Removal company software for one-van firms

Search for removals software on a wet Thursday and more often than not the firms behind the first few results want you on a demo call before anyone tells you a price. That’s who those tools are built for, firms with an office to take the call.

The big ones are built around a fleet. Someone books a survey, a surveyor walks the house, that becomes a job on a dispatch board, and the board feeds crews, storage and the wages run. Often a set-up fee and a training day on top (some throw those in, plenty don’t) and a monthly price: per van, per user, or a flat tier, depending who you ask.

None of it is a con. Running four or five vans out of a yard, most of it earns its keep. Ask what that monthly price does when the whole firm is one bloke.

Honest bit: it’s the wrong shape for one van. You are the surveyor, the crew, the office and the wages run. Software that spends its first fortnight asking who reports to whom is solving a problem you haven’t got.

Search for removals software in the UK and the same handful of names come round. Worth knowing which end of the trade each one was built for before you book anybody’s demo, because whether the price is on the website tells you most of it.

At the top are the fleet systems: MoveMan, QuickMove and Move Agent. Survey bookings, dispatch boards, storage, crews, wages. If you have to ask for the price, that’s your answer about who it’s for. A firm with an office books the call; a bloke in a Transit doesn’t.

In the middle are the general trades tools, Flobot and Fixxable among them, which cover plumbers, gardeners and scaffolders as well as movers. Fine at the paperwork. Removals is one industry page among many, so the bits that are particular to a move are on you.

At the small end, Removals Manager and Move and Store put their prices on the website and take a card there, which is a good sign in itself. Every price in the box below is from the company’s own site in September 2026 and will move, so check before you decide. Then hold whichever you fancy against the six things to check further down.

Last Tuesday: one enquiry at half seven, three more while you were getting a sofa bed down a fire escape in Bromley, and you sat at the kitchen table at nine at night pricing the lot.

Strip the job back and there are five things. A real price in front of somebody quickly, because whoever answers first usually gets the work. Looking like a proper firm while you do it. A deposit, so a Friday can’t evaporate on the Thursday. A diary you trust. Never typing the same thing twice.

That’s the lot. No dispatch board, no crew rota, no storage. The trap is buying for the firm you’d like to be in five years. Buy for the van you’ve got.

Where the enquiries come from is a different job, and that one has its own guide. If you haven’t started yet, or you’re a few weeks in, start here instead.

For the first few months a spreadsheet and WhatsApp is the right answer. Genuinely. A dozen jobs on the go and you hold the lot in your head.

Then it gives out, in the same four places every time. The enquiry that lands at twenty to seven with both hands full, answered hours later. The price done in your head on the phone, nothing written down when she remembers it differently. No deposit, so a Saturday goes missing and you eat it. And the numbers in your head, so you never know what a week really made, worth working out properly.

Honest bit: a spreadsheet isn’t what’s failing you. Doing all four of those yourself, at ten at night, after a day of carrying, is.

The tell is the day you stop chasing an enquiry because you can’t face the typing. Not laziness. That’s your setup asking to be replaced.

Then there’s the middle rung: tools where an enquiry arrives with the rooms already photographed, and the furniture list comes back without you typing a word.

What they do well is real enough. The typing goes, and you price over your morning brew instead of after tea. Better still, you’re looking at the actual stuff, not guessing what a few bits and a sofa means on the phone.

What a lot of them miss is the graft. A list is not a price. Plenty price the pile of stuff and forget the carrying, the stairs, the travel and the clean-air charge, so the number comes out short on the jobs that hurt. Some price at their rates, not yours.

And a photo won’t show you inside a shut garage; the loft and the shed are where quotes go wrong. What matters is whether you can fix the list in a couple of taps, and whether the price is yours.

Six lines are in the box below. Take them to anything you’re weighing up and you’ll know before the kettle’s boiled whether it was built for a firm your size. The first four are about doing the job. The last two are about who’s in charge: you or them.

Your own rates matter more than any feature list. Anything pricing off somebody else’s national numbers will be wrong for your area in both directions. London is not Lincolnshire.

Two more worth asking. Does it work on your phone, one-handed, with one bar of signal in a stairwell? And can you get your customer list back out if you leave? Anything that makes leaving awkward is telling you something.

One warning. Anything charging you per lead isn’t removals software, it’s a lead site with a nicer screen: £15 to £30 an enquiry, sold on to four or five vans, win or lose. The sum is in the lead-site guide.

Ours, then. You’re on our website, it’d be odd to pretend otherwise. An enquiry comes in through your own quote page, priced up from the customer’s list or photos at your rates. Enquiry in, priced quote out, minutes not an evening.

Small confession: it gets the list right most of the time. When it misses the chest freezer in the garage, you fix it in two taps before anything goes out. You are always the one pressing send.

What it isn’t, on the plans above, is a fleet system. No crew rota, no storage records, no dispatch board. There is a Fleet option for multi-van firms, but that’s a conversation rather than a price on a card, and if you’re running a yard full of vans and need a dispatch board this month, one of the big ones will suit you better. We’d rather say so now than take your £39.

Starter, at £39 a month, is where the diary lives, and card deposits from the quote page are on the way. Pro, at £79, adds your logo and colours and a quote form for your website. What it costs is below.

Don’t take anyone’s word for it, ours included. A trial you don’t properly use tells you nothing. Two quotes on a wet Sunday prove nothing either way. One week, every enquiry, nothing else changed.

Monday: put your real rates in. Your minimum call-out, what you’d charge for a 1-bed five miles, per mile, your hourly rate. Anything left on default numbers is testing somebody else’s business, not yours. Then put your quote link in three places: Facebook bio, Google listing, back doors.

Tuesday to Friday, every enquiry goes through it, including the ones that ring you: that’s what the message below is for. Write down when each landed and when your price went out.

Friday night, hold it against the week before. If the gap between enquiry and price hasn’t shrunk, don’t pay for it. You’ve lost an evening and a few of your ten free quotes. Busy week? You might run the ten out before Friday. Nothing breaks in front of a customer when you do. The page tells them you can’t take requests online just now and gives them your number, and their name and number still land with you. You lose the photos and the instant price, not the job.

This is the bit you actually worry about: your customer works out whether you’re a proper firm off one screen. They tap your link, answer a handful of plain questions (where from, where to, when, what’s coming) and photograph the rooms as they go. The ones who can’t be doing with photos type the list instead. That works too. No app, no account.

Some of them won’t take the photos, and that’s allowed for. There’s a Skip photos for now button, and a box to type what’s coming instead. You get a shorter list and a price that plays it safe, so give that one a proper look before you send it, still beats ringing them back at nine at night.

What comes back carries your business name, their stuff listed, the price and what’s included. Our name isn’t on the page. One thing we’ll own up to: send the link on WhatsApp and the little preview box still says Kwotly. On the list, not fixed yet.

They don’t get a number the second they finish. The page says a price is coming shortly, because you check it first. Anything it’s missed goes on before it leaves your hands.

Card deposits from the quote page are coming to the paid plans; for now, put the deposit and how to pay it on the quote. Your logo and colours come in on Pro.