How to use Bookrun

Everything Bookrun does right now, roughly in the order you'll run into it. Where the app mentions something that isn't working yet, it's marked Coming later.

Getting set up

Signing in

There's no separate signup. Type your email, Bookrun sends you a six-digit code, and entering it either creates your account or signs you back in. No password to remember.

Coming later: the Sign in with Apple button on that screen doesn't work yet. Use the emailed code.

Onboarding

Seven steps. Each one saves as you leave it, so if you put the phone down halfway you'll come back to the first thing you haven't answered rather than starting over.

Your business name
Your trade (type your own if it isn't listed)
Your service area: ZIP and radius. Business phone and address are optional here. Your phone shows on quotes and invoices; your address only on invoices. Plenty of people in this trade work from home, so we don't hand that address to everyone who asks for a price.
Pick the services you offer
Set your prices
Connect payments
Choose a plan

Step 7 is where the subscription starts. Pick monthly or yearly and the App Store handles it, including the free trial if you haven't already used one. Prices come from the App Store rather than from us, so you see your own currency.

You can skip it and look around first. What needs a subscription is sending a quote; everything up to that, including writing one and saving it as a draft, is free. Subscribe later from Settings → Account & plan, or from the prompt that appears when you send.

Connecting payments

Step 6 hands you over to Stripe. Everything your customers pay goes straight into your own Stripe account. Bookrun never holds your money and never sees a card number.

Getting back from Stripe doesn't mean you're finished. Stripe verifies accounts in the background, and Bookrun waits for Stripe to confirm before it says "Connected". Sitting in the middle for a while is normal. If it seems stuck, Settings → Account & plan → Payments will re-check and can send you back into the Stripe flow.

You can use Bookrun without connecting payments at all. You just won't be able to ask for a deposit, and your invoices will go out without a payment link.

Your price book

Settings → Price book. What you offer, what it costs, how long it takes.

A name and a price.
A duration. This sets how long a slot has to be before a customer can request that service on your request page, so it's worth getting close.
Taxable or not, on by default. Switch it off for anything your state doesn't tax, usually a travel fee or a tip. Check with your state if you're not sure.
Offer this service. Switching this off hides a service from your request page without deleting it or touching any quote that already used it.

Changing a price here won't change a quote or invoice you've already sent. Those record the price at the moment you wrote them.

Sales tax

Settings → Tax. This stays off until you switch it on. If you never open the screen, you'll never see tax anywhere in the app.

You type in your own combined rate: state, plus any county or city on top. Bookrun doesn't look rates up, doesn't give tax advice and doesn't file anything for you. It does the arithmetic and keeps the record. Enter it as a percentage with decimals if you need them, like 8.375.

You can also set what it's called on anything a customer sees, and your seller's permit or tax registration number, which prints on invoices where that's required.

Tax gets charged on the invoice and only estimated on the quote. Deposits are worked out on the price before tax. Each document stores the rate it was written with, so changing your rate later won't rewrite old paperwork.

The Money tab shows tax collected, counted from the date an invoice was paid. Most small filers remit on a cash basis, and tax on an invoice nobody has paid yet isn't money you're holding.

Availability and your request page

Your hours

Schedule → Availability. Set a weekly pattern, then add exceptions for particular dates: a day off, a one-off late finish.

Two things to know. Jobs already on your schedule come out automatically, so there's no need to block them off yourself. And nothing on this screen books anything. It describes when you're willing to work, and any request that comes in is still yours to take or turn down.

Your request page

Settings → Profile → Quote request page. Pick a short address and your page goes live at bookrun.app/r/your-name. There's a Copy button next to it. Put the link in your bio, on your van, in your email signature.

Customers pick the services they want, see slots built from your hours minus the jobs you've already got booked, and send through a request with their details.

Three settings are fixed for now and can't be edited: slots come in 30-minute steps, customers need to give 24 hours' notice, and they can book up to 60 days ahead.

Collecting and answering quote requests

Requests arrive in a Requests section at the top of the Quotes tab, labelled "From your request page". Open one and you'll see what they asked for, their contact details, the address, roughly how long the work should take, and any time they said they'd prefer.

That preferred time is a preference and nothing more. The slot stays open until you send a quote and they pay the deposit.

You've got two options:

Turn into a quote creates the customer record and opens the composer already filled in with what they asked for. This is the only point where a customer record gets created, so strangers filling in your form don't pile up in your customer list.
Not for me declines the request and clears it out.

Writing and sending a quote

Start one from Home, from the Quotes tab, or by converting a request.

Who it's for, and where

Pick an existing customer or add a new one. If they've said they're happy to be texted about the job, tick the consent box. You're required to keep that record, and it's tied to that one customer.

Then the job address. If the customer already has a usual address you can reuse it in a tap, and you can save a new one as their usual.

Line items

Add them from your price book or type a free line. Then the bit that matters:

The first line is required.
Everything after it is optional, meaning the customer can untick it before they accept.

Offering the extras as extras is what separates a quote that gets accepted at full price from one that gets picked apart. The deposit, the tax and the eventual invoice all follow whatever they actually kept.

Deposit

Pick 0%, 10%, 25% or 50%. It defaults to 25%.

The deposit comes off the pre-tax subtotal rather than the headline total, and the screen says so when you've got tax switched on, because the figure is smaller than most people expect. Paying the deposit is what confirms the booking.

If you haven't connected payments yet, the quote still sends. It just can't ask for money.

Proposing a time

Switch on Propose a time and pick one. The customer sees it on their quote, and paying the deposit books it.

The slot isn't held while they think it over. If somebody else takes it first, the job still comes through, it just arrives without a time on it.

Send, or save as a draft

Send quote is the main button and it's one step. Save as draft sits underneath, quieter, for anything you want to finish later. Drafts get their own section on the Quotes tab and reopen where you left off.

Drafts have no share link, so nobody can accept a quote you haven't finished writing.

What the customer gets

A link. No app, no account. They see your business name, logo and phone, the work, the price, the estimated tax and any time you proposed. They tick or untick the optional lines, then accept and pay the deposit.

If the time doesn't suit them, they can accept the quote and decline the time. The deposit still charges (turning down a time never blocks the payment) and the job lands on your Schedule under "Needs a time".

Keeping track

The Quotes tab splits into three sections: Active for anything waiting on the customer, Drafts for what you haven't sent, and Complete for accepted, declined and expired. Home picks up any quote that's been out two days without an answer.

Scheduling

Jobs get a time in one of two ways.

From the quote. Propose a time, the deposit books it, and there's nothing else for you to do.
By hand. Open the job from the Schedule tab and tap the date row to set or change the time. This is what you'll use when a quote went out without a time, or when the customer turned down the one you offered. The job screen tells you which time they declined.

Schedule is grouped the way a working day actually runs: Needs a time at the top, then Today, then what's coming up. Anything needing a time also shows on Home, because a customer who's paid a deposit and is waiting to hear back is an easy one to lose.

Running a job

Open the job from Schedule or from the Today list on Home. The screen is built for one hand in daylight.

Start job kicks off the timer and Finish job stops it. The elapsed time is saved against the job.
Before and after photos sit in two columns. Use the camera or pick from your library. Photos stay private to your account.
Notes and the address are on the same screen, so the gate code is where you need it.

Invoices

Raising one

Finishing a job doesn't raise the invoice by itself. Once the work is done the job screen shows Create invoice, and you tap it. Bookrun then copies the accepted lines over from the quote, adds tax at your current rate if you've got tax on, and credits any deposit that's already been paid.

Those lines are copied rather than linked, so editing your price book afterwards can't rewrite what you charged.

A job with nothing to bill won't produce a $0 invoice. If the deposit covered the whole job, the invoice comes out already paid.

Editing one

Until a payment lands, the job screen offers Edit invoice for the extra half hour, the thing you spotted once you got there, the part you supplied. The customer's quote stays as it was. The invoice is what they actually get billed.

Adding to an invoice that a deposit had already settled flips it back to unpaid and starts the chase again. Once a payment lands, the invoice locks. At that point it's a record rather than a draft.

Sending it

Send payment link shares a link. Same as the quote: no app, no account. They pay and the invoice settles.

Coming later: Tap to Pay. The job screen shows "Tap to Pay (coming soon)". Taking a card by tapping it against your phone needs a permission from Apple that we haven't been granted yet. It's visible but greyed out until that comes through.

Finding them

The Money tab. It opens with what you're owed, then lists your invoices, and you can resend a payment link from there. Money also shows Earned across 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or a year, counted from the date each invoice went out, covering the full value of the work whether or not it's been paid. Underneath that, sales tax collected, counted from the date invoices were paid.

To edit an invoice you go through the job (Schedule, then the job) rather than through Money.

Getting paid out

Your money never touches Bookrun. Customers pay into your Stripe account and Stripe pays you out on its own schedule.

That means payouts, bank details, payout timing, refunds, disputes, tax forms and Stripe's own fees are all handled over in Stripe. There's no payout screen in Bookrun, and we can't move your money or change when you get paid.

Go to Stripe directly and follow their documentation at stripe.com/docs, including their payouts pages for schedules and bank details. We're not going to reproduce Stripe's steps here. Their dashboard and their rules change on their own schedule, and anything we wrote down would quietly go stale.

What Bookrun can tell you is in Settings → Account & plan → Payments: whether Stripe currently says you can take payments, and a way back into the Stripe flow if there's something outstanding. If you delete your Bookrun account, your Stripe account stays with you. It holds your payout history and any open disputes.

Reminders and nudges

Two things share this job: messages Bookrun sends on your behalf, and prompts for the ones only you can send.

Sent for you

These go by email, wherever you've got an email address for the customer.

Message	When
Quote follow-up	Two days after a quote goes out with no answer
Booking confirmation	As soon as a deposit clears
Job reminder	The day before a scheduled job
Invoice chase	3, 7 and 14 days after an unpaid invoice

Handed back to you

Anything Bookrun can't send lands on Home under "Needs you", with the message written out ready to send from your own phone in your own name. That covers the rebook nudge six weeks after a finished job, plus anything above that had no email address to go to.

Home also works out some prompts from what's true right now rather than from a queue:

Overdue invoices. "Remind" shares the payment link again.
Jobs needing a time. "Schedule" opens the job.
Unanswered quotes. "Follow up" shares the quote link again.

Sending from the share sheet clears the nudge. Backing out without sending leaves it where it was.

Coming later

Review requests. Asking a customer for a review once they've paid. Nothing gets queued for this at the moment, so ask for reviews yourself for now.
Text messages. Everything goes by email today. SMS is waiting on carrier registration, which is also why the consent box on quotes matters: that's the record you'll need once texting is switched on.
Push notifications.
Editing what the messages say and turning individual automations off. They're fixed for now.

Customers

The Customers tab holds the list. Open anyone for their contact details, address, notes and job history with a lifetime total. Notes are the useful field here: gate code, where to park, the dog that bites. Messaging records whether they've agreed to be texted and lets you record an opt-out.

Your account and your data

Settings → Account & plan.

Download my data exports everything Bookrun holds about your business (customers, quotes, jobs, invoices, payments) as a JSON file you can keep or share.
Delete my account permanently removes your account and everything in it, photos included. You'll type DELETE to confirm. There's no undo, so export first if you want a copy. Your Stripe account is left alone.

Your subscription shows what you're on, when it renews, and a link into the App Store to change or cancel it. Cancelling happens in the App Store rather than here, because Apple owns the billing; a cancel button in Bookrun would leave you still being charged. You keep everything until the period you've paid for runs out.

Coming later: changing the email you sign in with. Get in touch and we'll move it for you. That email is also where replies land when Bookrun writes to a customer for you.

What's not live yet

Everything the app mentions but doesn't do yet, in one place.

Where you'll see it	Status
Sign in with Apple	Not working. Use the emailed code
"Tap to Pay (coming soon)"	Waiting on a permission from Apple
"Review requests", under Coming later on the Automations screen	Nothing gets queued. Ask for reviews yourself
Text messages, push, editing or muting automations	Listed under "Coming later" in the app
Changing your sign-in email	Ask and we'll do it for you

Still stuck?

help@bookrun.app, or the support page.