Two messages Mucka can send your customers on its own: one when the job goes in the diary, and one shortly before you turn up. Between them they head off most of the "are you still coming?" calls and most of the wasted trips to an empty house.
Each one can go as a text, as an email, or as both — every channel has its own switch, and they all start off. Head to Settings → Customers → Automatic messages.
It's Customer messages, not Notifications. Settings → Mucka → Notifications is your own alerts, the ones that reach your phone. These two messages go to your customers, so they live under Settings → Customers → Automatic messages instead.
Or just ask. Say "turn on booking confirmations" to Mucka in chat or on the app and it'll switch them on for you, as long as you're the owner. Say "email them as well" and it'll switch the email on beside the text.
Ask on the phone line and it works slightly differently: Mucka can't flip a setting that messages your customers from a phone call, because you can't see what you're agreeing to. It queues it instead, and you'll find a card waiting in the app — one tap and it's on. Nothing changes until you tap it.
Text, email, or both
The screen lists the three messages with what each one currently does beside it — "Text and email", "Text", "Off". Tap one to open it and you get two switches, Text and Email. Turn on whichever your customers actually read, or both.
Most trades pick one. A text gets opened; an email gets kept, forwarded to a landlord, and found again in three weeks when somebody wants to know what was agreed. If you switch both on, the customer gets both — that's the point of two switches, but it's worth doing on purpose rather than by accident.
Two differences worth knowing before you choose:
- A text is delivery-tracked and an email isn't. The network tells Mucka whether a text landed, so a wrong number shows up as undelivered on the job. For email, "sent" is as far as anyone can ever know.
- An email can carry a link and a text can't. UK networks filter texts containing web links, so anything with a link goes by email.
Each channel has its own wording, because the two read differently: a text is one line that starts with your business name, an email opens with a greeting and signs off with your signature.
Booking confirmations
The moment a job goes in the diary with a date and a customer on it, Mucka tells them. As a text:
Ryan's Plumbing: Hi Andrew, you're booked in for your boiler service on Wednesday, 9am to 11am. Any problems, give us a ring on 01709 123456.
Or as an email, subject Your boiler service is booked in on Wednesday:
Hi Andrew,
You're booked in for your boiler service on Wednesday, 9am to 11am.
Job reference: J-014
If that no longer suits, just reply to this email and we'll sort another time.
Replies come straight back to your business address, not to Mucka.
This matters most for bookings taken over the phone. The customer agreed a time out loud and has nothing in writing, so a text is the difference between a booking they trust and one they ring back to check. If you've got the AI receptionist, every booking it takes gets one as soon as you approve it.
If you take bookings on the phone and confirm them yourself, you don't need this switched on for Mucka to know — tick Customer's confirmed this time on the job, or answer Already confirmed on the card it raises the night before. See Mark a job as confirmed with the customer.
Appointment reminders
A nudge before the visit:
Ryan's Plumbing: Hi Andrew, reminder we're with you tomorrow for your boiler service, 9am to 11am. Any problems, give us a ring on 01709 123456.
You choose how far ahead in Settings: a couple of hours, the day before, or up to three days. The day before is the usual pick. A wasted trip to a house with nobody in costs you an hour of van time and a slot you could have sold, so this one tends to pay for itself the first week.
The day before means 24 hours before the visit, not the evening before. A 2pm job gets its reminder at 2pm the day before, and a 9am job at 9am. If a job only goes in the diary after that moment has passed, there's no reminder for it, because the booking confirmation has just told the customer the date.
One lead time covers both the text and the email. You picked a lead time for the reminder, not for the pipe it travels on, so nobody gets reminded twice on two different days about one visit.
And a third: on my way
The same screen has an On my way row, with its own text and email switches. That one fires off the engineer's button rather than off the diary, and it isn't held to office hours — see Text the customer when you set off. Everything below about wording applies to it too.
Changing the wording
All of it is yours to word. Open a message in Settings → Customers → Automatic messages and its wording appears under the switches — one box per channel, so the text and the email are edited separately, and each appears only while that channel is on. The email box has a subject line above it.
Drop in the bits that change per customer by tapping the buttons under the box: their first name, what the visit is for, what the job is, the day, the arrival window. Under that you see the finished message exactly as the customer gets it, along with how many characters it is and how many texts it counts as. Anything over 160 characters counts as two.
A booking confirmation goes out when you book the job, not the day before, so don't write "tomorrow" or "today" into it: use the day button instead, and Mucka puts the right day in for each visit. If you do type one, Mucka points it out under the box.
Telling them what the job actually is
What the job is puts the description you wrote on the job into the message — so instead of "you're booked in for your Plumbing Insp." your customer reads "we're coming to renew the cold-water storage tank". It's the same words you typed into What's the job? when you booked it, which is also what prints on their job sheet.
Not every job has one, and that's fine: when there's nothing written, Mucka falls back to the job type, so the sentence still reads properly either way. And because it's the customer-facing box, nothing from Internal notes ever goes near a message.
If you go too far, Reset to Mucka's wording puts the original back. Each message saves on its own, so changing the reminder doesn't touch anything else on the screen.
Four things you can't change on a text, and they're all there to stop your messages failing:
- Your business name on the front. A text with no name on it reads as spam.
- The contact number on the end. So a customer with a problem can always reach you.
- No links, ever. UK networks filter out texts containing web links, and a filtered text doesn't arrive at all, with nothing to tell you. If you need to send someone a link, say "we've emailed it over" and let the email carry it.
- No made-up fields. Use the buttons under the box rather than typing the curly brackets yourself. If you type a field name Mucka doesn't recognise, it'll tell you when you save, because a field it can't fill would land in your customer's message exactly as you typed it — brackets and all. Mucka won't send one of those.
- No placeholders from your old system. If you paste in wording from software you used before, swap its placeholders for Mucka's buttons: Mucka can't fill a
[TIME]or a[Customer Name], so it asks you to change them before it saves, and it won't send a message that still has one.
An email works the same way, with three differences: it needs a subject line, it can carry a link, and it goes out with your email signature on the bottom and an unsubscribe link under that. The unsubscribe is not optional — it's what keeps your emails out of spam folders, and it's the same list the access emails use, so somebody who opts out is opted out of all of it.
The same screen also holds the wording for the on my way message, the review nudge and the service due email, so everything Mucka says on your behalf is in one place.
Knowing it actually arrived
You don't need to copy yourself in to check a text landed. Once a confirmation has gone, the job says what became of it:
A confirmation was delivered to their phone. No reply back yet.
That's the network confirming it reached the handset, not us saying we sent it. And if it didn't:
A confirmation went out but did NOT arrive — that number may be wrong. Worth ringing them.
You don't have to go looking for that one. Mucka raises a card the moment a text comes back undelivered, so a wrong number surfaces before the visit rather than after an empty house.
This is why there's no "copy me in" on the texts. A copy to your own phone only proves the message left us. The delivery receipt proves it got there — and if the customer's number is wrong, your copy still arrives perfectly, so a copy is blind to the one thing you're checking for.
If you'd like the emails in your own inbox, that one is worth having and costs nothing: Copy me in on the same settings screen sends you a hidden copy of every automatic email. Hidden means the customer never sees your address on theirs.
Booking one without texting the customer
Sometimes you want the job in the diary and the engineer told, but the customer left alone: you've already rung them, or it's a favour, or the landlord wants to tell the tenant himself.
Just say so when you book it: "book it for Tuesday, don't text the customer". The job goes in properly, booked, not pencilled, and nothing goes to the customer about it: no confirmation and no reminder, by text or email. Move the job later and that still holds.
Already booked it and the confirmation is on its way? Say "don't send that text" or "stop the confirmation". Mucka stops whatever hasn't gone yet and tells you straight if something had already gone, because a text that has landed can't be taken back. Mucka tells you when a booking's confirmation is due to go, and it usually goes within five minutes of booking, so say it soon.
Changed your mind? "Actually, do text them" puts it back in the queue.
There's no setting for one text. Switching booking confirmations off in Settings stops them for every customer, not just this one. To leave one customer out of every booking, use Turning reminders off for one customer or mute Mucka's messages on their record instead.
What Mucka does when things change
You don't have to manage any of this. Move the job and the reminder moves with it. The rules:
- Job moved? The reminder re-times itself to the new date. If the old reminder had already gone out, the customer gets a fresh one for the new time, so nobody's left holding the wrong date.
- Job cancelled? Nothing goes.
- Job put in a status that isn't booked in, then moved back to Scheduled? Nothing goes while it's out of the diary. Move it back and whatever it missed catches up: the booking confirmation goes straight away, and the reminder too if its time hasn't passed yet.
- Job already started or finished? Nothing goes. A reminder arriving after you've been and gone is just noise.
- No mobile on the customer's record? No text goes, and Mucka doesn't pretend otherwise. If the email is switched on and you've got an address, that still goes.
- No email address? Same the other way round.
- Customer texted STOP at some point? No text goes. That's a legal opt-out and it can't be overridden.
- Customer clicked unsubscribe on one of the emails? No email goes, to them, from anybody on Mucka. A text still can, if they never replied STOP.
Times of day
Confirmations and reminders only ever go out between 8am and 8pm, emails included. Take a booking at half eleven at night and the confirmation waits until eight the next morning. Same with an early start: a 7am job with a day-before reminder gets it at 8am the day before, not 7am.
If there's no sensible slot left, the text is dropped rather than sent late. A 7am job booked at 6am doesn't get a "reminder" at 8am, an hour after you knocked.
Recurring jobs
Set up a recurring job and the customer gets one confirmation, not one per visit. They agreed to a series, so twelve identical "you're booked in" texts would just be annoying. Each individual visit still gets its own reminder, which is the point of a recurring job in the first place.
Jobs that run over several days
Book a job with an end date a few days out — a bathroom, a full system swap — and Mucka puts a day in the diary for each working day, so your engineer's week looks right. The customer hears about it once:
Ryan's Plumbing: Hi Andrew, you're booked in for your bathroom installation Tuesday to Friday. Any problems, give us a ring on 01709 123456.
One confirmation naming both ends, and one reminder the night before the first day. Nothing on the Wednesday, Thursday or Friday mornings — you're already in the house by then, and "reminder we're with you tomorrow" while you're stood in their bathroom is the kind of thing that makes someone stop trusting the rest of it.
Use the end date rather than booking each day separately. Four days booked as four separate jobs are four separate bookings as far as Mucka can tell, so the customer gets four confirmations and four reminders. Set the finish date on the one booking and it's one text.
You'll notice the run text doesn't quote a time. That's deliberate — the first day starts when you said, the last day finishes when you said, and the days in the middle run your normal hours, so there's no one time that's true of all of them. The reminder before day one carries that day's actual times.
If they're off, Mucka tells you you're not telling anyone
Book a job in — or move one — while both of these are switched off, and Mucka raises a card saying the customer hasn't been told, with a link straight to the setting.
You get one card a day, not one per booking. A morning spent booking eight jobs raises one card, because eight identical cards saying the same thing is how an inbox stops getting read.
It's there because Mucka used to mention it in conversation and sometimes didn't — an owner booked eight jobs across four customers on one call and hung up believing every one of them had been texted. The card doesn't depend on Mucka remembering to say it.
The card never texts anybody. Whether your customers get confirmations is your call, and plenty of firms ring their customers themselves and want these left off. Dismiss it and it goes; it won't come back until the next day you book something.
Switching them on doesn't text your whole diary
Turning either of these on applies from your next booking. It doesn't fire off a burst of texts to everyone already in the diary. Those jobs were booked when the setting was off, and blasting reminders for work booked weeks ago isn't a nice surprise for anyone.
If you want a customer already in the diary to get one, open the job and save it. That re-checks the settings and queues the messages.
Nobody gets bombarded
There's a ceiling on the automatic texts, and it's per customer rather than per job: four in any seven days. Past that, Mucka stops texting that person and waits.
You'll almost certainly never meet it. Across every business on Mucka, nearly everyone getting automatic texts gets one or two a week. It's there for the odd week where somebody has a big job on, a service due and a quote visit all at once, so they don't end up with a phone full of us.
Three things it never touches:
- Anything you send yourself. On my way, running late, or a text you type. You pressed the button, so it goes.
- Gas safety texts. If somebody reports a gas smell they get the emergency number, whatever else has been sent that week.
- Payment messages, which are rare and matter.
If you ever wonder whether a customer got theirs, just ask Mucka. "Did we text Andrew about Tuesday?" gets you a straight answer, and if it was held back it says why, so you can ring them instead if it was an important one.
Turning reminders off for one customer
Some customers don't want reminding. A builder or a letting agent who booked the work themselves, and who has you at three sites this month, doesn't need a text the night before every visit — for them it's just noise from a number they already know.
So the reminder can be switched off for one customer without losing it for everybody else.
Open the customer's record and look for Appointment reminders. It reads as a sentence about them rather than a setting, so you can see at a glance where they stand:
Stonebridge Builders gets appointment reminders
Tap it and it turns into:
Stonebridge Builders does not get appointment reminders
That's it — saved as you tap, no Save button.
It only stops the reminder, not the booking confirmation. "You're booked in for Tuesday" still goes, because that's the one a busy customer actually wants. It's the night-before nudge that gets tiresome when somebody has you booked in constantly.
It also works on customers who are already in the diary. Switch it off this afternoon and the reminders lined up for next week stop with it — same as the account-wide switches below.
If you're ever wondering why somebody didn't get one, ask Mucka. It'll tell you the reminder was held because that customer is set not to get them, rather than leaving you hunting through settings that are perfectly correct.
And switching them off stops them straight away
Turn either switch off and nothing further goes out — including texts already lined up for jobs booked days or weeks ago. The switch is checked again at the moment each text would leave, not just when it was queued.
Worth saying plainly because it used to work the other way: a queued text is a plan to send, never a promise. Switching off is you changing your mind, and it takes effect on everything still waiting.
What these cost you
From 1 October 2026 every text Mucka sends your customers comes out of one allowance for your business: booking confirmations, reminders, on-my-way texts, the ones you send yourself, and your receptionist's replies. Emails are free and always will be.
- Your business gets 60 free texts a month, however many of you there are. They go back to 60 on the 1st and don't carry over.
- After that it's £45 for 500 more (plus VAT), and texts you buy never expire.
- Turn on auto-top-up and Mucka buys another 500 when you run low, so it never runs out.
You'll find your balance, the Buy button and auto-top-up at the top of Settings → Customers → Automatic messages.
If you do run out, Mucka keeps sending your confirmations and reminders on a small overdraft (25 texts) so nobody misses one, and emails you. Past that it stops texting until you top up; emails still go out as normal.
Texts are counted per 160 characters, so a long message counts as two or more. Mucka's own wording fits in one for a typical job, and the preview in Settings tells you what yours counts as before you save.
A couple of characters cost more than they look — a proper dash or a curly quote pushes a text onto a different alphabet and more than doubles it, so the editor points those out if you paste any in.
Who can change these settings
Owners and anyone with workspace management permission. Engineers can't see or change them, since these decide what goes out to the whole customer base.