DetailByte isn't a diary with extras bolted on. Every part below shares the same customers, the same prices and the same job history, which is why a finished job can update a customer's spend, their VIP status, their loyalty points and their next reminder all at once.
Your plan decides how many of these are switched on. Everything that runs your day (online booking, customers, the portal, job packages, condition reports, the dilution calculator, invoicing and text reminders) is on every plan including Shine. The growth tools are on Finish and above. See the comparison, or the pricing page.
One admin panel runs all of it, not a stack of tools stitched together. Real screens from a real DetailByte instance, not mockups.
The heart of the system: how a job is requested, priced, scheduled, and worked, mobile or drop-off, from the public form or from you.
The public form is embeddable in your existing website as an iframe, so it lives inside your brand rather than sending customers elsewhere.
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Requested, not yet accepted. Nothing scheduled. |
| Confirmed | Accepted, time locked in, confirmation sent. |
| In Progress | The job has started. Can be paused and resumed if it spans more than one day. |
| Completed | Finished, duration recorded, stats recalculated. |
| Closed | Archived after delivery. Auto-closes at 30 days. |
On my way, Start job, Finish job: each one moves the booking along and can message the customer as it happens. No separate "did I text them?" step.
Your day or week at a glance. Confirmed and in-progress jobs show; drafts and cancellations are excluded from availability so they never block a real slot.
Customer, vehicle, price, address, a map, notes, ETA, duration, and a record of every message sent and when. An activity log covers the bigger changes too: who overrode a price, edited an account or deleted something, and when.
Every service is priced across your vehicle size categories. When a customer books, the right one is chosen automatically from their vehicle: no quoting by hand, no "is a Qashqai a medium?" Four sizes come pre-loaded (Small, Medium, SUV, XL) as a starting point, not a ceiling; rename, reorder or add your own from Settings.
And a manual override on any individual booking, for when a job is genuinely bespoke.
Combine a base service with an extra (interior deep clean plus exterior protection), priced per size like anything else, with its own description of what's included.
Mark each service mobile, drop-off, or both. A service you'd never do on someone's driveway simply won't be offered to a mobile customer.
DetailByte records how long jobs actually take and uses that history to estimate the next one, which also powers the "job running over" alert.
Postcodes are looked up against your shop origin as the customer types. Beyond your furthest tier, mobile isn't offered and they're guided to drop-off instead.
Simple "up to X miles → £Y" rules; the first tier that covers the distance wins. Choose whether the travel fee is discountable, or always added on top of coupons and loyalty.
Press On my way and the ETA is pre-filled with a real driving time from your origin to their postcode, plus your prep buffer. Edit it before sending: a figure you set always wins.
Drop-off bookings skip all of the above entirely: no travel fee, no postcode check, and none of the mobile wording. Manage as many drop-off locations as you like, each with its own address and instructions, delivered by email only, which is where a full address belongs.
The record every other module reads from: a tidy history of everyone you look after, and everything they own.
Bookings from the public form are matched to an existing customer where possible, so you don't end up with the same person three times.
Because size drives price, a customer guessing wrong costs you money. DetailByte remembers make and model combinations and offers the right size to the next customer who books one. But a new size only becomes trusted after you've reviewed it. A size you've confirmed can never be overwritten by what a customer picks, and any booking that contradicts one is flagged with a one-click correction.
A self-service area in your branding, so customers stop asking you things they could look up.
With a countdown, plus their full booking history, their vehicles, and their profile and password to manage themselves.
Every job package they've been sent (before-and-after sets, the invoice and any documents), downloadable as a ZIP.
Support tickets rather than a lost WhatsApp. New tickets and replies notify you; a customer replying to a closed one reopens it automatically.
The portal can be added to the home screen on iOS and Android from any page, so it sits alongside their other apps rather than being a bookmark they lose. No app store, no download, no review process.
For privacy, sign-up never reveals whether an email already belongs to a customer: matching happens quietly in the background.
The signature touch: what you hand over after the job, rather than just an invoice and a wave.
Photos alone are enough. Nothing else is mandatory.
Sending a package fires the thank-you email and opens gallery access in their portal for however many days you choose, counted from when you sent it. The gallery link fills itself into the template. You never paste a URL.
Your watermark travels with every image they download or share, which is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
You can pull your own copy of the full package as a ZIP at any time too, for as long as it's still on disk, not just the customer's portal link.
Photograph and pin a car's existing damage before you touch it: your protection against a dispute that hasn't happened yet.
An intake report is evidence, not marketing, so it's kept for a year by default, well past the 30-37 days a job package's gallery lives for, and stored completely separately so cleaning up old job photos never touches it.
On every plan, including Shine: this is the one feature we think is worth including no matter how small the business is, because the one-van operator with no legal budget is exactly who a damage dispute hurts most.
Know what a job costs you in product, not just how long it took.
Type a bottle size and a ratio, get back exactly how much product and water to mix. Works with nothing set up, on Shine as much as Concours: it's the clearest single demonstration of what this product is for, so we include it everywhere. Try the free public version to see the maths for yourself.
Branded, itemised and generated for you from the booking itself, free on every plan.
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 it from their own portal login before it's added to the invoice.
Generating, sending and getting paid through an invoice is free on every plan: bank transfer and pay-by-link need no add-on at all. Stripe card payments are included on Finish and Concours, and available on Shine as an early-access add-on. Square is planned, not built yet.
A genuinely separate document from an invoice, so quoting a job never burns a real invoice number.
The reminder that actually stops a no-show: every text carries its own version, written and switched on separately from email.
Templates ship pre-written (confirmation, reminders, thank-you, review request, follow-up and more), with a live preview as you edit. Drop in variables for the customer, vehicle, service, date, price, ETA or gallery link; the editor greys out any variable that won't work in the template you're editing.
Send through your own VoodooSMS or Twilio account: whatever your provider charges is what you pay, nothing marked up. Or switch to managed SMS and DetailByte sends on your behalf instead, billed per message, with nothing for you to configure. UK numbers are normalised automatically either way.
Reaching customers on your own terms: one at a time, or a whole segment at once.
A one-off message to a single customer, without creating a template for it: for the quick personal note a template would be overkill for.
Bulk email or SMS to a segment rather than to everyone: no booking in the last 60 days, customers who did book recently, VIPs, customers of a particular service, or a particular booking status. Send now or schedule it.
Templates decide what gets said. Automations decide when, so the customer hears from you without you doing anything.
| Trigger | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Request received | A customer submits the public form |
| Booking confirmed | You confirm a booking |
| Booking updated | A confirmed booking's details change |
| Booking cancelled | A booking is cancelled |
| Job started | You start a job |
| Booking completed | You finish a job |
Timing is relative: 24 hours and 2 hours before the appointment, a review request a day after completion, a follow-up a week later. All switched on by default and all editable. Overdue invoices chase themselves the same way, fully editable, same as every other message.
The part that turns a good job into the next booking.
Customers earn points for visits and spend, building towards rewards that apply automatically at booking time. They're notified when they join, earn, unlock a reward, or have points about to expire, and every loyalty email carries a one-click opt-out.
Discounts you control, and recognition for the customers worth recognising.
Discount codes with usage tracking, and time-limited loyalty promotions: bonus points during a quiet fortnight, optionally limited to one service. Discounts stack predictably, honouring your travel-fee rule.
Flag a customer VIP yourself, or set rules (a minimum spend, a minimum number of completed visits, or both) and let DetailByte promote them automatically. Automatic VIP only ever manages the customers it promoted itself; a VIP you set by hand is never quietly demoted by a rule.
The part most valeting software doesn't even attempt: knowing (in real time, not at month end) whether a job is actually making you money, and what it's worth to the person doing it.
Open any in-progress booking and watch net profit per hour update live: add an assistant's hourly rate, log a chemical or parts expense the moment you reach for it, and the figure updates immediately, coloured green or red against a target rate you set. It feeds Advanced Reporting the instant the job completes: nothing to re-enter.
Started this afternoon, finished tomorrow morning: Pause before the team clocks off and Resume when work starts again. The clock stops completely rather than quietly counting the overnight gap, so recorded duration and labour cost reflect hours actually worked, not the calendar time the job happened to span.
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. Every job a worker completed that week is included automatically; enter their hours and Payroll totals base pay, commission and an estimated tax set-aside into a net figure per person, ready to export as CSV or PDF.
Built and labelled honestly as a calculator, not a payslip or a tax filing: real PAYE and National Insurance stay with your accountant.
Your logo, your colours, your name: on every plan, running through every other module here.
Upload your logo, set your brand colours, and confirm your company name, slogan and phone number. That recolours the admin panel, the public booking form, the customer portal and every outgoing email, including the email header and footer wrapped around each message. One change, everywhere.
A small "Powered by DetailByte" line stays at the bottom of customer-facing pages and emails. The remove-branding add-on takes it off everywhere, on any plan. It is never applied to text messages for anybody, paid or not: a footer there can push a message into a second segment and cost you real money to advertise us.
Everything that runs the day is on every plan. What Finish and Concours add is the tooling for having staff and for bringing customers back, not the basics held hostage. Full prices on the pricing page.
| Shine £29 |
Finish £59 |
Concours £99 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Bookings a month | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Customer records | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Job-package photos | 10 GB | 50 GB | 200 GB |
| Admin logins | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Worker logins | — | 10 | Unlimited |
| Drop-off locations | 1 | 3 | Unlimited |
| Public booking form | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Admin calendar & job lifecycle | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Services, bundles & add-ons | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Mobile travel fees & drive-time ETAs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Customers, vehicles & VIP rules | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Customer portal & support tickets | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Job packages & watermarking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vehicle intake & condition reports | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Chemical dilution calculator | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Invoicing & quotes: branded PDF, reminders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Booking emails & text reminders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed email delivery | 1,000 / month | 5,000 / month | 15,000 / month |
| Stock inventory & usage tracking | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Per-job material cost | — | — | ✓ |
| Advanced Reporting (real net profit by date range & service) | — | — | ✓ |
| Live Job Time & Labor Profit Tracker | — | — | ✓ |
| Payroll & Commission Calculator | — | — | ✓ |
| Staff accounts (one owner, plus administrator and worker logins) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Loyalty points & rewards | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coupons | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Build your own automations | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marketing broadcasts | — | 4 / month | Unlimited |
| Your own domain | Add-on | ✓ | ✓ |
| Remove DetailByte branding | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on |
| Manual, bank transfer & pay-by-link payments | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Stripe card payments | Add-on | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed SMS | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on |
Bookings and customer records are unlimited on every plan. The only thing that scales with how busy you get is job-package photo storage: going over it never deletes or hides anything, you're warned at 80%, and at 100% only new uploads are blocked, so the jobs already in your diary can still be finished and invoiced. Moving down a plan keeps everything you already have.
Shine deliberately includes text reminders. 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: it is not a feature worth holding back to sell an upgrade. What Finish adds is marketing: campaigns to a segment you choose, rather than the messages that protect today's diary.
The first admin login on any plan is the account owner: full access to everything, including settings and billing. Any admin logins beyond that are Administrator accounts: day-to-day operations (bookings, customers, worker accounts) without settings or billing access, so you can hand off running the business without handing over the account itself.
Start your 14-day free trial and we'll run a real booking end to end: request through to follow-up.
