Toby — User Guide

by Seagull Tech

What is Toby?

Toby is a virtual assistant built for tradespeople. It solves one problem: a message lands while you’re mid-job, you clock it, and six hours later it’s gone. Toby captures everything and tells you what needs your attention, so nothing slips through.

Toby is voice-first. Talk to it like you’d talk to an assistant: “Just had a call with Dave, he’s happy with the quote, wants to go ahead, I need to send him the contract by Friday.” Toby picks out the details, logs the update, and reminds you about the contract.

Every voice note goes through a review step: Toby shows you the transcript before anything is saved, so you can fix anything it misheard.

Getting started

The first time you open Toby it walks you through setup: your name, your trade (this shapes how Toby talks and what it listens for), connecting your email, and notifications. A few example customers are loaded so you can see how things look; they’re marked “Example” and remove themselves after a week, or you can clear them from the Home screen.

The Getting started card on Home tracks a checklist of 16 things worth trying (add a customer, capture a note, read a dossier, ask Toby a question, and so on). It doubles as a tour of the app, and completing it earns a bonus on your first month’s AI allowance.

A day with Toby

Here’s what actually using Toby looks like. The short version: emails handle themselves, and you talk to Toby for about 15 minutes a day to fill in everything he can’t see.

7:30, coffee and the briefing. A notification arrives with your morning briefing: who’s waiting on you, what’s booked, what’s coming up. You remember last night’s phone call from a customer, so you tell Toby in a 60-second voice note before you leave the house. Now he knows about it too.

Mid-morning, hands full. An enquiry email lands while you’re on the tools. You don’t stop. Toby has already read it and filed it, and it’s sitting in your new enquiries for when you’re ready.

Through the day, 30 seconds at a time. Finish a stage, book a date, agree a change on the doorstep: say it into your phone as you get back in the van. Toby puts each update on the right customer, and anything you were asked to do goes on your actions list.

On a break, five minutes with Toby. Ask him what needs doing. He knows every job, every promise and every customer who’s gone quiet, and he’ll tell you what to chase first and why. The Actions screen keeps the same list on tap whenever you sit down to do admin.

Before you ring someone back, open their At a Glance. The whole story on one screen. You sound like you remember everything, because Toby does.

18:30, the wrap-up. Toby prompts you. Two minutes talking through your day, and he sorts it onto the right customers. You review everything before it’s saved. Missed a night? You can fill it in tomorrow.

Friday, the recap. The whole week in one read.

Add it up and it’s roughly 15 minutes of talking per day. In return you get a complete record of every job, admin sessions that start with a ready-made priority list, nothing forgotten, and customers who feel looked after. All from £10 a month, about the price of a couple of pints.

Home

Home is the anchor. Everything starts here and comes back here.

Greeting + search — search any customer by name, job or project. Customers with more than one project get a row each, so you can tap straight through to the job you were looking for. If your search looks like a question (“has Sarah paid?”), Toby offers to answer it with AI, reading everything you have on that customer across all their projects. You can also ask questions directly from a customer’s own page (see below), where the answer is scoped to the selected project.
Add Update — the main way to log anything: a new customer, an update on an existing one, a voice note after a call.
Navigation cards — Actions (what needs you), New Enquiries (leads from your inbox), At a Glance (all jobs), Calendar (key dates).
Toby’s features — Ask Toby, Briefings, and the evening Wrap-up each have their own tile.
Triage card — appears when Toby received an email it couldn’t confidently file. You decide where each one goes.
Pull down to refresh — syncs your email and refreshes everything.

Customers and projects

A customer can have more than one project (Dave’s kitchen this spring, his wardrobes in the autumn). Each project keeps its own stage, notes, actions, documents and key dates. A pill bar at the top of the customer’s page switches between projects.

You decide when to start a new project. A note that mentions a few things together (“the wardrobes and a bookcase”) stays as one project — Toby won’t split it. When a customer’s next job is genuinely separate, add it yourself with + Add project on their page. That way a passing mention never fragments a job by accident.

When an email or note arrives for a customer with several projects, Toby works out which project it belongs to. If it isn’t sure, it goes to Triage for you to decide.

The customer page

Summary card — the card at the top shows the stage, who has the ball, and a one-line summary. Tap the + to expand it in place: change the stage or status, and see the budget, key dates, scope and contact details all together. Tap − to collapse it again.
Action bar — just below the summary card sits a row of three buttons for what you can do here: + Add Update, Search, and Call (Call only shows if you have a phone number). Tap one and that row morphs in place — the button you picked slides to the left as a coral icon and its controls fill the rest of the row:
- + Add Update — a text box plus a 🎙️ microphone: type or speak a note about the job.
- Search — ask any question about the project (“what’s outstanding?”, “when did we last speak?”, “what’s the agreed budget?”) by text or voice; Toby answers from that project’s notes, hours and history. It’s scoped to whichever project the pill bar has selected, and the box says which one, so switching projects switches what you’re searching. For a question spanning a customer’s whole history, search their name from Home instead.
- Call — shows the number and a Call button; tap it to dial. When you come back to the app it drops you straight into + Add Update with “Called {name}:” ready, so you can jot down what was said.
Tap the coral icon again to go back to the three buttons.
Stage — Enquiry, Quoted, Invoiced, Completed (plus Aftercare if a finished job reopens for snags). Tap a stage to move the job. Marking a job Lost asks for a reason (price, competitor, no response…), and declined enquiries have their own reasons; both feed your records.
Status — who has the ball: With me (you have something to do), With customer (waiting on them; Toby nudges you to chase after a few days), or In limbo (no clear next step).
Actions — its own tab, showing the open tasks with due dates. Tick them off, edit dates, or add one by voice or text. Ticking the last one prompts you to decide the next step.
Timeline — everything that’s happened: your notes (summarised by Toby), emails, stage changes, completed actions. Notes can be edited after the fact.
Dossier — Toby’s living memory of the job: a readable, nicely formatted summary of where things stand, built from your notes and emails, kept up to date automatically.
Documents — quotes and invoices from your email are parsed and attached to the project. You can also import older PDFs from past emails with that customer, ticking just the ones that belong.
Manage — multi-select notes, documents, actions or key dates and move them between projects (or into a new one), for when something was filed to the wrong job.
Delete — removing a customer’s last project removes the customer. Deleting is per-project, so one cancelled job doesn’t wipe their history.

Actions

Your working to-do list. The count on the Home tile is jobs that need you, shown here in four groups:

Needs your attention — jobs with open actions due. Sorted most urgent first.
Chase up — jobs waiting on the customer for longer than your chase-up setting. These aren’t ticked-off tasks coming back; they’re a standing nudge that the ball has been in the customer’s court too long.
Gone quiet — jobs with you where nothing has happened for a while.
In limbo — no next step set. Oldest first, because those are the ones that quietly die.

Everything on this list can be ticked. Ticking an action marks it done. Ticking a chase-up or gone-quiet nudge means “I’ve chased them” or “I’ve sent an update” — it logs that on the timeline and quiets the nudge, which returns if things stay silent.

At a Glance

Every job on one screen, each with a smart one-liner showing the most relevant thing right now: an overdue action, a customer you’ve been waiting on for four days, an invoice awaiting payment, or simply the latest note. Filter by stage, or search.

Finished and closed jobs move out of the way into Inactive (tap the button top-right), split into three tabs so they stay separate: Completed jobs, Lost leads, and Not For Us (enquiries you declined).

Calendar

Key dates across all your jobs: site visits, install dates, deadlines. Add them by voice (“survey at Patel’s on Tuesday morning”) or from the customer page. Tap any date to see what’s on.

Email

Connect Gmail or Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail, Microsoft 365) in Settings, or during setup. Access is read-only: Toby can never send, delete or change anything in your mailbox.

Connecting Gmail: Toby is a new app and still completing Google’s verification process, so Google may show an “unverified developer” warning during sign-in. That’s expected — tap Advanced then Continue to Toby to carry on. Toby only ever requests read-only access.

Once connected:

Emails from existing customers are filed to the right customer and project automatically, summarised on the timeline. Replies you send are captured too, so the story stays complete.
New enquiries — emails from people you don’t have on file that look like genuine work. Each shows who it’s from, what they want, and Toby’s suggested name and job. Create the customer with one tap, ignore it, or block the sender.
Ignored Bin — everything you’ve dismissed or Toby filtered out, in case something was binned by mistake. Restore anything from here.
Attachments — quote and invoice PDFs are parsed and attached to the project.

If your email connection ever drops, new emails stop coming in and your briefings and wrap-ups can go out of date. So Toby shows a banner on your home screen until you reconnect in Settings. The “Tell me if my email disconnects” checkbox (just below the connect buttons in Settings → Email & sync) turns on automatically once you’ve connected email — untick it only if you’ve stopped using email.

Toby’s AI features

Ask Toby

The place for the big picture across all your customers: “what’s on this week?”, “anything overdue?”, “who’s gone quiet on me?”, “which quotes haven’t landed?”. Answers cite the customers they’re drawn from as tappable chips, so you can tap straight through to the job. Three starter questions sit on the screen when it’s empty if you want somewhere to begin.

Ask Toby answers questions and changes nothing. To add something to a customer’s record, use Add Update on that customer’s page: it takes what you say, works out what changed, and shows you the result before anything is saved. If your question is about one customer, their own page has a Search button that answers from just that project.

You can also ask Toby how to use the app itself — “how do I add a second project?”, “where’s the wrap-up?”, “how does chase-up work?” — and it answers from this guide.

Briefings

Scheduled summaries at times you choose, for example a Monday morning look at the week ahead. Create and edit them in Settings. Each briefing keeps a history you can swipe back through. The weekly or monthly Recap is always pinned at the top of the Briefings list once you have had your first one.

When a new briefing is due and you haven’t opened it yet, it’s marked Ready in the list so you can see at a glance which one is waiting. The Briefings tile on your Home screen also shows a count of how many are ready (including a ready Recap), so you know one is waiting without opening the tab. Opening a briefing clears its mark. Each briefing is written fresh when you open it, so every one shows two honest times: Scheduled (when it was due) and Generated (when it was actually written, and therefore how up to date it is).

Weekly / monthly Recap

A feel-good look back at what you got done: jobs moved along, work won, money invoiced. Swipe back through past recaps, and share one if you’re proud of it.

Evening Wrap-up

At the end of the day (6:30pm weekdays by default, yours to change), Toby prompts you: talk through your day in one go. “Fitted the doors at Dave’s, waiting on hinges. Quoted the Hendersons eight and a half. Need to call the timber yard tomorrow.” Toby splits it up, files each piece to the right customer, and shows you the result to approve before anything is saved. Missed a day? You can fill in any of the last week from the Wrap-up screen.

Forgot someone mid-review? Tap Edit update at the bottom of the review screen. Your words come back into the box so you can add what you missed and send it again. No need to start over.

Time tracking (optional)

Turn on Track your time in Settings under Toby, in the Daily wrap-up section. From then on, your wrap-up also suggests hours for each job you talked about: say “spent most of the day on Angie’s painting and did a couple of hours invoicing” and Toby suggests 6h on Angie, 2h on Admin & Other (any time not on a customer’s job — invoicing, quotes, workshop tidying — lands in that one bucket). Adjust any of them with the plus and minus buttons before you apply, or remove a row entirely. Half days are fine; the total just can’t be more than a real day.

Set your Working day in the same place (8 hours by default) so “most of the day” means the right thing for you. The hours land on each project, so you can ask Toby things like “how many hours have I done on Angie this month?”.

Toby also spots jobs you didn’t mention. If a project had emails, notes, or actions on that day but you didn’t log any time to it, it appears under Other activity today — so you can add the hours you spent there too, or just skip it. Toby only flags the activity; it never guesses the hours for you.

Holiday mode

Going away? Set your holiday dates in Settings under Toby. Toby will hold back briefings and notifications while you’re off (you can choose which ones to pause), and quietly fills in your daily wrap-up history as “On holiday” so there are no gaps when you come back. Everything starts again automatically when the dates end.

Settings

Organised into panes:

Profile — your name and trade.
Email & sync — connect or disconnect Gmail and Microsoft, trigger a manual sync, manage blocked senders.
Toby — your business profile (a short interview that sharpens everything Toby writes), briefing schedules, wrap-up schedule, recap frequency, a button to rebuild all dossiers, and Holiday mode (set dates to pause notifications and briefings while you’re away).
Usage — your AI allowance used this month. During your trial, this pane also shows your setup checklist progress and any bonus AI allowance you have earned.
Account — your plan and subscription status, change password, and sign out. Deleting your account also starts here — a two-step flow warns you that deleting is permanent, reminds you to export your data first if you want to keep a copy, then asks you to tick a box to confirm.
Your data — back up now, restore, export everything as a file, or export your full account (GDPR) before deleting.

A notifications on/off switch also lives on the main Settings screen, above the panes, so you can silence all Toby notifications in one tap without going into each schedule.

A Help & guide link also lives on the main Settings screen and opens this guide in your browser.

Plans and billing

Toby has three tiers (Light, Standard, Pro) that differ only in how much AI use is included per month. Every plan starts with a 14-day full-feature trial. If you reach your month’s AI allowance, Toby pauses the AI work until your next cycle but keeps capturing your email and notes, so nothing is lost. Paid users see usage as a simple percentage in Settings.

Sign-up and billing happen on the website (toby.seagulltech.co.uk); the app is where the work happens.

What’s AI and what’s rules

Feature	AI or rules?
Voice transcription	AI (with a review step, always)
Understanding notes, extracting actions and dates	AI
Email summaries, enquiry detection, project routing	AI
Dossiers, briefings, recap, wrap-up, Ask Toby	AI
Quote/invoice PDF parsing	AI
Actions screen grouping and sorting	Rules
Chase-up timing, limbo detection	Rules
At a Glance one-liners	Rules
Search and stage filters	Rules

The rules-based parts cost nothing and work offline. The AI parts use your plan’s allowance.

Privacy in one paragraph

Your customer data is processed only to run the features you use. It is never used to train AI models. Email access is read-only. You can export or delete your account at any time from Settings. Full policy: toby.seagulltech.co.uk/privacy.

Tips

Log it in the moment. Twenty seconds of voice after a call beats trying to remember at 9pm.

Say dates plainly. “Thursday” and “next Friday” become due dates; “soon” doesn’t.

Use With customer properly. Set it when the ball leaves your court and Toby will chase for you.

Connect email early. The more customer addresses Toby knows, the more it can file for you.

Do the evening wrap-up. It’s the single habit that keeps everything else accurate.

Toby by Seagull Tech. Built for tradespeople who want to stay on top of their jobs without the admin overhead.

User guide.