The 60-minute service business quickstart checklist

What "live" actually means

Most onboarding guides assume you have a quiet Sunday afternoon and a clean spreadsheet of your prices. You probably do not. This guide assumes you have the next hour between jobs, your phone, and a vague sense of what you charge for the five services you do most.

If you can carve out 60 minutes, you can be answering calls, booking jobs, and taking payments on Joblinkers tonight.

Before you start (5 minutes)

• Sign up for a free trial — no credit card required.
• Open the app on the phone you actually use on the truck.
• Have your bank account or debit card handy for the Stripe connect step.

That is it. Skip anything that does not fit, you can come back to it.

Step 1 — Set up your pricebook (15 minutes)

Pick the five services you do most often. Do not try to model everything yet.

For each service, fill in:

• Service name (e.g. "AC tune-up", "Drain snake to 75 ft", "Standard cleaning — 2 BR")
• Default price (use your most common quote)
• Default duration (the time block on the calendar)
• One or two materials it consumes (if applicable)

If you sell good/better/best, build the good version first. You can clone it into the other two tiers in one tap later. Pricebook items show up in estimates, invoices, and the AI receptionist's booking flow — so getting these five right covers 80% of your call volume.

Step 2 — Connect your calendar (5 minutes)

• Settings → Integrations → Google Calendar (or Outlook).
• Choose the calendar you want jobs to sync to.
• Set your working hours and your default appointment window.

Two-way sync is the default. Block-offs you make in Google show up as unavailable in Joblinkers, and vice versa. If you have multiple techs, do this once per tech — the dispatch board uses each person's real calendar to decide who is free.

Step 3 — Turn on the AI receptionist (10 minutes)

• Settings → AI Receptionist.
• Pick a voice and a language (English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, or Dutch out of the box).
• Set your greeting — keep it short. "Thanks for calling [Company]. How can I help today?" is plenty.
• Choose which services it is allowed to book. We recommend starting with your top three.
• Set your escalation rules — when should it hand off to a human, and which human.

Do a test call to your forwarding number. If the AI handles it cleanly, port your business line. If not, tweak the escalation rules and try again before forwarding production traffic.

Step 4 — Connect Stripe (5 minutes)

• Settings → Payments → Connect Stripe.
• Run through the express onboarding (it is mostly your bank details and an ID check).
• Turn on Tap-to-Pay on your iPhone if you want to take cards at the door without hardware.

You are now able to send a payment link with every invoice and accept Tap-to-Pay in person.

Step 5 — Send a test estimate and invoice (10 minutes)

Pick a real upcoming job. Use Joblinkers to:

• Build the estimate from your pricebook
• Send it for digital approval
• Convert it to an invoice with one tap
• Send the payment link

Doing it once on a real job teaches you more than reading any documentation will. Pay attention to the parts that felt slower than they should — those are usually pricebook gaps you can fix in five minutes.

Step 6 — Add your QuickBooks or Xero (5 minutes)

• Settings → Integrations → QuickBooks Online or Xero.
• Authenticate.
• Pick the bank account that should receive Joblinkers payments.
• Choose live or daily sync.

From here on, every invoice you send from Joblinkers shows up in the books automatically. No CSV exports, no double entry.

Step 7 — Plan your first week (5 minutes)

Three small commitments that compound:

1. Forward your business line to Joblinkers for at least one full week. Anything shorter is not a real test.
2. Send every estimate through Joblinkers, even if the customer is on the phone. The data hygiene matters more than the speed.
3. Use the morning briefing. It runs at 7 a.m. and tells you what is at risk for the day.

What changes after one week

If the setup goes the way it usually does, by Friday you will:

• Be picking up calls you used to miss
• Have estimates approved without follow-up texts
• Be reading reviews you did not have to chase
• Be looking at margin per job for the first time in your business

That is the goal of the first week. Everything fancier is for later.

If you get stuck, we are reachable — usually within the hour during business days. Good luck.