i-mve — Operations SaaS for the UK Removals Industry

The UK removals industry is a few hundred large national operators and a few thousand small ones — owner-drivers and 5–20 vehicle outfits that move house for families across the country. The small operators are competent at the physical work. They're drowning in the admin.

A typical job generates a survey visit, a written quote, a booking confirmation, a crew schedule, a vehicle allocation, a job sheet, a customer contract, an invoice, and a payment. For a company running 30 jobs a week, that's 270 documents being manually created, tracked, and filed. Most of it in spreadsheets. Some of it in WhatsApp groups. Some of it on paper in a van.

The problem isn't that operators are disorganised — it's that they're using tools designed for generic small businesses rather than removals specifically. Salesforce won't calculate cubic footage from a room survey. QuickBooks doesn't know that "job confirmed" means "van allocated" means "crew notified." There was no software that spoke the language of the industry.

That meant leads from Compare My Move, PinLocal, and Getamover — the platforms that generate most inbound volume for UK removals companies — were arriving by email and getting copied into spreadsheets by hand. Late quotes lose jobs. In a market where the customer has three quotes on their screen at once, the operator who responds in 20 minutes wins.

We mapped the entire removals workflow before writing a line of code: lead → survey → quote → booking → job → invoice → payment. That chain is the backbone of the data model. Every screen, every notification, every integration traces back to a position in that chain.

Multi-tenancy was designed in from the start, not bolted on later. Each company on the platform is a fully isolated tenant — their own data, their own branding on customer-facing documents, their own pricing rules, their own user accounts. Adding a new company to the platform takes minutes. There's no manual provisioning.

Lead intake is automated via webhooks from Compare My Move, PinLocal, and Getamover. A lead arrives, it's in the CRM immediately, and the company's standard response sequence triggers. No copy-paste.

Quoting is the piece that required the most domain work. We built a room-by-room survey tool — the surveyor (or the customer self-serving online) walks through the property room by room, selects items, and the system calculates volume and weight. Pricing rules account for distance, access difficulty, packing materials, storage. The quote generates as a branded PDF. The customer signs it digitally. The booking is confirmed. All from one flow.

Job management tracks vehicle allocation and crew assignment against a calendar. Double-booking is blocked at the data layer, not just the UI. Crew members see their schedule on a mobile-optimised job sheet — no printouts, no WhatsApp forwards.

Accounting integrations push invoices and payment records to Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage automatically. The bookkeeper sees the same data as the ops manager. Reconciliation that used to take hours now happens in real time.

Self-serve onboarding means a removals company can sign up, configure their rate cards and service areas, and run their first job through the platform without talking to anyone from i-mve. That matters at scale — you can't grow to hundreds of customers if each one needs a sales call and a setup session.

i-mve is live across hundreds of UK removals companies. [last known figure was 600+.]

The platform processes [25 thousand] jobs per month]. For operators previously running on spreadsheets, the first measurable change is time: the admin overhead that used to eat Monday mornings is gone. Quotes go out in minutes instead of hours. Jobs don't get lost between the survey and the schedule.

The competitive effect is real. A small operator on i-mve is responding to leads at the same speed as a national chain — because the same automation is available to both. The platform has become a way for independent operators to stay in the market as it consolidates around larger players.

The client has grown i-mve into a funded SaaS business with a dedicated sales team and is expanding into adjacent verticals in the UK logistics industry.

For us: i-mve is the project we point to when someone asks whether we can build a multi-tenant SaaS platform with real industry-specific depth. It's been live, under load, for years. It works.