What Does a Tradie Need Ready Before an AI Receptionist Can Go Live?
The short answer
A tradie needs no new number and no new software before an AI receptionist goes live. What Durbacti needs ready is a page of facts (services, suburbs, hours, prices you have set), a written list of the calls that ring your mobile on site, access to the calendar or job app you use, and a diversion set on your phone.
The question comes up on most first calls with a tradie, usually in the first five minutes: what do I have to set up? Behind it is a worry. A plumber or an electrician running a one-van business has no office, no IT person and no spare afternoon. If an AI receptionist means a new phone number on the ute, new software to learn and a week of configuration, the honest answer is that the voicemail stays.
The worry is reasonable and the picture behind it is wrong. A 24/7 AI phone receptionist does not need a new number, does not need software installed on anything, and does not need the tradie to understand how it works. What it needs is a short set of facts and decisions, written down, plus access to two things the tradie already has. Most of Durbacti's typical one to three week go-live is spent waiting on those decisions, not on technology.
What follows is the list Durbacti would ask a tradie to have ready, drawn from the brief its own receptionist runs on and the build process on How we work. It is written from how the receptionist is built, not from a tradie's completed go-live, and the end of the post says so again.
Do you need a new phone number or new software?
No to both, and the reason settles half the worry.
The AI receptionist answers on a number the voice platform provides. The tradie's advertised mobile stays exactly as it is, on the ute, the website, the Google listing and the fridge magnets. What changes is a diversion on that mobile, set from the handset. The carrier forwards calls to the receptionist's number either for every call or only for the calls the tradie does not pick up.
Telstra's small business support page on forwarding calls on a mobile, read on 19 October 2026, lists four kinds: all calls, when busy, when unanswered, and when unreachable. The unanswered diversion kicks in after 15 seconds by default and can be set to 15, 20, 25 or 30 seconds. Each kind is switched on and off with a code typed into the dial pad, and the page says forwarding is included in Telstra plans with an unlimited call allowance. Other carriers publish their own codes and their own conditions, and a tradie checks their own carrier's page rather than trusting a list from anyone else.
The decision a tradie makes is which kind. A sparkie who wants to answer the phone personally whenever the hands are free chooses the unanswered and unreachable diversions, so the receptionist only gets the calls that would have gone to voicemail. A plumber who never wants to answer on a job chooses all calls between set hours and turns it off once the van is parked. Either way nothing is installed on the phone, and either way the tradie can switch it off from the dial pad and go back to answering personally.
Which facts does the receptionist need written down?
An AI receptionist built by Durbacti answers from a brief: a written document of plain sentences, not from general knowledge. What goes in an AI receptionist's brief before it answers? sets out the shape of Durbacti's own. For a tradie the paragraph that does the work is the one on what it may say about the business, and the facts in it are the tradie's homework.
What you do, and what you do not. A plumber who does blocked drains and hot water but not gas fitting says so, in a sentence, so the receptionist can tell a gas caller to ring someone else rather than booking a job the tradie will cancel.
Where you go. The suburbs or the radius. A caller in Penrith asking a Sutherland Shire electrician needs to hear no before the details are taken, not after.
When you work, and when you answer. Hours on the tools, hours for callbacks, and what Saturday means.
Prices, only where set. A call-out fee if there is one, an hourly rate if the tradie quotes one, and otherwise a sentence that says the job is priced after it is seen. The receptionist will not quote a price that has not been set, so a blank here is a sentence the receptionist says, not a guess it makes.
The licence. NSW Fair Trading's page on building trade advertisements, updated 7 August 2025, says a licensee's name and licence number must be shown in all advertising for residential building work, across print, internet, television, radio and other media, and lists a business telephone number among the details to include. Whether an answering greeting or a phone answer counts as advertising under that rule, and which trades and jobs it covers, is for Fair Trading or a lawyer to say. What Durbacti does is simpler: the licence number and its category go in the brief, so a caller who asks hears the right number.
Payment and the small print. Card or transfer, deposit on larger jobs or not, and anything the tradie always tells a new customer before turning up.
That is a page. A tradie who writes it on the scope call takes an hour; a tradie who turns up with it written has already done the slow part of the build.
Which calls should ring your mobile on the roof?
The emergency list is the one thing on this list that cannot be skipped, because without it the receptionist has nothing to apply and falls back to judging how the caller sounds, which is the failure Durbacti builds against.
A tradie's emergency list is short and written in the caller's words, not the trade's. For a plumber: water through a ceiling, a burst pipe, no water at all, sewage coming up, a gas smell. For an electrician: sparks or smoke from a switchboard, a burning smell, power out to the whole house with the neighbours still on, a live wire exposed. Each line is a sentence the receptionist matches against, and each line has one action: ring the mobile now, at any hour the tradie has agreed to, and if the mobile is not answered, take the details and send them by SMS so the first thing the tradie sees is the address and the fault.
Everything not on the list is captured, never transferred. A quote request, a question about availability next week, a follow-up on an invoice: the receptionist takes the job, the suburb, the best time to look and the caller's number, says when the tradie will call back, and lets the phone on the roof stay quiet. The callback time it promises is a time the tradie has agreed to keep, "by 5 pm today" or "tomorrow morning", never "as soon as possible".
Two decisions sit beside the list. First, what hours the emergency transfer applies: every hour, or only between 6 am and 10 pm with everything else taken as a message. Second, what a caller in danger hears: one sentence, hang up and ring Triple Zero on 000, before any details are taken. Durbacti writes both into the brief as rules, and a tradie reads them back before go-live.
Where do bookings and job details land?
The second thing the tradie already has is a calendar or a job app, and the receptionist needs to see it. Durbacti builds around the tools the tradie already uses, so this is a question of access, not of switching.
For a tradie on a shared Google or Outlook calendar, access means inviting the receptionist's account to the calendar, and from then on it offers only the times the calendar shows free. For a tradie on a job management app, it depends on what the app lets a third party do. ServiceM8, to take one job management app, published an API update in July 2025 that lets an integration create a job directly, from a template, or by converting an inbox message. Where the app offers that, the receptionist can write the job into it; where it does not, the record goes by email or SMS and the tradie enters the job. Which path a particular app allows is checked on the scope call, not promised on the phone. The Smart scheduling page covers what the receptionist does once it can see the calendar, including the rule that it never offers a time the calendar shows as taken.
The tradie also decides where the record of every call goes: what the caller wanted, what was answered, what was booked, whether it transferred. A daily email, an SMS as each call ends, a push into the job app, or the voice platform's dashboard; the tradie picks on the scope call, and the pick is a setting, not a rebuild. On a Project build the accounts the receptionist uses are the tradie's own, created in the tradie's name and handed over with the documentation, so the business never needs Durbacti's permission to read its own calls.
What does the receptionist say about itself?
Three decisions, all small, all better made before go-live than after a caller asks.
The greeting. Durbacti proposes a greeting that says the caller has reached the business's virtual receptionist, with no first name, and the tradie approves the words. A caller who asks whether they are talking to a person is told, plainly, that they are talking to an AI receptionist.
The record and the transcript. Every call leaves a record, and the tradie decides what is kept of each call and what a caller is told about it. Call recording and consent in NSW is its own set of questions, and that post gives the shape of them; the answers for a particular business come from a lawyer, not from a phone system.
What it says when it does not know. A question the brief does not cover gets "I do not have that detail" and an offer to have the tradie call back, never an answer from general knowledge. A tradie who wants a different line writes it; what nobody writes is a line that lets the receptionist guess.
Why does this matter more for tradies than for most businesses?
Because the tradie is the business. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported, in its count of Australian businesses released 26 August 2025, that construction saw 76,414 new businesses in 2024-25, the highest number of any industry. For the ones that are one person and a vehicle, the phone is the office, the sales desk and the booking system, and it rings while both hands are on a pipe.
A receptionist for that business is not a convenience layered on a front desk. It is the front desk, which is why the preparation is almost entirely decisions: the facts and the emergency list are the business written down, and nobody can write them but the tradie.
What we will not do
Go live without an emergency list. A receptionist with no written list of what rings the mobile is deciding on its own, and Durbacti will not switch one on.
Let it quote a price you have not set. A blank in the prices paragraph becomes a sentence about pricing after inspection, never a number.
Take your number off you. The advertised mobile stays the tradie's, the diversion is the tradie's to switch off, and on a Project build the accounts are the tradie's at handover.
Give legal advice on the licence or on recording. Where a licence number must appear and what callers must be told about recording are described here as questions, and a lawyer or NSW Fair Trading answers them.
Call this list proven. It is written from the brief Durbacti's own receptionist runs on and the build process, not from a tradie's completed go-live. When a tradie's build has produced its own list, that list replaces this one.
What to ask any vendor
Do I keep my number, and can I turn the diversion off myself? Both answers should be yes.
What exactly do I have to hand over, and who owns the accounts afterwards? A list, and your name on them.
Can I read the list of calls that ring my mobile? If the vendor cannot show it, the model is deciding.
What happens to a call when my phone is off in a ceiling cavity? A record, a callback time the caller heard, and an SMS for an emergency.
How do I change my hours when daylight saving ends? A sentence in a document you can read, or a support ticket.
Show me the record of a test call before I pay. Not a demo line, a call to the receptionist built on your facts.
A tradie's part of a go-live is an hour of decisions and two lots of access, not a week off the tools. The Tradies and home services page says what the receptionist does for a plumber or a sparkie once it is live; the facts and the emergency list for your business get written on a free strategy call.
Common questions
Does a tradie need a new phone number for an AI receptionist?
No. The mobile number on your ute, your website and your Google listing stays yours. The AI receptionist Durbacti builds answers on a number the voice platform provides, and your mobile is set to divert to that number: every call, or only the calls you do not pick up within a chosen number of seconds. A carrier diversion is switched on and off from the handset, so a tradie who wants to answer the phone personally on a quiet Friday can turn it off and turn it back on from the dial pad.
Can an AI receptionist quote a call-out fee for a tradie?
Only a call-out fee the tradie has set and written into the brief. An AI receptionist built by Durbacti answers from the information the business supplied and will not quote a price that has not been set, so a caller who asks what a blocked drain costs hears the call-out fee if there is one, and otherwise hears that the plumber will price the job after seeing it. The job, the suburb, the best time to look and the caller's number are taken instead. A price invented on the phone is one the tradie has to honour or argue about.
How long does it take to set up an AI receptionist for a tradie?
Typical go-live for a focused automation such as a voice agent is one to three weeks at Durbacti, and most of that time is spent on decisions rather than technology: which calls ring the mobile, what the receptionist may say about prices, where a booking lands, what the greeting says. A tradie who turns up to the scope call with services, suburbs, hours and an emergency list already written down shortens the build to the testing. The first version is built as a proof of concept on the tradie's own business before any money moves.
What happens to a call when a tradie's phone is off on site?
With a diversion in place, a call to a tradie's mobile that is switched off, out of coverage or busy reaches the AI receptionist instead of voicemail. The receptionist takes the job details and leaves a record: who called, what they wanted, the suburb, the number to ring back and the callback time it promised. For a call on the tradie's emergency list, a burst pipe or a gas smell, the record also goes by SMS to the mobile so the tradie sees it the moment the phone comes back on, fault and address first.
Should a tradie's AI receptionist give out the licence number?
A tradie's AI receptionist can read out the licence number to a caller who asks, as long as the number and its category are written into the brief, and Durbacti would put them there. NSW Fair Trading's guidance on building trade advertisements says a licensee's name and licence number must be shown in all advertising for residential building work, and lists a business telephone number among the details to include. Whether a recorded greeting or a phone answer counts as advertising under that rule is a question for Fair Trading or a lawyer, not for a phone system.