Automation for trades businesses

The phone rings at 2am. Someone picks up.

Atum is the office side of a trades business: the calls, the quotes, the follow-ups, the website, and the record of what each one earned. The engine underneath it is built. Setting it up for your company starts the day you come on. Nights and weekends are the easiest place to start.

Show me what it does

Plumbing
Electrical
HVAC
Refrigeration
Roofing
Industrial maintenance

01 What picks up

One engine, and every word in it is yours.

The phone, the chat on your website and the messages are front doors into the same engine. It reads what the customer wants, answers from a script your company signed off, stops and fetches a person the moment it is out of its depth, and writes down what happened twice. The detail is the product, so here it is in full.

It cannot say a word you have not signed off.

Every sentence the system is able to send lives in a script library that belongs to your company. Each script is stored with a fingerprint of its own text and the name of the person who approved it. Change one word afterwards and the fingerprint stops matching, so the system refuses to send that script and puts it back in the approval queue instead. Sign-off is not a promise we make to you. It is a check that runs before every single message.
The AI decides where a message goes. It never writes what your customer reads.

The model has one job: read an incoming message and return one label from a list you agreed, plus the facts it picked out, a name, an address, a postcode. It cannot return a sentence. The reply itself is rendered from your script. Prices, response times, dates and availability can only be filled in from your own settings, never from the model and never from what the caller said. A price you never wrote down cannot be spoken, because there is nowhere in the system for it to come from.
It tells people it is not a person, and that cannot be edited out.

Disclosure is not a line at the top of a script that somebody could quietly delete. Every kind of conversation has to name the script that carries it, that script is marked as one that cannot be removed, and its fingerprint has to match its sign-off. If any of that is wrong, that kind of conversation does not start at all. There is no setting it can run at and no hour at which it slips through. You can reword the disclosure, because it is your brand and your voice. Rewording sends it back through approval. Deleting it is not one of the options.
You set how much rope it gets, one kind of conversation at a time.

Four settings: draft everything and send nothing, hold every reply for a person, send immediately and flag it for review, or run on its own. It is set per kind of conversation, not per company, so an emergency can run on its own while quoting still waits for you. The setting is read fresh on every single reply, so you can pull one back at 3am without restarting anything and without ringing us. One button puts all of it back to holding. Every change is recorded: who moved it, when, which way, and why.
Nobody is left in silence while your people sleep.

Holding every reply for a person has an obvious hole in it at 3am, which is that at 3am there is no person. So a held reply has a clock on it. If nobody releases it inside the time you set, an approved holding message goes out on its own, the customer knows they have been heard, and the drafted reply waits for the morning. Ten minutes, unless you tell us otherwise.
It stops the moment it is out of its depth.

Handing over is the default, not the exception. It hands over on a word you flagged, on a complaint, on anything legal, on a voice note rather than guessing at what was said, on a message it is not confident enough about, on too many turns without getting anywhere, and on too many messages inside one hour. When it hands over it stops on that conversation for good, sends one approved holding line, and puts the whole thing in front of a person. It does not quietly take the conversation back.
It cannot contact anybody who has not contacted you.

The function that sends a message has no field for a recipient. The number is read off a conversation, and a conversation exists only because somebody wrote to you or rang you first. There is no contact list in this system, no spreadsheet import, and no way to send one message to a thousand people. That is not a rule we follow. There is nowhere to put the list.
Two records, and the one your invoice rests on can be checked.

The first keeps every message word for word, with the time and which script answered, and it is deleted on the schedule you choose. Ninety days, unless you tell us otherwise. The second holds no message text and no phone numbers at all, one line per conversation, kept for the life of the agreement and seven years after, because it is billing evidence rather than customer data. Every line carries a fingerprint of the line before it, so a line that was altered or removed breaks the chain, and you can walk that chain yourself. What we invoice is something you can audit rather than something you take on trust.

None of the above is a policy document. Each one is a check that has to pass before a message can leave, and the system stops rather than skipping one.

Every part of it, in detail

02 Start here

What is costing you money right now?

Pick the one that sounds most like your week. Under each one is the part of Atum that handles it.

Atum answers it.

A real conversation, on the second ring. Not a voicemail, not a menu, not a beep.
It finds out what has happened, where, and how bad it is.
If it is an emergency it wakes the person on call and tells them what they are walking into.
If it can wait until morning, it books it and lets everybody sleep.

See a whole night, minute by minute

Atum is built to chase it.

Two days later, a message. A week later, another one, worded differently.
If they reply, it answers the easy questions and passes the hard ones to you.
If they have gone, it says so and closes the quote off, instead of leaving it open forever.
Either way you find out what happened, which is more than most quotes ever tell you.

How quoting works

Atum is built not to forget.

Every conversation ends with a next step and a date on it.
When the date arrives, the message goes out. Nobody has to remember.
Some work comes round again: a service, a filter, an annual check. It is diaried the day the job finishes.
Nothing sits in somebody's head or on a note stuck to the dashboard of a van.

How follow-ups work

We build it, and we keep it right.

Pages that load fast on a phone with one bar of signal, because that is where your customers are standing.
It says what you do, where you work, and how to reach you tonight.
When your hours, your area or your services change, you say it once and the site changes.
Every enquiry from the site lands in the same place as every phone call.

What we build

Atum is built to keep the receipt.

Every call, message and web form is logged, with the time it came in and where it came from.
When one turns into a job, the job is tied back to it.
When the job is invoiced, the amount is tied back too.
At the end of the month you get one list, and you can open any line and read the original conversation.

See what the report looks like

Atum is built to answer them.

Are you open. Do you cover my area. How soon can somebody come. Do you do this kind of work. Where is my technician.
Answered on the phone, on the website, by email and by text, without anybody stopping what they are doing.
Anything it cannot answer goes to a person, with everything that has already been said attached to it.
It is the same conversation across every channel. Your customer never has to start again.

How the messages work

03 How it fits together

One system, not six tools.

Atum is an old Egyptian word built on a root that means completeness: one thing that holds all the others inside it. That is not a decoration on this website, it is the design. Every part below is the same system looking at the same customer, so nothing gets dropped in the gap between two products that were never meant to talk to each other.

Where the name comes from

They find you Website
Built by us, kept current by us, fast on a phone.
They get through Calls
Answered at any hour, triaged against your rules.
They get an answer Communications
Confirmations, updates and the everyday questions.
They get a price Quoting
Written from the call, sent the same day, your prices.
They are chased Follow-ups
Twice, differently, then an honest answer either way.
You see what it earned Reporting
Which call became which job, and what it billed.

04 The way in

Start with the nights.

You do not have to hand over the whole business on day one. Start with the hours nobody is in the office. Evenings, nights, weekends, the week between Christmas and New Year. It is the smallest change you can make and the easiest one to check, because you can listen to every single call.

An example night. This is how the system is built to behave, not a customer's story