How it works
One sum, done for you, all day
See You Soon is a free iPhone app for tradespeople. It reads the calendar you already keep, costs every journey against live traffic, and shows one leave time for each job. When a job overruns it drafts the text to each customer left waiting, which you send. It needs calendar access and iOS 26 or later.
The app answers one question before any other, and everything else on the screen is supporting detail.
Leave time=job start−travel time−your buffer
A 16:00 job, 27 minutes away, with a 15 minute buffer, means leaving at 15:18. That is the number on the card, and it is the only one you have to read.
Three steps
What actually happens
It reads the diary you already keep
Every calendar you leave switched on, across every account on the phone. Birthdays, holidays and cancelled events are ignored. You are never asked to duplicate anything, and there is no second diary to disagree with the first.
It costs every journey against live traffic
By car, on foot or on public transport, your choice. The next journey is costed from where you are now. Later journeys from the job before them. Where public transport times are not published for a route, it says so and gives you the driving time rather than nothing.
It puts one number on the screen
The leave time, in the largest type on the page, with a countdown that ticks each minute. When the moment comes, it tells you. If the traffic turns while you are on a job, it tells you that too, early enough to do something about it.
Your day
It opens on the tab that matters.
Flat, shallow, no hidden drawers, never more than two screens deep. It always opens on today, and it never restores a stale scroll position from yesterday: your day has moved on since you last looked.
Today
The screen the app exists for. The job you are standing in is pinned to the top so you never scroll to find out where you already are. The next one leads on its leave time. Finished jobs stay on the screen, dimmed, because you may still need that address.
Jobs
Everything booked and everything done, in one list. Past, Today and Upcoming as three segments, month headings with the year on them, a date picker to jump straight to March 2024, and search by customer, job or place. It tells you the range it has actually loaded, because a diary that quietly ended at the edge of what it read would look exactly like a diary that ended.
Customers
The people you work for, where they are, when you were last there and when you are next due. One tap to Navigate, Call or Message. They come from a group you already keep in Contacts, and with no group picked the tab asks for one rather than listing everybody in your phone.
Suppliers
The merchants and builders' yards you buy from, on the same footing as your customers. Name, town, number, and one tap to ring the trade counter or drive to it.
Settings
Short on purpose. Travel mode, buffer, working hours, reminders, which calendars to read and which of those hold jobs, contact groups, and the wording of every message the app writes.
Finding the address
Somewhere to drive to
A job is only useful if there is somewhere to drive to, and nobody writes calendar entries for a computer. The address ends up in the location field, or in the notes, or as a link somebody pasted from a text message. The app looks in all four places, in order.
- 1
A map pin the calendar already holds
Exact, free, and nothing else can beat it. A coordinate the calendar is already carrying wins every time.
- 2
The location text, looked up on the map
The normal case: somebody typed an address into the location field.
- 3
An Apple Maps link pasted into the event
Where the location field is itself a link, this is read before the text, because looking up the literal characters of a URL means nothing.
- 4
An address written into the notes
The last resort, and the one most likely to need a second look, which is why the app says when it used it.
A job with no address still appears
Marked plainly as “No address”, and left out of the travel sums rather than guessed at. It is still on your day, because you still have to do it.
An address that will not resolve keeps its text
You can still read it, and Apple Maps often finds what an automatic lookup cannot. It simply earns no leave time.
It says where each one came from
The detail screen names the source, so you can tell when the app has read something out of free text and might want checking. Where there is nobody to ask, it writes the text that asks for the address, with your sign-off on the end. You send it.
Notifications
Four, and no more
Every one has to be actionable at the moment it fires. An alert you cannot do anything about is the reason people turn notifications off, and an app whose notifications are off is an app that has stopped working.
Leave now
At the leave timeLeave now for J. Okoro. 27 min to 4 Vicarage Road. Arrive 16:00.
Reminder
However long before that you chooseLeave in 15 min for J. Okoro.
Traffic increased
When a recalculation pulls the leave time earlier by a material marginLeave at 15:04, 9 min earlier than planned.
Running late
Five minutes past the leave time, if you have not set offYou were due to leave at 15:18.
Every one carries the same three actions
Traffic alerts are for the next job only
A leave time four jobs out will be recalculated a hundred times before you get there. Nagging about a number nobody can act on yet is noise.
The baseline is what you were last told
Not the previous calculation. A journey that degrades three minutes at a time never trips a threshold on any single step, and that is exactly how somebody quietly loses half an hour.
The running-late alert is withdrawn as soon as the app sees you have set off.
Running late
The job overran. Now what?
One tap on the job you are standing in. Say how much longer, either as “another half hour” or as “I’ll be done by twenty past”, and the app shows you the rest of your day before it changes anything.
Twenty minutes lost inside a forty-five minute gap costs the next customer nothing. So that job is not late, is not moved, and its customer is not texted. The day is not shifted by a flat amount: an app that apologises to four people on behalf of somebody who will be on time for three of them is one you stop reading.
Four markers, not three
Late
Arrival lands more than five minutes past the booked time.
A few minutes later
It moves, but not enough to call it late. Saying “on time” about it would be the app asserting something the customer at the window could disagree with.
On time
The gap absorbed it. Nothing moves, nobody is texted.
Can’t tell
The journey could not be costed. Unknown, never nought: a missing travel time treated as zero reports the whole afternoon as comfortably on time.
Then, and only then: telling people
Nothing is texted while you are deciding
A message sent and then a tap on Cancel leaves a customer holding a time your diary never got, and there is no way to take it back.
One deliberate tap per customer
Nothing advances on its own. A queue that auto-opens the next composer either skips somebody silently or traps you in composers you have to refuse one at a time.
Never one message to several people
That would be a group message where every customer sees the others’ numbers, and the text names a different arrival time for each of them anyway.
A shift that walks a job past the end of your working day, or over midnight, is flagged rather than refused. You are the authority on your own evening. But a cascade that quietly writes a call-out into the small hours has turned an overrun into a booking nobody made.
Availability
Asked in somebody’s kitchen.
Apple’s Calendar can show you Thursday. It cannot tell you that Thursday at 14:00 in Solihull is impossible because you are in Redditch until 13:30. Every surface here earns its place by knowing about the driving.
Coming up
A fortnight at the foot of Today. One line per day: four jobs, 08:00 to 17:00. Holiday, all day. Nothing booked. Runs of empty days collapse into a single row, and the biggest usable gap is named where there is one.
A day opens to its jobs, and a job on it opens to the form that can move it, which is the one most likely to need moving.
Find a time
Tell it how long the job is and where, and it proposes the times that add the least driving to your week. Nine minutes from Highbury Works. Day is free. Earliest free time.
Five suggestions at most. A slot finder that returns thirty times has handed the decision back to you.
Why the list is short and plain
The reason is the whole value
Never a score, never a ranking number, never a star. You are weighing “nine minutes away” against “but Friday suits her better”, and only you can do that.
Impossible times are absent, not greyed out
A slot that would make you late for a job you have already booked is not offered at all. Being handed a time that makes you late for Mrs Patel is worse than being handed nothing.
Your working week is worked out, not configured
The app infers it from the diary you already keep, states its conclusion on the screen where it is used, and lets you correct it in Settings. A correction is permanent. A confirmation screen would be the setup step the inference exists to avoid.
It places. It never moves work by itself. A suggestion fills a gap that already exists. Nothing booked is rescheduled, shortened or reordered, and nothing in the slot finder writes to your diary.
Booking
Adding a job without leaving the app
It reads your diary, and it can add to it. One way only, and never behind your back.
You see the day you are booking into
The new job sits in time order among the ones already there. When the drive will not fit, it says which job it clashes with, or which gap is too short and by how much, or plainly that it could not tell.
It never blocks Save
The app knows the driving time and nothing else. Not the shortcut, not the key safe, not that the job before is a twenty-minute call-out booked as an hour. It says what it sees, once, and gets out of the way.
It writes back where you can read it
Customer name and number go into the event notes, in the shape the app reads back, so the job shows up complete in Apple’s Calendar too. You choose which calendar it saves to, and only calendars that can actually be written to are offered.
Contacts stay yours
You can look a customer up while booking, and add a new one into a group you already keep. The app never creates, renames or empties a group, and never alters or deletes anybody.
Every message it writes, in your words
Confirming a job, on my way, running late, asking for an address: nine of them, each with the real time already filled in. You can rewrite any of them in Settings. The editor shows the message with a real-looking time in it and you type around it, so there is no notation to learn, no merge field and no curly brackets.
Your sign-off goes on the end of all of them, because a text from a number the customer has not saved is a text that does not get read. The app writes them. You press send.
When it recalculates
Not on a timer alone. The day is rebuilt whenever something has actually changed, so the number on the screen is never a stale one presented as live.
- When the diary changes, including an edit made in Apple’s Calendar app
- When you set off
- When you bring the app to the front
- On an interval you choose, five minutes by default
When it cannot work it out
Degrading is a designed state, not a failure. Three things happen rather than an error message.
The card says “Starts at”
Where travel cannot be costed, the same card answers the same question with less, rather than showing a blank space.
The estimate admits its age
If the network drops, the last good leave time stays on screen and says how old it is.
“Can’t tell” is a real answer
A missing travel time is never treated as zero. That would report the afternoon as comfortably on time, which is a wrong answer that looks like a right one.
Zero setup
Grant calendar access and it is useful immediately. No onboarding wizard you cannot skip, no data entry, no duplicate diary to maintain.
