No more 11pm messages, no more wasted drives

Maeve covers Cork city and out as far as Carrigaline, kit in the boot, two to two and a half hours at each house. Bookings arrived in three places at once — Instagram messages, WhatsApp, a text from her mother's neighbour — while the actual diary was an A5 notebook on the passenger seat. Every evening after her last client she sat in the car reconciling the three.

The admin was the smaller problem. The drives were the real one. A late cancellation did not just cost her the fee; it left a two-hour hole in the middle of a route she had already planned around it, with a twenty-minute drive either side of the gap. And colour clients need a patch test forty-eight hours beforehand — an appointment nobody thinks to book, and one she was forever chasing by text.

Six months in, the notebook is gone and most of the evening admin with it. Missed appointments have not vanished — someone's child will always get sick — but the ones that used to happen because a client simply forgot have largely stopped, and where a late cancellation does land, the deposit means the slot is not a total write-off. Most weeks she is booked a fortnight ahead, which means she can plan a sensible route instead of criss-crossing the city.