The Good Books
Plenty of Canberra tradies are banned from somewhere. One bad week, one job that went sideways, one argument in a Facebook group, and that's them — gone, permanently, no way back. We think that's a rubbish way to run something.
How it actually works
Everyone starts level
New tradie, twenty years in the game, doesn't matter. You start in exactly the same place as everyone else. No head start for being first, no penalty for being new. What happened at some other outfit isn't our business and doesn't follow you here.
Good job, up one
A job goes ahead and the customer says it went well — +1. That's it. You don't have to be brilliant, you have to turn up and do what you said.
Badly let someone down, down three
−3, and yes that's deliberately heavier than the plus. Someone took a day off work and you didn't show. That costs them more than a good job gains them. The maths should say so.
You can work it back
Three good jobs undo one bad one. It's meant to be work, not a life sentence. And there's a floor — you cannot dig a hole deep enough that there's no way out of it.
What actually costs you points
Not much, and none of it is about being perfect. It's about not leaving people stranded.
These cost you
- No-show on a booked visit with no phone call
- Took the lead and never contacted them at all
- Walked off a job mid-way and stopped answering
- Quoted one number and invoiced a much bigger one with no conversation in between
- Unlicensed work in a trade that needs a licence
These don't
- Being too expensive. Your price is your business.
- Losing the job. Most quotes lose. That's the trade.
- Saying no, or handing a lead back because it's not your thing. We'd rather you did.
- Running late and telling them. Everyone runs late. The phone call is the whole difference.
- A customer who changed their mind, went quiet, or decided not to do the job at all.
- A job that got hard. Old houses do that. It's not a black mark.
The four rules that make it fair
- It's private. Your standing is not on your public profile, not in a directory, and not shown to customers. You can see yours. We can see yours. That's the list. We're not building a public scoreboard that follows a bloke around Canberra for the rest of his working life.
- You get told, and you get to reply, before anything lands. If a complaint comes in, we send you what was said and you've got seven days. Plenty of them evaporate at that point, because there are two sides and we've only heard one. Nothing is applied until you've had the chance.
- It fades. Points older than twelve months drop off — the minuses included. A bad month two years ago is not who you are now, and the system shouldn't pretend otherwise.
- Nobody gets banned. A low score means leads reach you a bit later than someone with a high one. It never means you're off the platform. There is no exit door here and we're not building one.
So what does it actually change?
One thing, and only one thing: the order leads go out in.
- A job comes in. Everyone who covers that trade and that suburb is in the running.
- Whoever's highest in the good books gets first look, with a window to take it or pass.
- If they pass or the window runs out, it moves to the next.
- Everyone gets to it eventually. Standing changes when, never whether.
It doesn't change your price, your listing, whether customers can find you, or what we say about you. It's a queue position.
The bit we'll say out loud
Why it's not public
A public score built out of complaints is a reputation you're publishing about somebody else's livelihood, off the back of one person's version of events. Get that wrong about a real Canberra business and you've done them genuine damage. We're not comfortable with that and we don't think you would be either. So it stays internal.
Why there's no perfect record
If we showed a public five-star average, the only tradies with a clean one would be the ones who'd done two jobs. Anyone busy enough to be worth hiring has had a job go wrong. Pretending otherwise just teaches people to game it.
If something goes wrong on a job
Standing is not a complaints process and it doesn't settle anything between you and a customer.
- Talk to each other first. Most of it is a misunderstanding about what was in the quote, and it gets sorted in one phone call.
- Australian Consumer Law applies to the work regardless of anything on this page. Consumer guarantees are not something we or you can sign away.
- Access Canberra handles licensing complaints and is the right place for those.
- We're not the umpire. We record what happened for the purpose of ordering leads, and that's the limit of what we do.
General information, not legal advice.