Detailing studio software for fixed-base work, not just mobile rounds
Drop-off bookings at your unit. Jobs that run for days, not hours. Timestamped condition reports before you touch the paint. Photo quotes, tiered coating proposals and deposits that scale with the ticket — all in one diary.
A studio is not a mobile round with a roof on it. Customers come to you, so the address on the booking is yours, not theirs. A stage-two correction and a nine-year coating do not fit in an afternoon, so a booking has to be able to hold a week. The average ticket is high enough that you get asked to justify it, photographed enough that you get blamed for marks you did not make, and repeatable enough that aftercare is real revenue rather than a nice idea.
DetailBook is booking software for UK car detailing businesses, and it handles fixed-base work as a first-class setup rather than a checkbox. This page covers the parts that only matter once you are working from a unit. If you are still on the road, the mobile valeting software page is the better fit — and if you are weighing the move, we wrote about mobile detailing versus a fixed location.
“That scratch wasn’t there when I dropped it off”
The single biggest exposure a studio has is a customer arguing about damage that was already on the car. Pre-job condition reports answer it with a timestamped record instead of an argument.
Walk the car before you start
Photograph each section — bumpers, every side, the roof, each wheel — with notes against anything you find. Then send the customer the report to acknowledge before work begins, with a PDF copy for your records.
Section-by-section photos with notes on each
Sent to the customer to acknowledge before you start
Timestamped, and locked from editing once it has been sent — it is a permanent record, not a document you can quietly revise
PDF copy saved against the booking
Before, after and damage photo galleries on every job
Why it matters
It changes who has to prove what
Without a report, a wheel scuff is your word against theirs on a car you have had for four days. With one, there is a photo of that wheel, taken before you started, which the customer already looked at and accepted. Most of these conversations end there.
Turn it on yourself in Settings → Operations & Workflow. It has been live for every DetailBook account since July 2026.
Built around a unit, not a van
The location model is real configuration, not a label on a settings page. Set it once and the booking page behaves like a studio for the rest of its life.
Business type
Fixed base only
Every booking becomes a drop-off. The customer sees your unit address on the booking page and in their confirmation, and is never asked for their own. Mobile-only and hybrid are there too if you need them.
Per service
Studio only, mobile, or both
Mark a ceramic coating as studio only so it can never be booked to a driveway, while a maintenance wash stays bookable either way. Availability respects the setting rather than just displaying it.
Hybrid
A location mode per weekday
Mobile Monday to Wednesday, studio Thursday to Saturday. Set it per day of the week and the booking page offers the right kind of job on the right day.
Intake
Fixed bookable start times
Publish exact intake slots — 08:00, 10:30, 13:00 — instead of a rolling 30-minute grid. Customers can only pick those. You can still drop an off-grid job in yourself.
Turnaround
Buffer time between bookings
An automatic gap between cars so the diary reflects the time it actually takes to get one out and the next one in, rather than assuming a clean handover.
Guard rails
Rules, with your wording
Working hours per weekday, closed days, minimum advance notice and a cap on reschedules. When a customer hits a rule, show your own message explaining why instead of a blank “not available”.
Jobs that run for days
Cure time is not downtime you can double-book. A DetailBook booking can hold a whole week, and each day of it is a real segment on the calendar.
Multi-day bookings
A job spans several working days, each one blocked on the diary. Built for exactly this: decon and correction on Monday and Tuesday, coating Wednesday, cure Thursday, collection Friday.
Span shading on reschedule
Move a multi-day job and the picker shades the days it currently occupies and exactly where it lands from a new start day, so you can see the collision before you make it.
Duration per service
A three-day correction blocks three days, not a morning. Duration drives the slot blocking, so what a customer can book always matches what you can actually deliver.
Per-service checklists
Your SOP as a tick list — decon, clay, machine stages, panel wipe, coating, cure. Set a default for every service, and each booking keeps its own snapshot so editing the checklist later never rewrites a job you already did.
Job clocking
A start/stop timer for real labour hours, editable after the fact and stopped automatically when you mark the job complete. This is how you find out what a 20-hour correction actually costs you.
Multi-day service flag
Decide which services are allowed to run long. A wash stays a single slot; a coating package can stretch across the week without you having to remember to block the days by hand.
Quoting work you can’t price over the phone
Nobody should be giving a firm number for a correction on swirled black paint they have never seen. DetailBook is built so you can look first and price after.
Photo quotes — the customer attaches two to ten photos (JPG, PNG or HEIC) to the enquiry, and you price it once you have seen the paint
Range pricing — publish a “from £X”, take the booking, confirm the exact figure after inspection
Price on application — leave the price blank entirely and quote every one by hand
Custom one-off line items — add bespoke work that isn’t in your catalogue, priced per job
Correct Price — fix a mis-quote before money is in flight, with an audit trail. It is blocked the moment a Stripe record exists, so nothing already paid can be silently rewritten
Multi-vehicle grouped quote — one quote covering every car in a group booking
Send Proposal
The coating package sales tool
Build a tiered quote — Standard, Premium and Deluxe — with add-ons, a choice of dates and an optional discount. The customer picks their tier and their slot, and books it themselves. It is the natural shape for three-year, five-year and nine-year coatings, or stage one against stage two correction.
Prefer to keep it simple? Send Quote pre-fills the service, price, date and time and the customer just accepts. Either way they can accept or decline by email using a 48-hour quote link, with an automatic chase after 24 hours by email and SMS. If they say yes on the phone instead, you confirm it in place yourself.
A £2,000 coating should not be asking for the same deposit as a £120 valet, and a held slot should never sit dead because someone never paid the link.
Tiered deposits — a different percentage above a price threshold, so the big jobs are protected properly
Card saved for later — a deposit-bearing booking stores the card off-session, so Charge Saved Card collects the balance without chasing
Unpaid deposit requests expire after 24 hours and release the slot back into the diary
Exemptions — waive deposits for a trade or VIP customer, skip it on a single booking, or confirm a booking whose customer never paid
Payment links — a 48-hour Stripe checkout for a balance, per booking or for a whole multi-vehicle group
Mark paid for cash or bank transfer, with partial-payment states and an honest ledger
Add-on delta charging — adding extras to a paid job charges only the difference
0% commission
The money is yours
Payments run through Stripe into your own account. DetailBook takes 0% commission on bookings — standard Stripe fees of 1.5% + 20p apply on UK cards. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link are all supported, plus an Express Checkout wallet button, so paying a four-figure deposit takes a thumbprint.
One diary, built to be dragged around. Week, day and table views with a live “now” line, and a month view that drills into a day panel.
Drag to reschedule on week, day and month — drop one booking on another to swap them, and multi-vehicle groups move as one block
Owner override — drag a job outside hours, onto a day off or over a block and DetailBook asks “move it anyway?” rather than refusing. Customers booking themselves still follow every rule
Quiet moves — reshuffle a whole day without notifying anyone, then send everyone their final time with one action
Blocked time — full days by dragging on the calendar, partial-day blocks with a reason, and recurring weekly blocks you can delete a single occurrence of
Google Calendar two-way sync, Apple Calendar ICS subscribe, and a per-booking .ics for customers
Status timeline — Awaiting Confirmation, Confirmed, On My Way, Completed, each timestamped
Silent book-in to pencil a job in without pinging the customer yet, plus Close, Reopen and Archive so your To Do list only shows what still needs something
One honest note: DetailBook runs a single diary. There is no bay or ramp scheduling — you cannot give bay one and bay two independent availability. For a one-to-three-person studio working cars through in sequence that is usually how the week runs anyway, but if you need genuine parallel capacity, it is worth knowing before you sign up.
— What DetailBook doesn’t do
Aftercare is where a studio makes its money twice
A coating client is worth far more over three years than on the day they collect the car — if they come back on schedule and at your price rather than a walk-in one.
Maintenance Plans
Recurring care plans that create real future bookings on your calendar inside a protected horizon, with a colour per plan and a review screen for upcoming visits. A missed auto-book cannot silently skip a customer.
Welcome email when a customer joins a plan
Due reminder with a one-click rebook
A due-soon widget on your dashboard at 7, 14 and 30 days
A notification to you every time a plan books itself
Service prerequisites — make a maintenance wash bookable only by customers who have already had the full detail or coating, within a qualifying window you set. This is the studio-specific one: it stops walk-ins buying coating-maintenance pricing
Unlisted services with a private booking link — keep the public price list clean while a coating client self-books their own rate
Review requests by email and SMS with your Google link, on a daily schedule, with a per-customer cooldown so a repeat client isn’t asked every single visit
Follow-up and win-back emails to customers who have gone quiet, and rebook-from-a-past-job that pre-fills vehicle, add-ons and notes
Records, invoices and the numbers
Customer and vehicle history
Total revenue, booking count and last booking date per customer. Vehicles saved against them with make, model, size, colour, registration and a nickname, so the reg and spec never get retyped when you book them back in.
An audit trail per customer
Every booking, note, email, SMS and change on one timeline. Add notes like “always drops off 8am”, “wants the wheels off”, “coating applied 03/25” — the things you would otherwise be trying to remember four cars later.
Rename-safe service history
Bookings record which service they were, not the name it had that day. Renaming your catalogue never fragments a customer’s history or splits your revenue reports in two.
Invoices with VAT
PDF invoices with line items, VAT registration flag, number and rate, company registration number, bank details, payment terms, prefix, logo, accent colour, footer and T&Cs. Combine several visits onto one invoice, and void a sent one so it reads CANCELLED with a trail rather than vanishing.
Expenses and analytics
Log expenses with date, amount, category, receipt photo and payment method, including recurring ones, and export to Excel. Then read revenue trend, booking volume, service breakdown, average job value and top customer across this month, last month and year to date.
Funnel analytics
Visitors to your booking page, conversion rate, and where people are dropping out of the flow — so a coating page that gets traffic but no bookings is something you can see rather than guess at.
Multi-vehicle bookings
Up to five cars in one transaction with sequential slots and a grand total. Useful for the household that brings both cars in, or a small business dropping off a couple of vans.
Customer Hub
A passwordless magic-link portal where your customer sees upcoming and past jobs, reschedules or cancels if you allow it, rebooks a past job, starts a new booking and pays invoices — without emailing you to ask.
Your shop window
Browse & Book gives you visual service cards with cover images, categories and badges for bestsellers, studio or mobile, duration and “we quote you”. Add your logo, accent colour and font, your own subdomain, a QR code for the unit door and an embed snippet for an existing website.
Custom questions on the booking form can now be scoped to specific services — so only a coating enquiry gets asked “has it been coated before?”, and a wash booking isn’t. See the full feature list or how the CRM works.
Setting it up as a studio
1
Set your base and your intake times
Choose fixed base only, add your unit address, set working hours per weekday and publish your intake slots. Add a buffer between cars and a minimum advance notice so nothing lands on you overnight.
2
Build the menu the way you sell it
Add your services with real durations, mark the long ones as multi-day and the studio ones as studio only. Attach a checklist to each. Put a “from” price or price on application on the ones you need to see first.
3
Switch on condition reports and deposits
Enable pre-job condition reports in Settings → Operations & Workflow, connect Stripe, and set a tiered deposit so a coating asks for more than a valet.
4
Send the link and let the enquiries sort themselves
Share your Browse & Book page, stick the QR code on the unit door, embed it on your site. Photo enquiries come in, you quote them properly, and the confirmed ones land in the diary with a deposit already paid.
What it costs
Studios almost always want Pro, because deposits are the whole reason you are here.
Essentials is £25/month without deposits, SMS or invoicing. Compare both on the pricing page.
Your trial runs with Pro capabilities for 14 days. No card required to start.
Studio questions, answered straight
Detailing studio software handles booking, quoting, deposits, job records and customer history for a detailing business working from a fixed unit rather than a van. The difference from a mobile app is the shape of the work: customers drop the car off at your address, jobs run for days rather than hours, and the value of each job makes proof of condition and a proper quote far more important. DetailBook supports all of that with a fixed-base business type, multi-day bookings, pre-job condition reports and photo-based quoting.
Yes. Set your business type to fixed base only and every booking becomes a drop-off: the customer sees your unit address and is never asked for their own. You can publish fixed intake times such as 08:00, 10:30 and 13:00 instead of a rolling grid, set a buffer between cars, and set a minimum advance notice so nobody books a coating for tomorrow morning.
Yes. A booking can span several working days, and each day appears as a real segment on your calendar, so cure time between coating stages is blocked out rather than left to memory. You mark which services are allowed to run long, and when you reschedule a multi-day job the picker shades the days it currently occupies and exactly where it lands from the new start day.
No. DetailBook runs one diary. There is no concept of bay one and bay two, and availability is not calculated per bay, so you cannot publish two cars into the same slot and have the booking page treat them as separate capacity. For a one-to-three-person studio working through cars in sequence this is usually how the week runs anyway. If you need independent parallel availability across multiple bays, DetailBook does not do that today.
Yes. Choose the hybrid business type and set a location mode for each weekday, so you can be mobile Monday to Wednesday and studio Thursday to Saturday. Each service can also be marked studio only, mobile, or both, so a ceramic coating is only ever bookable at the unit while a maintenance wash can still be booked at the customer’s address.
Customers can attach two to ten photos to an enquiry, so you price the car after you have looked at the paint. You can also publish a “from” price and confirm the exact figure after inspection, or leave a service as price on application and quote it manually. For coating packages, Send Proposal builds a tiered Standard, Premium and Deluxe quote with add-ons and a choice of dates, and the customer picks their tier and their slot and books it themselves. There is more in our guide to pricing car detailing services in the UK.
Send a pre-job condition report before you start. It is a section-by-section set of photos with your notes, timestamped and acknowledged by the customer before any work begins, with a PDF copy on the booking. Once it has been sent it cannot be edited, which is the point — a record you could revise afterwards would not be worth much.
Most studios want Pro at £50 per month, because deposits, SMS sending, the invoice module, discount codes and tipping are all Pro features, and deposits are the whole point on a £2,000 coating. Essentials is £25 per month. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with no card required, and it is month to month so you can cancel anytime. DetailBook charges 0% commission on bookings and payouts go direct to your own Stripe account.
Support tickets with a 24-hour response, including attachments and photos, an in-progress state so you can see it is being worked on, and a notification in the app when we reply. It is a ticket system rather than a chat widget, so you will not get an instant answer at 11pm — but you will get a real one from someone who details cars.
Try it on your next coating booking
Fourteen days, Pro capabilities, no card. Set your unit up as a fixed base, put your coating packages behind a tiered proposal, switch condition reports on, and see how the week runs when the diary knows a three-day job is a three-day job.
