Setting up from your website

Most of what this product needs to know about your business is already written on your own website. Rather than asking you to retype it, you can give us the address and we will read it, look for your Google listing, and show you one screen of everything we worked out — for you to correct before any of it is saved.

Choose how you want to start

The first screen after you sign up offers three ways in.

I have a website. Type your address — riveraplumbing.com is enough, you do not need the https://. We read your homepage and the handful of pages behind it that look like they describe your services.

I’ll describe it. A sentence or two about what you do, for a business that works from a phone and a social page rather than a website. It is less to go on, so expect a shorter list, and the screen will tell you when that happens.

Answer the questions myself. The setup questions, exactly as they have always been. One click, and nothing is fetched. If you have no website, or you would rather type it yourself, this is not a lesser path — see Setting up and hiding what you do not use.

Reading a website is part of the Professional plan. On Starter the first screen explains what it would have done and takes you to the questions; nothing is fetched and nothing is charged.

Read what we found before anything is saved

Reading takes a few seconds, and the screen tells you what it is doing while it works.

What comes back is one card. Nothing on it has been saved — not a job type, not a setting, not your logo. It lists:

• the kinds of work you do, in your words
• what your business does, matched against our categories
• the towns you say you work in
• your opening hours, if we found your Google listing
• your logo, shown at the size it will actually appear
• which parts of the product you will need

Every line says where it came from — the page it was read from and the words that produced it. We think you do water heater replacement, because your services page says “water heater replacement & repair” is something you can settle in a second. That is deliberate: you are checking evidence, not taking our word for it.

Change anything that is close and remove anything that is wrong

Nothing on the card is take-it-or-leave-it.

Untick anything that is not you and it is not saved. The kinds of work are text boxes, not labels — if we read Water Heater Replacement & Repair off your services page and you call it Water heaters, type that instead. What you type is what gets saved, because these are the names every one of your margin reports will be grouped by for years.

Opening hours are editable as a week: change a day’s times, or untick a day to mark it closed.

When you are happy, Use this and carry on saves it and takes you into the setup questions with your answers already filled in. You still walk through them and can change any of them. A confirmed card is a filled-in form, not a finished setup.

Understand what “verified” means on the card

We do not guess at your Google listing. We read your business name off your own site, ask Google for it, and then check that the website Google holds for that listing comes back to the same domain you gave us. Only then do we use it.

Anything that came from a confirmed listing is marked Verified. That is a stronger claim than something read off a page, because it is structured information you maintain yourself — your registered name, your phone, your address and your hours.

If we cannot confirm a listing, there is no listing section at all. We would rather show you nothing than show you a business with a similar name and let you assume it is yours.

Finding your listing needs the Maps part of the Professional plan. Without it the rest of the card is unchanged — we read your website and skip the listing, and the towns are ones you add yourself afterwards.

Fix a phone number your website and Google disagree about

This is the part most owners have never been told, and it is worth reading.

If your website says one phone number and your Google listing says another — or the name or the address differ — we show you both and ask which is right. Search engines rank local businesses partly on those matching, so a number that is out of date in one of the two places is quietly costing you.

We do not pre-select either one, because you know which is current and we do not. Pick it and we use it. Then it is worth going and fixing whichever of the two is wrong, wherever it lives.

Use the logo from your site

If your site has a usable logo, it is shown on the card at the size it will actually appear on your quotes and invoices — so you can see whether it is your logo or a small square icon before you accept it.

Accept it and your browser uploads it the same way the logo form does. Skip it and nothing is uploaded. A site with nothing usable proposes no logo rather than something that happens to be an image on the page. You can always add or replace it later under Settings → Organization → Business Details.

Know what is added and what is replaced

Applying a card adds; it does not tidy up after itself.

• Kinds of work are created. Nothing you already have is renamed or removed, and a kind of work you already have is not offered again.
• Categories and service areas are added to what you have. Anything you added by hand stays.
• Your business name, phone and address are filled in where we established them.
• Opening hours are the exception. They are a whole week, and a week cannot be merged with a week — so accepting them replaces what you have. If you have already set your hours, the box comes unticked and the screen says so.

Each part is saved separately, so if one is refused the rest still go in. When that happens you get a short list naming exactly what was saved and what was not, rather than a general apology — every one of those settings has its own page under Settings, and you can finish it there.

See what a website could not tell us

Reading a website answers what the website says, and there are four things no website states.

Your labor rate, because it is nobody’s business but yours. Whether you take card payments here. Whether you do the work yourself or run the office. And where you work, precisely enough to be booked against — a site says “serving the greater Austin area”, which is not a place.

So the last screen of setup names what is still outstanding, and says what leaving each one costs rather than only what it is. Every margin figure in the product is revenue minus cost, and your time is most of the cost — without a rate, every job’s profit is a guess. Each one links straight to where it is fixed.

None of it is a gate. A business with every one of those outstanding works exactly the same as one with none of them. The list is a prompt, and if you have finished all of it the screen says so rather than showing you an empty box.

It is the same list your dashboard shows under Get Started, read from the same place, so the two can never tell you different things about whether you are set up. The dashboard version is the short one; Why these matter on it brings you back to this screen for the reasons.

Know why we ask where you work

This is the one on that list most often left undone, and it costs the most quietly.

A business with no service area is left out of the contractor directory entirely — not ranked lower, not listed. However good your public page is, a customer searching your town will not see you until you have said you work there. One town is enough.

If we found and confirmed your Google listing, this is usually filled in already from the areas it lists. If not, it is on Settings → Organization → Business Details, beside your address.

Run it again later

You can come back to this from setup at any time. A second run shows you what is new — anything you already have is left off the card rather than lined up for you to re-confirm.

That makes it worth re-running after you have redone your website, or added a service, rather than a thing you only ever do once.

Know who can run it

Setting the business up is the owner’s. It decides what the business is and which parts of the product it uses, so a Manager opening the setup screen is told that and offered the questions instead.