Questions blinds firms ask
What it costs, what it does on site, and what happens to your data — answered plainly.
Blinds Base is built and run by a blinds fitter, so these are the questions we actually get asked before anyone signs up. Where the honest answer has a limit in it, the limit is written down here rather than left for you to find in month two.
What it costs
What does Blinds Base cost?
Two plans, and they carry exactly the same features — the only difference is how many people can log in. Basic is £99 for the first month, then £149/month, and covers 1 account. Standard is £199 for the first month, then £249/month, and covers up to 25 accounts (+£10/mo each beyond). Basic's single account is a hard cap rather than a nudge: on Basic you cannot create a second staff login at all.
What do I get on a plan?
Both plans include full CRM and job management, appointments and calendar, customers and Customer 360, quotes, invoices and payments, manufacturing and ordering, documents and reports, and email notifications. Nothing in that list is held back for the dearer plan. One point of precision on it: "invoices" there means the money side of a job — what a customer owes and what they have paid — because the paperwork a submitted job sheet actually generates is a quote, a deposit receipt, a payment receipt or a fitting sheet, with no separate invoice document. The plan price is not the whole bill in two cases, both priced elsewhere on this page: extra accounts on Standard, priced on its own line above, and the three Extras below, which are charged on top of the plan and two of which carry AI usage and optional SMS costs on top of that.
What are the Extras, and what do they cost?
Three optional Extras at £99 a month each: Facebook AI Lead Booker, Gmail Auto Booker, Calendar Auto Booker. The Facebook AI Lead Booker answers a Facebook lead form with a branded email within a minute, then reads the customer's email replies, answers from your own business knowledge and books a real slot from your live diary. The Gmail Auto Booker connects a Gmail mailbox, classifies what arrives and drafts the reply, checking the mailbox roughly every 15 minutes. The Calendar Auto Booker is the booking widget your own website embeds.
Is there anything to pay on top of an Extra's £99?
The Facebook AI Lead Booker and Gmail Auto Booker carry a real AI usage cost on top of the £99, driven by AI work rather than by normal everyday CRM activity; the Facebook one shows that spend on your own usage dashboard. The Facebook AI Lead Booker's dedicated SMS number is separate and optional — if you take one it is £2.50 a month for the number, plus 5p for every text you send and 1p for every text you receive. The Calendar Auto Booker is flat at £99 a month with nothing added.
Getting started
How do I sign up and try it?
There is no button that creates an account on the spot, and that is deliberate. You send an enquiry, we talk it through, and the account is built for your business before you ever sign in. The first month is the reduced price on either plan, and from then on the account is invoiced automatically every 30 days, counted from the day it was created.
How do I get my existing prices and fabrics in?
Supplier pricing goes in as the supplier's own Excel workbook — .xlsx or .xlsm, up to 50MB — and is parsed into real price grids you review before publishing. Your flat-rate fabric price table can be loaded from a CSV carrying Blind type, Fabric name, Minimum price and Rate per m² columns; a file with a blind type that is not one of ours is rejected whole, so a half-imported table is not a state you can end up in. One warning about that CSV, because it is a replacement and not a merge: a valid import wipes the entire flat-rate table and puts the file's rows in its place, and it cannot be undone from that screen. You are asked to confirm before it runs — export the current table first, and treat the import as the whole list rather than an addition to it. The rest of the setup — your companies, staff accounts and fabric books — is done with you when the account is built rather than left to you as a wizard.
What does support look like?
Most screens carry a Help button that opens a written guide to that exact screen — what it does, how to do each job on it, what happens after you press the button, and the questions people genuinely ask about it. Each guide has a "Was this helpful?" on the bottom that comes straight back to us, so the guides get fixed where they are thin. Beyond that you contact us directly, and if we need to sign in to your account to answer something, that sign-in shows up in your own Audit Log — what we can see without signing in is set out under Your data below.
Out on the job
Does it work on a phone at a customer's house, including with no signal?
Yes. The fitter workspace is built for a phone in the field — measure, add blinds, pick the fabric, price it, take a payment and capture both signatures on the device — and it can be added to a phone's home screen like an app. With no signal it carries on working while it is open, saving everything on the phone itself. One honest limit: if the page is closed and reloaded while there is still no connection, the fitter gets an offline notice until the phone reconnects, so it is worth leaving the workspace open on site.
What happens to a job sheet a fitter takes with no signal?
It is queued on that phone the moment they tap Save and send, signatures and payment included, and it sends itself the second the phone finds a connection. The queue retries about every 10 seconds and the fitter's Home screen shows exactly what is still waiting to go. If a sheet keeps failing, the office is told about it in the Problem Centre and told again while it stays stuck, rather than it sitting unnoticed on somebody's phone.
Pricing and fabric books
Can I import a supplier's price list?
Yes. Upload the supplier's workbook and you get a preview, not a live change: you review which price tables were found, which sheets were skipped and why, and anything the parser could not work out on its own, then publish it into the live catalogue. Nothing from a workbook reaches a fitter's job sheet until you press publish. Only the customer-facing selling column is ever read — the parser is built so it can never read from the supplier's cost column, so a trade price cannot end up quoted to a customer by accident.
Can I put every price under one blind type up in one go?
Yes. Bulk price change sets a percentage against the supplier tabs and flat-rate fabrics under a blind type you choose, and every job sheet priced from then on sells at the uplifted figure, rounded up to the whole pound. It never rewrites your supplier's imported prices — the percentage is set rather than added, and setting it back to 0 removes it. Separately, one fitter's own job totals can be moved by a percentage that no fitter ever sees a control for.
Your team and your customers
Who can see what?
There are four roles. CEO or Administrator sees everything; office gets customers, jobs, bookings, payments, documents, manufacturing, archived jobs and the audit log; a fitter sees only their own jobs, their own calendar and their own current-month payments; a manufacturer only gets the manufacturing workspace. On top of that, individual permissions can be granted or taken away from one named office account without a developer, with three deliberately locked to the CEO alone — inviting staff and changing permissions, pricing, and business financials. Fitter and manufacturer accounts are not tuned that way: a fitter has exactly one per-person switch, whether they may book their own calendar, and a manufacturer has exactly one, whether they may report Fabric Not In. Everything else about those two roles is fixed by the role itself.
Can customers book their own appointment?
Yes, with the Calendar Auto Booker. A short script on your own website turns an existing button or link into a booking form, where a visitor picks a genuine slot from your live diary and books a free measure with no login and no phone call. You decide which of your fitters can be offered for each brand you run. The booking lands on the same calendar as one the office typed in, and the customer gets a confirmation email.
How does a customer get their quote or receipt?
A submitted job sheet generates the paperwork itself — a quote, a deposit receipt, a payment receipt or a fitting sheet — carrying your own logo and colours. From the Documents screen, Send copy emails the customer their PDF and your terms and conditions to the address on file, and the row then reads Sent or Failed depending on what the mail provider reported back. A document's PDF is produced once and served unchanged from then on, so a customer's copy never quietly rewrites itself after a branding change.
Does it handle VAT?
Each job sheet carries its own VAT choice: no VAT, or VAT at 20 per cent added on top of the subtotal. The subtotal, the VAT and the total print on the customer's paperwork as their own lines, labelled Subtotal, VAT and Order total; that wording is fixed on the PDF itself, though the matching labels on the fitter's own on-screen job sheet can be reworded to suit your business. If you are not VAT registered, leave the choice on no VAT and the VAT line simply reads zero.
Your data
Where does my data sit, and who at Blinds Base can see it?
Every business runs in its own account on the same platform, and the separation is enforced by the database itself — Postgres row-level security scopes each query to your own organisation, not just the application code in front of it. Signing in to your CRM as support is the tightly held part: it needs a session that names your organisation specifically, is re-checked on every single request, and expires on its own after an hour at most. It is written into your own Audit Log as "Support session started by Blinds Base", so you can see that sign-in happened without asking us. And the part a privacy answer usually leaves out: we can see summary business information about your account from our own platform screens with no support session at all — revenue and outstanding balances, job and customer counts, your staff's names and roles, which integrations you use and your settings. That is how the platform is run, supported and billed. Those visits are recorded on our side, though that record is not shown to you today.
A customer asks us to delete everything we hold on them. What happens?
A CEO or Administrator can permanently delete a customer and everything filed against them — every job live and archived, their job sheets, documents, payments, the appointments on those jobs, and the Facebook lead or Gmail conversation matched to them. It cannot be undone. A few things it honestly cannot reach, and they are worth knowing before you promise a customer anything: the log of emails already sent keeps the address they went to; the original email still sits in your own Gmail account, where only you can delete it; a Facebook lead form or an email that was never matched to their record in the first place is joined to them by nothing, so it stays, keeping the name, email address, phone number and address it carries; an appointment booked with no job on it is not reached either, and the Gmail assistant's own bookings are always made that way, so it keeps the name, email address, phone number and address given for the visit; and three kinds of problem report — a failed automatic booking, a job sheet stuck on a fitter's device, and a failed appointment email for a visit booked without a job — are filed against no job and no customer, so the delete cannot find them, though each can carry the customer's name and two of them an email address. There is also an Export everything option on a customer's record, which produces one self-contained file you can send to whoever asked.
Can I get my data back out?
Yes, and without asking us. Customers, payments, documents, reports, your fabric price table, the manufacturing report and the audit log each export to CSV from their own screen whenever you want them. A single customer's whole record exports as one file that opens in any browser, and every document can be downloaded as its own PDF.
Still deciding? Tell us how your business runs and we’ll tell you straight whether this fits it.
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