Changelog

A record of notable changes to DetailByte. Newest first. Updates are applied to your instance for you: there is nothing to download or upgrade.

v6.21.0 — 2026-08-23

Pause a job that spans more than one day

Not every job finishes in one sitting. If a car is started one afternoon and the team goes home before it's done, Pause it: then Resume when work starts again tomorrow. The Job Tracker's clock stops completely while paused rather than quietly counting the overnight gap, so recorded duration, labour cost and every figure downstream of it reflect hours actually worked, not the calendar time the job happened to span. See Job Tracker.

v6.20.0 — 2026-08-23

Payroll & Commission Calculator

A weekly ledger for staff paid a base hourly rate plus a commission percentage that varies by service: 15% on a ceramic coat, 10% on a basic valet, for instance. Every job a worker completed that week is included automatically, with a checkbox to exclude any specific one, and totals base pay, commission and an estimated tax set-aside into a net figure per person. Export as CSV or PDF. Deliberately built and labelled as a calculator, not a payslip or a tax filing: real PAYE/NI stays with your accountant. Concours. See Payroll.

v6.19.0 — 2026-08-22

Advanced Reporting, and a live Job Time & Labor Profit Tracker

Advanced Reporting: real net profit for any date range (revenue minus material cost, overhead and payroll), overall and broken down by service, with CSV/PDF export. A new Expenses screen records overhead (rent, insurance, software) that never shows up against one specific job, spread fairly across the period it applies to.
Job Time & Labor Profit Tracker: while a job is in progress, watch net profit per hour update live: add an assistant's hourly rate, log a chemical or parts expense as it happens, coloured against your target rate. Feeds Advanced Reporting automatically once the job completes: nothing to re-enter. Both Concours. See Reporting, Job Tracker & Payroll.
The Activity Log was also overhauled to record real business events (bookings created and cancelled, invoices sent and paid, quotes accepted and declined, customer changes) rather than sitting mostly empty.

v6.18.14 — 2026-08-21

A real role system: Owner, Administrator and Worker

Staff accounts now have three tiers instead of two. Owner is your own account: full access to everything, exactly one per business, and it can never be switched off or have its role changed. Administrator is new: day-to-day operations (bookings, customers, worker accounts) without Settings or Licence access, for someone helping run things who shouldn't be able to change your billing or branding. Worker is unchanged.
Existing installs are unaffected: every current admin account was automatically promoted to owner, keeping exactly the access it already had. The seat allowance on your plan is unchanged too; owner and administrator logins share the same pool your plan already includes.
The Accounts screen was rebuilt to match the rest of the panel, and several small icon and mobile-layout polish fixes landed alongside it.

v6.18.0 — 2026-08-19

Vehicle condition reports, and stock & dilution tracking

Vehicle intake & condition reports: pin a car's existing damage on a real diagram before you touch it, photograph it, and it's sent to the customer and locked the moment the job starts. A clean report ("I looked and found nothing") is recorded too; it's stronger evidence than no report at all. Kept for a year by default, well past a job package's own photo retention, and stored completely separately so routine clean-up never touches it. On every plan, including Shine.
Stock & dilution: a free-standing dilution calculator on every plan (try the public version), and on Finish and Concours, real stock tracking: tick which chemicals a service uses, and finishing a job deducts the right amount automatically. Concours adds per-job material cost, so you can see what a specific job cost in product, not just a monthly average.
Several rounds of refinement followed real-world testing over the following days: diagram accuracy across different vehicle body styles, a full redesign of the dilution calculator's layout, and the usage matrix restructured from a grid into a per-service checklist that's actually quick to fill in.

v6.17.16 — 2026-08-17

New look

The brand palette moved from red to blue across the whole product: the admin panel, the customer portal, and every email.

v6.17.0 — 2026-08-16

Managed SMS is now pay-per-text

The old managed SMS bundle (a fixed monthly fee for a set number of texts) is gone. You're now billed for what you actually send, at a simple per-message rate: no monthly allowance to run out of, and nothing stops sending automatically if a busy month runs over. See Pricing for the current rate.
If you'd rather not use managed SMS at all, sending through your own VoodooSMS or Twilio account is unaffected and remains free of any DetailByte charge.

v6.15.0 — 2026-08-12

Stripe card payments, and free payment methods on every plan

Stripe is now a real, working payment option. A customer clicks Pay by card on their booking page, pays on Stripe's own secure page, and the invoice marks itself paid automatically the moment Stripe confirms it. Card details never touch DetailByte. Included free on Finish and Concours; available on Shine as an early-access add-on. See Invoicing.
Manual payments, bank transfer and pay-by-link no longer need any add-on: free on every plan now, shown on every invoice and on your customer's booking page by default.

v6.14.0 — 2026-08-12

Sending in the right order, and quotes from scratch

Invoicing now enforces the natural order of things: a job package can't be sent to a customer until its invoice has actually gone out: a draft blocks it, and a void invoice offers "Send anyway" or "Archive instead" rather than letting it through silently.
Generating an invoice now requires the booking to be marked complete, with one deliberate exception: a cancelled booking can still be invoiced for a late-cancellation or no-show fee.
Quotes can now be created from scratch, not only from an existing booking. Pick an existing customer and vehicle or add new ones without losing your place, then a service and add-ons, priced exactly like a real booking. Accepting a quote creates the real booking behind the scenes automatically.
The Invoices screen gained a "+ Invoice" button and a "Bookings without an invoice" filter, so a completed job can't quietly go uninvoiced just because nobody opened it from the booking itself.

v6.13.3 — 2026-08-12

Fixes

Generating or regenerating an invoice could fail instead of producing the PDF. Fixed.

v6.13.2 — 2026-08-12

Settings, reorganised

Settings → Business split into three focused tabs: Identity & brand (name, logo, colours), Contact (phone, WhatsApp, review link, prep guide) and Operating mode (drop-off, mobile, or both). Each option in Operating mode now shows its own icon, matching the style used throughout the rest of the panel.
Your business address moved onto Settings → Invoicing, since it's what's printed on every invoice and doubles as the drop-off location shown to customers.

v6.13.1 — 2026-08-12

Invoicing settings, polished

The accent-colour picker on Settings → Invoicing was rendering as a bare grey line instead of the usual colour swatch. Fixed, and it now matches every other colour picker in the app.
Added a Preview invoice button: see exactly how an invoice will look, styled with your current settings, before you ever send a real one.
Added a Starting invoice number field, so you can pick up numbering from wherever your previous system left off.

v6.13.0 — 2026-08-11

Invoicing, built in

DetailByte now generates a branded, itemised invoice straight from the booking itself: the service, vehicle, add-ons and any discount, exactly as they were priced, so the invoice and the job package can never disagree. Add your VAT number under Settings → Invoicing for a full VAT invoice, or leave it blank for a plain document. See Invoicing.
Quotes are a genuinely separate document with their own numbering, so quoting a job never burns a real invoice number. Convert to invoice turns an accepted quote into a real invoice at that point and locks the quote.
Found extra work on site? A worker can flag it without seeing or setting a price: workers never see money on a job. You price it, and the customer approves or declines it through their existing portal login before it's added to the invoice.
Automated reminders for invoices issued and overdue, through the same automations engine as every other message, editable exactly like the rest.
Generating and sending an invoice is free on every plan. Actually taking payment on one (bank transfer or a pay-by-link URL today, card payments planned) needs the new online payments add-on. See Pricing.

v6.12.5 — 2026-08-10

Replies land back with you

Managed email now sets a Reply-To header pointing at your registered contact address, so a customer replying to an automated message reaches you directly rather than a shared inbox.
Settings → Email now hides the SMTP credential fields entirely while your licence is on managed delivery, showing "sent automatically" instead: nothing to configure, and nothing sitting in your settings for anyone else to see.

v6.11 — 2026-08-06

An activity log: who changed what, and when

A new Activity Log screen records the changes worth being able to answer for: an account created, edited, switched off or on; a booking's price overridden; a licence key entered; DetailByte support access switched on or off; and deletions of add-ons, automations, coupons, customers, loyalty promotions, services, templates and vehicles.
Filterable by who, by what kind of change, and by date, using the same page layout as the delivery logs you already use.
Deliberately not everything. Routine day-to-day edits (a customer's phone number, a new vehicle) already show up in the record they changed, so they are not duplicated here. This covers the changes with real accountability weight.

Fixes

Service images (added in v6.10) filled the entire width of their row instead of sitting as a preview. They now sit beside the title as a thumbnail, in both the Services list and the booking wizard, with the wizard's service step showing the thumbnail to the left of the name and price rather than above them.
A checkbox on the Licence page rendered stretched across the row instead of a normal tick box, shoving its label aside.
A job package's "delete the photos after" setting could be silently switched to "keep every photo forever" by submitting the field blank rather than typing 0 on purpose. A blank submission now leaves the setting exactly as it was.
A couple of "+ Add" buttons (inviting a customer to the portal, adding a vehicle size category) were rendering as plain underlined text rather than a button.
The booking wizard still showed a handful of coloured emoji outside the admin screens the previous pass reached; replaced with the same icon set used throughout the rest of the panel.
A booking's ETA sat permanently under the map reading "Set when needed", even before a job had one. Now only shown once an ETA actually exists.

v6.10 — 2026-08-06

Job packages wait for the job to actually start

Job packages can now only be created once a job is in progress, and the thank-you email only once it's completed. Previously both were available at any status, including before the job had started.
The loyalty welcome email now sends when a booking is confirmed rather than when the job closes, so it no longer arrives in the same moment as the points or reward email a customer gets when their visit finishes.

History now has a limit

The customer portal's booking history and photo packages, and the Licence page's own history tables, now show the last 12 months by default (adjustable, including "show everything"). Previously both were unlimited by age, capped only by row count.

New

Admin can now open a support ticket for a customer directly, not only reply on one they've already started.
Services can have an uploaded image, shown on the service card and in the booking wizard.
Vehicle sizes are editable. Settings → Vehicle sizes now has size categories you can rename, reorder, add to, or retire; no longer four fixed names.
Job packages: admins can now download a zip of everything in a package themselves, for as long as the retention window keeps the files on disk.
Worker actions (a job finished, a note added, a booking cancelled) now show up in the notification bell, not only as an optional admin email.

Moved and tidied up

Customer portal invites moved from Customers to Portal Accounts, alongside everything else about managing a portal login.
DetailByte support access and "about this install" moved from Settings → System to the Licence page, next to the support sign-in history and licence details they belong with.
Save/back buttons moved to the top of most admin forms; plain checkboxes replaced with the same toggle-switch control used for working hours, in Settings → Modules and the booking wizard's add-ons; the booking wizard's review step got proper edit buttons instead of styled text links; the booking wizard no longer jumps between steps of different heights.

v6.9.0 — 2026-08-04

Support can now sign in to help, and you are told every time

When you ask us for help, our support team can sign in to your panel to look at the problem directly, instead of asking you to describe it or read settings out over the phone.
They never use your account. Support signs in as a separate DetailByte Support account, so your own login is never shared and your records never show your name against something you did not do.
You cannot miss it. While a support session is open, a banner sits at the top of every screen naming the person who is in and the reason they gave. It also appears in your notifications, and it is listed permanently under Licence → DetailByte support sign-ins.
It ends on its own after 30 minutes, whatever we are doing. You can end it sooner at any moment with the button in the banner.
You can refuse it entirely. Settings → System → DetailByte support access switches it off, and then nothing we send will be accepted. Turn it back on whenever you next want a hand.
The support account does not use one of your admin seats, and it never appears as an option when assigning a job.

v6.8.0 — 2026-08-03

Job photos take a fraction of the space, at the same quality

Photos uploaded to a job package are now resized as well as compressed. They were only ever re-compressed, so a 12-megapixel phone photo was stored at 12 megapixels and a single job package could run to 50 MB.
The difference on screen is nothing: measured against real before/after work, the reflections in black paint, the brickwork and the alloy spokes are indistinguishable from the original at the size a gallery displays. The difference on your storage allowance is roughly nine times.
Nothing you have already uploaded changes. This applies to photos added from now on.

Galleries now expire properly, and you get the space back

A delivered gallery has always stopped opening for the customer after a set number of days. The photo files, however, were kept for ever, so a business that had sent two years of packages was still storing every one of them.
There is a second setting now: Settings → Customer Programs → Job Packages → Then delete the photos after (days). Default 7, maximum 14. On the defaults, photos live 37 days from sending: 30 visible to the customer, then 7 held back.
You are told before anything goes. The day a gallery expires you get a notification naming the exact deletion date, with a link straight to the package, so there is time to download the set if you keep your own records.
Only the image files are deleted. The booking, the invoice, the customer's spend and their loyalty history are all untouched, and the package still shows in the job's history, so you can see that a package existed and when its photos were removed.
Set it to 0 to keep every photo indefinitely, as before.

Solo jobs are assigned to you automatically

If you are the only person with a login, new bookings are now assigned to you rather than being left with nobody against them. An unassigned booking did not appear on My jobs and could not have a job package built against it.
Nothing changes the moment you add staff, or if you have more than one admin: the Assigned to field then asks, as it always has.

Plans

DetailByte is now sold as three plans (Solo, Crew and Fleet) rather than one. See Pricing for what each includes.
Text reminders are on every plan, including Solo. Booking confirmations and 24-hour reminders are what stop no-shows, and a no-show is the most expensive thing that happens to a one-van business.
Going over a limit never deletes or hides anything. You are warned at 80%, and at 100% only new records of that kind are blocked, so the jobs already in your diary can always be finished and invoiced. The same applies if you move down a plan.

v6.7.0 — 2026-08-02

Tell DetailByte how you actually operate

A new setting under Settings → Identity & brand → How you operate asks the one question everything else follows from: are you mobile, do customers come to you, or both? Five choices: drop-off only, mainly drop-off, both equally, mainly mobile, and mobile only.
The booking page stops asking for an address on drop-off jobs. If the customer is driving to you, their home address is irrelevant, and it was previously required on every booking. It is now asked for only when someone is coming out to them.
The buried "I'd like mobile service" tickbox is now a proper two-option choice, and it only appears when there is genuinely something to choose. Run drop-off only and nobody is ever offered mobile, including on services still marked as mobile-capable from before, so switching over works immediately without editing every service first.
Your business address is now a setting, and setting it creates your first drop-off location for you.
If more than one drop-off location is active, the public booking page now asks the customer which one. Previously it picked silently, and with several it could leave the booking with no address at all.
Email and SMS templates follow the same logic. A drop-off-only business no longer sees mobile wording it can never send, and the template editor opens on the version customers will actually receive rather than on the mobile one. Nothing you have written is deleted; it comes back if you widen how you operate later.
Menu tabs that stop making sense disappear: no Mobile & travel if you never travel, no Drop-off locations if you always do.
Switching between mainly-drop-off and mainly-mobile updates your services to match and tells you how many it changed. Services set to both are never touched.

Staff accounts

You can now add other people to your DetailByte under Settings → Users, as either an admin or a worker.
Workers get a focused My jobs screen showing only the bookings assigned to them: no pricing, no customer records, no settings. Bookings gain an assigned to field.
Switching an account off takes effect immediately, on their next click, and signs out any device they left logged in. Nothing is deleted, and switching it back on restores everything.
The last active admin cannot be switched off or demoted, because the admin panel is the only way back into the admin panel.

Fixes

Switching off Online booking now actually closes the public booking page. It had been hiding it from your menu while continuing to take bookings.
A licence that expires while your instance is offline is now recognised as expired. It previously kept reporting the plan it had when it last checked in.
The notice shown during a grace period was printing the wrong date: it showed when the licence would next check in, not when it expired.
The customer portal sign-in page no longer prints technical warnings above the login form.

v6.6.0 — 2026-07-30

Modules: switch off what you don't use

A new Settings → System → Modules screen lets you switch off the parts of DetailByte your business doesn't run. Not every detailer wants a loyalty scheme, a customer portal or marketing broadcasts, and until now there was no way to say so.
Switching a module off does more than hide its menu items: it stops the work behind it as well. Turn off Loyalty and no points accrue, no milestones are issued and no loyalty emails go out. Turn off SMS and nothing texts your customers, from any screen or any automation.
Screens and settings tabs belonging to a switched-off module disappear, along with any section heading that would have been left empty. Its email templates drop out of the Templates list too, so you are not editing messages nothing will ever send.
Automations behaves slightly differently, on purpose: with it off you cannot build or edit rules and the rest of the sequence stops, but the correspondence a booking cannot function without keeps sending: the booking confirmation, the 24-hour reminder, the cancellation notice, and the "we have your request" acknowledgement while your public booking page is on. Your own new-booking alert is unaffected: that is a notification setting, not an automation.
Nothing is deleted. Points, portal accounts and job packages stay exactly as they were, and switching a module back on picks up where it left off.

Branding and appearance

Your logo now appears everywhere it should: admin panel, booking page, customer portal, sign-in screens and emails. Until you upload one, the DetailByte mark is shown rather than a blank space or your initials.
A logo that fails to upload, or is later removed from the server, no longer leaves a broken image behind.
Fixed the customer portal's opening screen cropping a wide logo down to an unrecognisable square.
The customer portal, sign-in screens and the loyalty opt-out page now use the same typeface and text size as the rest of the software. They had been falling back to narrower font weights, and in one case to the browser's own font.

Fixes

A drop-off booking made through the public booking page now carries its drop-off location, so the confirmation email tells the customer where to bring the vehicle. That address could previously arrive blank.
Saving a setting and immediately re-reading it on the same screen now returns the new value rather than the old one.
An instance that has not been activated yet now says so plainly, instead of reporting a plan limit of zero.

v6.5.0 — 2026-07-26

First public release.

Bookings and scheduling

Public booking wizard with live availability, vehicle-size pricing, add-ons and coupons, embeddable in your own site as an iframe.
Admin calendar, booking list and a daily work screen per booking, with status flow from request through to closed.
Mobile and drop-off service types, per-service, with drop-off locations and travel-fee rules.
Automatic drive-time ETAs: the On my way action pre-fills a real driving time from your shop origin to the customer's postcode using OpenStreetMap routing, with an optional prep buffer.

Customers and vehicles

Customer records with vehicles, service history, spend and VIP status.
Self-learning vehicle sizes: make/model combinations are remembered and offered to the next customer, with an admin review queue before a size is trusted.
A size an admin has confirmed can never be changed by what a customer picks, and a booking whose vehicle contradicts a confirmed size is flagged on the booking screen with a one-click correction.

Customer portal

Customers get their own account: next appointment with a countdown, booking history, loyalty progress, vehicles, profile picture and a direct message thread with you.
A dedicated Photos area for job packages: before-and-after sets, invoice and any documents.
Installable as an app on iOS and Android, from any page.

Job packages

Build a package of before/after photos, an optional invoice and optional aftercare letters, then send it with the thank you email. Photos alone are enough. Nothing else is mandatory.
Time-limited portal access to each gallery, with a ZIP download of everything.

Communication

Email and SMS templates for the whole booking lifecycle, with drop-off wording handled inline on the same template rather than as duplicate rows.
Automations for reminders, follow-ups, review requests and next-service prompts.
Quick send and marketing broadcasts, with full delivery history and retry.

Loyalty

Points per visit plus milestone rewards, with promotions, coupons and automatic reward application at booking time.

How versions work

The release number you are running is shown in the admin footer and under Settings → System. It only changes when a customer-facing release goes out. Routine behind-the-scenes maintenance does not move it.