SR7 Transport — website and job management system

An SR7-owned business, not a client commission. A courier and light haulage website with a working quote estimator on the front, and a custom job management system behind it that runs a job from first enquiry through to invoice.

Visit the live site →

What it is

SR7 Transport is my own courier and light haulage business, based in Seaham and covering the North East and the wider UK: same day courier work, light haulage, furniture transport, business deliveries and pallet work.

It is on this page because it is the deepest custom build I have done, and because everything in it was built to solve a problem I had myself rather than one described to me in a brief.

The requirement

Transport work lives or dies on how quickly you can turn an enquiry into a price. Somebody rings up, or fills a form in, and wants a number. If they have to wait until the evening for a reply, they have already booked somebody else.

The second problem is what happens after that. A job has a life — quoted, accepted, collected, delivered, invoiced, paid — and if it lives across a notebook, a phone and an email inbox, things get missed and invoices go out late.

The website

• A custom WordPress theme, built for the business.
• A page per service: same day courier, light haulage, furniture transport, business deliveries, pallet transport and nationwide coverage.
• An areas covered page, and a blog answering the questions people ask before booking — how same day pricing works, what to know about pallet delivery, what a tail lift delivery involves.
• Click-to-call throughout, and a clear four-step explanation of how the process works.

The quote tool

This is the piece that makes the site worth having. It is not a contact form with the word “quote” on the button — it works out a guide estimate on the page.

The visitor gives a collection postcode and a delivery postcode, picks the service and the load category, and adds the things that actually change a price: weight, whether a tail lift is needed, whether it is a two-person job, whether there are stairs, and how urgent it is. There is a box for anything unusual. The tool then returns a guide estimate before they submit anything.

The form is organised the way a dispatcher would ask the questions — route first, then service and load, then the awkward extras, then contact details — rather than as one long list of fields.

The system behind it

The quote tool is the visible end of a custom plugin, SR7 Transport Operations, currently at version 1.7.2. It is a job management system rather than a form handler, and it covers the whole lifecycle:

• Full job lifecycle — quote, acceptance, collection, delivery, invoice and payment, all against one record.
• Quote and profit preview, so a price can be checked against what the job will actually cost before it is sent.
• Invoicing with PDF attachments, generated and sent from inside the system. The invoice row is the single source of truth for what has been paid.
• SMS automation through ClickSend, so the customer gets told what is happening without anybody having to remember to text them.
• GPS trail tracking against a job, and vehicle mileage gates.
• Admin address lookup, so entering a job is fast rather than a postcode-typing exercise.
• A branded login and a dark admin interface, which is the production default — it gets used in a cab and at night as often as at a desk.
• Analytics across the jobs data.

Integrations and automation

ClickSend handles the outbound SMS. Invoices are produced as PDFs and attached automatically rather than made by hand. Analytics is wired in through Google Site Kit. The point of all of it is that the routine parts of a job happen without anybody remembering to do them.

On a phone

Both ends are built for a phone. The public site and the quote tool reflow properly on a narrow screen, and the admin side is designed to be usable one-handed, which is why dark mode is the default rather than an option.

Where it stands

The site and the system are built and live at sr7transport.co.uk, with the quote tool working on the public site and the operations plugin behind it. The plugin has been through seven minor versions and is the business’s main working asset.

No trading figures are published here. What this project demonstrates is the build, not the balance sheet.

More work

• Fishing Lives — the other SR7-owned build, with members, contributions and moderation
• KPM First Aid Training — a client rebuild with a custom plugin behind it
• Treemasters — a trade site built to get the phone ringing
• Back to all work

Need a website that actually does something?

Quoting, booking, invoicing, notifications — if the job is closer to a system than a website, this is the proof I can build it. Tell me what the process looks like now and I will tell you what can be automated and what it would cost. Get a quote or call 07538 227194.