Job management software for locksmiths: a UK guide

Last updated: August 2026

It is twenty past one in the morning and you are on your knees at a uPVC door in a stairwell, most of the way through a gearbox that has finally let go. Your phone rings. You cannot answer it, and by the time you can, that caller has scrolled to the next result and is already talking to someone else. They will not leave a voicemail and they will not ring back.

Nothing about that hour is a diary problem, which is most of what field service software is built to solve. The problems in this trade are the call you could not take, the price you agreed at a door with nothing in writing, and the fact that when a job comes back at you six months later, no regulator holds a record of it, so yours is the only one.

Nobody licenses you, so your own records are the only proof

There is no statutory licence to trade as a locksmith anywhere in the United Kingdom. The Master Locksmiths Association says so on its own site, in capitals: the industry is not regulated, and anybody can trade as a locksmith irrespective of their competence, background or motive. Locksmith is not a protected title, and there is no competent person scheme. The Commons held a debate titled Licensing of Master Locksmiths on 22 September 2021. No legislation followed.

One activity does need a licence. Keyholding, holding keys or alarm codes so you can respond to a customer’s alarm, is licensable under the Private Security Industry Act 2001 and sits with the Security Industry Authority. Cut and hold a spare set for a commercial client and you are close to that line, and the honest answer on where it falls is to ask the SIA.

The consequence of the licence gap is the part nobody writes down. Locksmithing has no CP12, no EICR and no FENSA equivalent, so nothing forces a record into existence. Your job records are not compliance. They are your defence, and they are the first thing to slip.

Auto work now has a gatekeeper, and it arrived in April 2026

SERMI, which controls independent access to vehicle security functions including key programming and immobiliser resets, went live in the UK on 1 April 2026, and vehicle locksmiths are explicitly in scope. The IGA’s SERMI page lists what approval takes: public liability insurance in excess of £1m, a Basic DBS certificate for the owner, and a certificate lasting five years with at least two audits, one of them unannounced. A locksmith who never touches a car is untouched by it, but the auto side now carries a records burden it did not have before.

Every honest quote is heard through the rogue trader problem

Rogue locksmith reports recorded by the MLA have risen sharply, from 242 in 2021 to 402 in 2025, up 66% since recording began. The pattern is consistent. An advertised £39, £49 or £59 callout becomes hundreds or thousands at the door, including one recorded case of £1,800 for a simple lockout. A BBC investigation filmed a locksmith attempting to charge more than ten times the phone quote and drilling locks that could have been opened non destructively.

None of that is your business, and all of it is your problem. The MLA’s own red flag list for consumers names vague pricing over the phone as a warning sign, which means your caution about quoting for a door you have not seen reads to the caller as the scammer’s tell. Attempting to drill first is red flag six, so on the occasions when drilling a high security cylinder is the right call, you are explaining yourself. The customer arrives already suspicious.

You cannot fix the market. What you can do is make the argument winnable: a price agreed and recorded before work starts, a note of what you found and why the figure moved, and photographs of the lock’s condition before you touched it.

The doorstep contract, and the records that defend you

Agreeing a price on a doorstep forms an off premises contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Pre contract information has to be given on paper or another durable medium before the contract is formed: who you are, what the service is, the total price including tax, and the cancellation conditions. There is normally a fourteen day right to cancel. The urgent repairs exemption is narrower than people assume: where the consumer specifically asked you to call out for urgent repairs, the cancellation right does not apply to that work, but it does not extend to anything else sold on the same visit. The lockout is exempt and the three cylinders you fitted while you were there are not. Failing to give the cancellation information is a criminal offence rather than a civil irritation, so it is worth getting one standard form right once.

Identity is the other exposure. No statute requires you to check who you are opening a door for, and there is no defence without it, because opening a door for the wrong person is assisting a burglary. In a real lockout the photographic ID is usually inside, so what protects you is the documented alternative: a bill retrieved once you are in, a tenancy agreement, the agent or landlord confirming by phone. Note what you accepted and from whom.

The related trap is a lock change. Under section 1 of the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 it is an offence to unlawfully deprive a residential occupier of occupation, and a further offence to do acts likely to interfere with their peace or comfort with intent to make them give up occupation. A landlord asking you to change the locks while the tenant is out is asking you to take part in a criminal offence. That Act covers England and Wales, with equivalent protections elsewhere.

The comebacks arrive months later and they are all the same shape. You let a stranger into my flat. You said £80 and charged me £340. The lock you fitted is not insurance standard and my claim was refused. The defence in every one is a contemporaneous record of what was found, agreed, fitted and authorised, and in most one van businesses that record is a text thread.

The phone is the bottleneck, not the diary

For a one van operator the diary is the phone. Calls come in, you give an ETA on the call, and the schedule is a mental queue plus, at most, a notes app. Almost every field service product answers that with drag and drop scheduling, which for a reactive callout business solves a problem you do not have: the next job is now.

The problem you do have is that a lockout caller does not leave a voicemail and does not ring back, so a call missed while you are under a door is a job lost permanently. The busiest calling hours, evenings, overnight and weekends, are exactly the hours a one person business cannot cover and the hours that command the highest rate. That is why the field service product most identified with locksmiths is built around a phone system rather than a diary.

The second constraint is the van. Whether you fix it on the first visit is entirely a function of what you are carrying: euro cylinders in a spread of sizes and offsets, mortice deadlocks, nightlatches, multipoint gearboxes, handles and key blanks. A second visit on a small emergency job destroys the margin on it, and nobody in a one van business runs stock control.

The third constraint is what gets sacrificed. A quoted two hour master key suite on a Tuesday afternoon is the thing that moves when a lockout comes in at twenty to two, and the customer whose afternoon you moved is the commercial one who pays best.

Money at the door, and money on account

Emergency work is priced as a callout plus labour plus parts, with the hourly rate stepping up out of hours and again overnight. A fixed price agreed on the phone is what the MLA pushes members towards, because an all in figure quoted up front is the single most effective defence against the reputation problem above. Master key suites and commercial fit outs are quoted as projects.

Payment splits along the same line. At a door, a card reader is the norm: SumUp’s UK pay as you go pricing is 1.69% on in person card payments with no monthly fee. Cash increasingly reads as a red flag rather than a convenience.

Everyone who is not standing at the door pays on terms. Letting agents, insurers, councils and enforcement companies pay against a purchase order, and often only once the paperwork is right: job sheet, photographs, sign off. The person who secured a burgled property at 3am is the same person who then assembles the claim pack and chases it, which is covered in chasing unpaid invoices.

Two tax points. The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover, and a busy one van business on emergency rates sits close to it. Crossing it is a visible 20% price rise to domestic customers. Separately, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is already live for anyone whose qualifying income was over £50,000 in 2024 to 2025.

CIS mostly does not bite. HMRC’s CIS manual excludes the installation of security systems and states that doors equipped with locks do not represent a system, so ordinary lock fitting was never a construction operation. Where you can be drawn in is structural: hanging or altering doors and frames under a construction contract, and that one is for your accountant.

How Dispatch helps

Dispatch is built for work done at a stranger’s door, at speed, where the record you keep is the only thing standing behind you afterwards.

The completion report will not let a job close until someone has written up what they did and attached photographs, and it is on unless you switch it off. That is the difference between a price argument you win and one you cannot answer. Two way job chat, shared by WhatsApp or text, keeps what the customer asked for and what you quoted in one thread with photographs attached. Compliance documents attach to the job and stay for its life, so a photographed authority or a landlord’s written instruction sits where you can find it in a year.

Cancelling a job forces a written reason with a timestamp and the person who recorded it. Book onto a week calendar and the customer is told automatically when you are coming.

Then invoice from the doorstep and take card payment into your own Stripe account before you leave, with part payments recorded as they arrive and overdue invoices chasing themselves at 3, 10 and 21 days.

Every feature is on every plan, the caps are on seats and templates only, everything runs in the UK, and there is a free plan. One emergency callout is enough to see whether it fits.