. Some sensitive actions then require a fresh second-factor check even inside a valid session, and replacing an existing second factor also requires that check, so nobody can quietly swap it out.

Only an owner, admin or manager. A crew member marking a job done moves it to pending approval rather than completed, and the completion side-effects — inventory deduction, cost roll-up, auto-invoice — only fire when an approver finalises it.

On the Clients page choose New Client and enter the name (the only required field) plus optional company, email, phone, address, tags and notes. To move an existing list across, use the CSV import: map your columns to BOOTMARK fields and review before committing.

Make sure the client has an email on file, then choose Send Invitation from the client list or the client record. They receive a link to set their own password. You can re-send an invitation that was missed, or remove portal access without deleting the client.

See balances and activity, view and download invoices and pay online, review and accept estimates, sign contracts, book services, raise service requests, track a crew on its way, message you in real time, and access documents you have shared.

It arrives with the service type, description, preferred date and priority, appears in your queue and raises a notification. Accept it to turn it into a work order or an estimate, and the customer keeps seeing the same thread.

It is a real-time two-way chat. Client Communications groups every conversation into one inbox on your side, and the client sees the same thread in their portal — so nothing depends on somebody remembering to forward an email.

Open Estimates, choose New Estimate, pick the client, and add line items from your catalog or as one-offs. Send it by email or link. Once the client accepts, convert it in one click into an invoice, a work order or a contract — no re-keying.

Yes. Add Good, Better and Best tiers to an estimate and the customer picks their own scope. The tier they select becomes the estimate's line items and totals, so everything downstream — invoice, job, contract — reflects what they actually chose.

Because an optional reason field is one nobody fills in, and then why do we lose stops being answerable. The reason comes from a closed list so the answers can actually be counted in the win/loss report.

Your BOOTMARK Connect listing, your public booking page, service requests from the client portal, or entered by hand on the Leads page. All of them land in the same pipeline so nothing is tracked in a second place.

A work order starts as a draft or at your workflow's first stage, gets scheduled and assigned, then moves through on the way, in progress and pending approval to completed. The transitions are a defined state machine, so invalid jumps are refused and the history stays truthful.

On the Scheduling calendar turn on Crew View to get one column per crew member, then drag the job to a different person. Optimize Route reorders a day of stops to cut driving; distances are estimated as road miles rather than straight lines, so the numbers match what the van will actually do.

It warns you before the booking is created and asks you to confirm if you genuinely mean to overlap — deliberate double-booking is sometimes correct, so it is a check rather than a block.

When the job status changes to On The Way, the customer can follow the technician on a live map with distance and an estimated arrival time, shown in miles. Whether that notification is sent is controlled in Dispatch Settings.

Yes. Recurring Jobs take a cadence — weekly mowing, quarterly maintenance — and materialise the scheduled work orders for you on a daily run, so a maintenance contract does not depend on someone remembering.

Two ways. Crew clocking in and out against the job records real hours, or an admin enters hours by hand. Either way, hours become cost only if the employee has an hourly rate on their record — without it, labour cost is zero on every job.

The timer heartbeats while the crew member works. If the phone dies or the app closes, a sweep auto-closes the entry at the last heartbeat rather than at the moment somebody noticed, so the recorded end time is the last time they were genuinely working.

Completion captures a checklist, before-and-after photos, materials used and the customer's signature on the phone, all stored as the job's completion record. Signed documents also carry a verification link so anyone holding the PDF can confirm it is genuine.

Include a secure payment link when you send the invoice, or share the link yourself. Payment runs through Authorize.net's hosted secure form. The invoice becomes Paid only when the balance actually clears — a partial payment reduces the balance and leaves it open.

Authorize.net, using their hosted secure form so card numbers never touch BOOTMARK. Each business connects its own merchant account in Account Settings under Payments with an API Login ID, Transaction Key and Signature Key, so money goes straight to you.

Yes. Record a manual payment (cash, check or ACH) against an invoice with a specific amount and date. Deposits and partial payments are supported, and the balance updates as each one lands.

Tax is applied per line item and per jurisdiction rather than as one flat rate on the total, so a job that mixes taxable and non-taxable work — or crosses a rate boundary — bills correctly.

Yes. Progress billing bills a cumulative percentage of the revised contract value, with retainage held back and released at the end. Billed-to-date is derived from the invoices themselves, so the figure cannot drift from reality.

Yes — merge them into the oldest invoice. Merging refuses if any of them already has a recorded payment, and the source invoices' revenue is reversed so nothing is counted twice.

If you opt in. The dunning schedule emails reminders on a cadence you set, backed by an ageing report. It is off by default so nobody is surprised by mail going to their customers.

Open the contract and choose Send Email or Generate Link — a secure, time-limited signing link. The signer needs no account. When every required party has signed, the contract becomes executed, its content locks, and an audit certificate recording the signing is appended to the PDF.

Yes. The signing page has a negotiation and feedback section, so a client can ask for a change rather than simply not signing and leaving you guessing.

Before you send, it reads the draft and flags unusual or one-sided terms so you notice them while you can still change them. It is an extra reader, not a substitute for legal advice.

Raise a change order. It goes draft, pending, approved — with approval as a separate permission from editing, so nobody approves their own amendment. On approval the amount flows into the contract's revised value and the job's cost exactly once, and progress billing bills against the revised value.

A blank form is built from scratch with the drag-and-drop palette. A Smart PDF Form starts from a PDF you already use — upload it and BOOTMARK detects its fields so the paper form your customers already recognise becomes fillable and reportable.

Open a form and choose Submissions to see each entry field by field, newest first, with a table view for scanning. Everything exports to CSV, and form workflows can notify people or fire a webhook the moment a submission arrives.

Materials are the consumables crews use on jobs; products are what you sell. Both carry cost, price and stock with low-stock alerts. Materials recorded on a work order deduct from stock when the job is approved as complete, and a purchase order tops stock back up when it is received.

Yes. Locations cover warehouses, yards and vehicles, and Stock Transfers move inventory between them, so van stock is a real number rather than a guess.

Business Reports cover sales summary, work orders, client activity, inventory, revenue trends and service distribution. Analytics adds trends and forecasts. Job costing rolls material, labour and approved change orders into a per-job margin, and everything exports to CSV or Excel.

The audit log records who did what and when, with before-and-after values on meaningful changes. Filter by user, record type and date to reconstruct a sequence of events.

Automations are general when-this-then-that rules across operations, finance and clients. Job Workflows define the stages a work order moves through for a particular kind of job — so a roof replacement and a service call do not have to share the same three statuses.

Answer questions about how BOOTMARK works, query your own workspace data within what your role may see, and draft records from a description — always showing you exactly what will be saved before anything is written.

Yes. The AI Control Center has per-feature toggles and a kill switch that stops all AI immediately, enforced centrally rather than page by page. It also shows token spend per feature so you can see what AI is costing.

Connect is a public marketplace where customers search local providers by category and location, view profiles and request or book work. Bookings arrive in Connect Bookings and flow into your normal pipeline. Your listing needs a category before it can be published.

They are verified against completed bookings, so a rating reflects work that was actually done through the platform rather than anonymous opinion.

There is a structured dispute flow with escrow states, giving the customer and the provider a defined path and a record, instead of an argument over email.

Yes. Every core module — clients, work orders, estimates, invoices, contracts, scheduling, inventory and more — is available over a REST API at /api/v1/<your-workspace>/. Issue a scoped key from Settings, then Developers & API.

A key carries scopes like invoices:read or work-orders:write, and only the ticked scopes are reachable — anything else returns a clear insufficient-scope error. A key also only ever works against its own workspace, and endpoints outside the documented public API are not reachable with a key at all.

You issue a new one. BOOTMARK stores only a one-way hash of the key, so it genuinely cannot be shown again. Revoking a key stops it working on the very next request.

Each delivery carries a signature header of the form t=<timestamp>,v1=<hmac>. Compute HMAC-SHA256 of timestamp.rawBody using your endpoint's signing secret and compare. Reject anything older than five minutes so a captured request cannot be replayed later.

BOOTMARK retries up to four times with backoff. A 4xx (other than 429) is treated as a deliberate rejection and is not retried. After fifteen consecutive failures the endpoint is disabled and the reason is shown on the Webhooks tab, so we stop hammering a dead URL.

Yes — 300 requests per minute per key. Exceeding it returns a 429 with a retry hint rather than failing silently. Key traffic is metered per key rather than per IP, so a server-to-server integration is not throttled by sharing an address.

Open App Customization (owner or admin rights, or the customization permission, on the Business Suite plan). Upload your logo, set your brand colours and theme, and they apply across the app, the client portal and every generated PDF.

In Account Settings enter your SMTP host, port, username and an app-specific password from your mail provider, then send a test. Until you do, mail goes out from the platform default sender.

Free covers a small operation with limited monthly jobs, one crew member and basic analytics. Journal documents work — jobs, time, GPS, forms, contracts and inventory. Pro adds scheduling, employees, estimates, the lead pipeline, online booking and client messaging. Business Suite runs the whole company, adding invoicing, payments, the client portal, e-signatures, automations, advanced reporting, branding and AI.

You are warned as you approach it rather than cut off without notice. Each plan caps jobs, crew, clients, contracts and storage; upgrading raises them immediately, and a platform admin can raise one specific limit for one customer without changing the tier.

Yes. An owner or admin can export the workspace's data at any time. Secrets — passwords, keys, tokens — are redacted from the export by design.

Only if you turn them on. Automated work-order emails and the on-the-way notification are off by default and controlled in Dispatch Settings, so nobody accidentally mails their whole customer list on day one.