What's New in VanMan: One Inbox, Fixed Pricing, Bundles & More

Since the mid-year round-up we've been working on the two things removalists lose the most money to: messages nobody sees, and prices nobody can pin down. VanMan now has a proper unified inbox, and a pricing model that finally admits not every job is charged by the hour. Here's the rundown.

One Inbox for Email and SMS

The headline. VanMan has a new Inbox — every customer email and every SMS in one two-pane list, with a live unread count in the sidebar.

The change underneath it matters more than the screen. Before, an inbound email only reached you if its subject carried a job number; anything else was thrown away. Now every inbound message is kept. A fresh enquiry, a customer writing from a different address, a text from a mobile you don't recognise — it all lands on the Unassigned tab instead of disappearing.

VanMan then does the obvious thing: it compares the sender's email and phone against your job contacts and offers matching jobs as suggestions, so assigning a message is usually one click. Assign it and the message — and its attachments — file onto the job. Assign an email thread and the whole conversation goes with it.

The rest of it is the stuff you'd expect from an inbox and haven't had: threaded or flat views, filters by channel, search, bulk read and archive, a Sent tab with delivery statuses, and the calendar's job side panel right there in the message pane, so you can change a status or a truck without leaving the message that asked you to.

Your Email Actually Comes From You

Outbound email now goes out through your connected Gmail or Outlook mailbox. It comes from your real business address, it lands in your provider's Sent items, and it threads properly in the customer's mail client. Applies to job emails, booking emails, inbox replies and workflow emails alike. If nothing's connected, VanMan falls back to its own delivery so the message still goes.

Alongside it: attachments everywhere. Inbound email attachments are captured (including on unmatched mail, which previously lost them), MMS media on inbound SMS is downloaded, and you can attach images and PDFs to anything you send. Photos and video preview in a lightbox; assign the message to a job and the files are on the job.

And two things that were always missing — per-user email signatures you can paste straight out of Outlook with formatting intact, and personal message templates that only you see, sitting alongside the shared ones in every template picker.

Three Ways to Price a Job

Estimates used to assume hourly and bolt a fixed price on the side. Now the first question on a new estimate is how is this job priced?, and there are three honest answers:

• Fixed price — one agreed total. VanMan derives the implied hourly rate for you.
• Hourly — a rate per hour, crew and time; the total calculates itself.
• Hybrid — hourly labour with fixed-price extras and bundles on top.

Pick one and you're offered the appraisal templates set up for that mode, not a list you have to filter in your head. The job's Costs tab carries the same choice as a Contract type, and jobs that aren't hourly wear a badge in the header.

The best part is on fixed-price jobs. Record what the job actually used, and the receipt shows Fixed price, Internal costs and a Margin line that goes red when the flat rate didn't cover it. It's the fastest way to find out that the number you've been quoting for three-bedroom moves stopped working eight months ago.

There's also Import estimate on the Costs tab, which pulls the quote across as real cost lines and tells you whether the two totals match — so the gap between quoted and billed stops being something you discover at invoicing.

Bundles

A bundle is a set of items priced together at one fixed amount. Packing kit — $180, rather than six lines of boxes and tape the customer has to add up.

Build them once at Settings → Bundles with their items and their price, then drop them onto any hybrid-priced job — or select lines already on a job and bundle them on the spot for a one-off like Stairs & long carry. Member lines nest under the bundle so you can see what's inside; the customer sees one line.

Crews can add, edit and price bundles from the mobile tally too.

The Catalog Is Now "Costs"

Materials and Material Categories are now Costs and Cost Categories, under a Catalog group in Settings. The list was never only packing materials — your crew rates were always in there — and the name was sending people looking elsewhere.

More usefully: costs can now be retired. A retired item stays on every job, quote and bundle it's already on, but stops being selectable for new work, and comes back with one click. Deleting was always blocked once a job referenced an item, which left tidying a messy catalog effectively impossible. Now it isn't.

VanMan Shows You Round

New users get a welcome video and a guided tour of the dashboard on first sign-in — per person, so every teammate you invite gets their own rather than being talked through it by whoever set the account up.

After that, the ? in the top bar always offers a walkthrough of the screen you're on: calendar, day plan, job page, requests, incidents, contacts, timesheets, staff, invoices, trucks, settings. Each highlights the parts of the page in turn, respects your permissions, and links through to the Help Centre for anything you want to go deeper on.

Know Where Your Work Comes From

Your booking form can now ask "Where did you hear about us?" — your own list of sources, plus an Other box that catches the ones you never thought to list.

The answers land on a Referral Sources card on your dashboard: a bar per source over this month, last month, last three months or all time, the free-text Other answers underneath, and — the number that actually matters — how many of those enquiries became jobs. A source sending you forty tyre-kickers is worth less than one sending eight signed moves, and now you can prove it before the next invoice for a directory listing turns up.

Deleted Jobs Come Back

Deleting a job never destroyed it, but there was no way to see one again. Job Search now has an Include deleted checkbox: deleted jobs show dimmed with a red badge and a Restore button that brings the job, its locations and its contacts back in full.

A Much Better Activity Trail

A job's Activity tab now covers about forty kinds of event, names who did each one, and — the real change — expands. Click an entry and you get the detail: a status change shows the old status and the new one as coloured badges; a message shows the recipient, subject, a preview and its delivery status; an invoice shows the customer, total and a link through to Xero.

It used to tell you that something happened. Now it tells you what it was before.

Mobile

The app has had a busy few months:

• The job timer works with no signal. Start, pause and stop apply instantly, queue as changes that survive an app restart, sync in order when coverage returns — and carry the time you actually pressed them. A start tapped in a basement at 8:02 and synced at 8:40 is recorded as 8:02.
• A Time tab — the last week of timesheets, scoped to your selected truck, tapping through to any day. Days already submitted open read-only, and View Day replaces Start Day on the Today screen once the office has them.
• An Estimate screen — the quote in the crew's pocket: pricing mode, total, logistics, crew, time, materials and bundles. Read-only, because the estimate belongs to the office.
• Import estimate on the tally, with a labour-item picker, an editable fixed charge, and an estimate-vs-import comparison.
• Bundles on the tally — add from the catalog, build one on the job, edit its items and price, with member lines nested and crew hours shown.
• Retired costs tagged on existing lines and excluded from the picker.
• Company names on jobs, so commercial work reads as the company.
• Long job notes and item lists collapse with a Show more toggle.
• A redesign refresh, and the floating timer pill is back — scoped to your truck, with a Profile toggle.

Odds and Ends

Invoices now bill the company where the contact has one, with the person kept as the contact behind it — so Xero ends up with the business that owes you, not whoever signed the form. A configurable Inbox Sync Frequency sits alongside the providers' push notifications, with a manual Sync button in the Inbox for when you're waiting on a specific reply. And the Appraisal tab can be relabelled Estimate if that's the word your business uses.

What's Next

Reporting and route optimisation are still the big ones in progress. If there's something you'd like to see, hit the chat icon in the app and tell us.