Next month's diary, filled by last year's customers.

Where the dates come from

Every job you do records what was done to which vehicle on which day. From that, the workspace knows when the next service is due, when the annual test falls, and when the tyres fitted last year are a year old. For vehicles looked up by registration, the test due date comes from the lookup where your country provides it.

You do not type any of this in. Doing jobs is what builds the reminder list, which is why creating real jobs during the trial matters: each one is a customer who will be reminded next year.

Open Reminders and switch on the milestones you want

In Setup, choose Reminders. The panel lists the milestones the workspace can track: annual test due, service due, tyres fitted a year ago, seasonal tyre change where that applies in your market, and a brake or battery check interval if you want one. Switch on the ones that suit your business.

For each one, set how far ahead the reminder goes. Four weeks before a test due date is typical, two weeks for a service, and a month for tyres. The reminder arrives early enough to book and late enough to be relevant.

Choose the channel and the wording

Reminders go by email, by text, or both. Text gets read; email carries more detail. Many workshops send a text with a booking link and an email a few days later if the customer has not booked. Set that order in the panel.

• The wording is a short template with the vehicle and the date filled in. Edit it to sound like you; two sentences is plenty.
• Every reminder carries a booking link that opens your storefront with the vehicle already selected.
• A customer who books is not reminded again for that milestone. A customer who does not is reminded once more, then left alone.

Bring in customers you already have

If you have a list of customers and vehicles from a previous system or a spreadsheet, import it from the Customers tab. Registration, name and mobile number are enough. The workspace looks up each vehicle, finds the test due date where it can, and adds the vehicle to the reminder register from the first import.

A workshop with five hundred vehicles on file has five hundred reminders waiting to go out over the next year, before a single new customer walks in.

Respect the customer's choice

Every text and email carries a way to stop. A customer who opts out is marked on their record and is not reminded again, for any milestone, until they ask. A bounced email or a dead number is marked too, so you can see which records need a fresh number next time the customer is in.

The panel shows the register: who is due, what was sent, who booked. It is the quietest report in the workspace and one of the most valuable.

Time the reminders around your diary

A reminder that lands when you have no slots is a customer sent to someone else. The reminder panel reads your schedule, so you can choose to send tyre and service reminders only when the next fortnight has space, and to hold them back for a few days when the diary is already full.

Seasonal reminders, where your market changes tyres twice a year, can be pinned to the weeks you choose rather than the date the tyres were fitted, so the whole customer list is invited in the fortnight before the rush rather than on the day of it. For a mobile fitter, reminders can be grouped by area, so customers in the same part of town are invited in the same week and the van spends less of the day driving between them.

None of this needs attention once set. It is a few switches in the panel that shape when the trickle arrives.

What to expect

Reminders do not produce a rush. They produce a steady trickle of bookings from people who were going to need the work anyway and would otherwise have gone wherever was nearest on the day. Over a year that trickle is a meaningful share of the diary, and it costs nothing beyond the texts.

Switch them on in the trial, import what you have, and let them run. The first reminder goes out on its own on the day it is due.