Business automation in Launceston.
The gateway town, and one of the busiest agricultural centres in the South West. Businesses here routinely work both sides of the Tamar, which quietly breaks most scheduling software.
Autaimate builds business automation and custom software for Launceston businesses, from a studio in St Austell. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. You own the code.
A working town on the border
Launceston sits where Cornwall meets Devon and has long been one of the region’s principal agricultural centres. Livestock, arable, agricultural engineering, feed merchants, haulage and the contracting businesses that move between all of them.
Working both counties creates an administrative wrinkle nobody designs for. Two sets of local authority contacts, sometimes two sets of scheme requirements, and a job list that does not respect the Tamar. Generic scheduling and compliance software assumes a tidier operating area than that, and the gaps get filled by somebody keeping a second record.
The compliance load is the other constant. Livestock movement, transport records, driver hours, machinery certification, assurance audits. Recorded roughly on paper at the time because that is all that works in a yard, then typed up properly later by someone who has already done a full day.
For work that crosses the river
Four builds shaped by an operating area that spans two counties.
Movement and compliance records
Captured once at the point it happens, producing the audit trail as a by-product. Where requirements differ either side of the border, the tool can hold both rather than making somebody remember which applies.
Job and route records
Work recorded on a phone in the yard or the cab, offline, syncing later. The office receives structured data instead of a folder of notes and a phone call to clarify them.
Contracting and machine hire
Which machine, which operator, which field, how many hours, at what rate. That information already exists — it just lives in three places and one person’s head, which is fine until that person is unavailable in the middle of a season.
Enquiry capture
An assistant that answers from your own confirmed material and captures every enquiry with a name and a number. Seasonal contracting work goes to whoever picks up first, and in June nobody picks up.
Cornish, not up-country
Autaimate is based in St Austell. That is worth saying plainly on a border page, because the alternative for a Launceston business is usually a supplier in Exeter or Plymouth who treats east Cornwall as the far edge of their patch.
Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing any software. The value of that in an agricultural town is not domain expertise in farming — it is knowing what a tool has to survive to get used at all. Cold hands, bad light, a lot of noise, and no patience for a form with fourteen fields.
Cornwall Play Safety Ltd use our voice-first inspection app across the county to produce BS EN 1176 reports, working entirely offline. Different trade, identical constraints: record it where it happens, finish it before leaving, sync when there is signal.
Launceston questions
We work in both Cornwall and Devon. Is that a problem? +
No, but it is worth raising at scoping because it changes real design decisions — differing record-keeping requirements, and scheduling that does not assume a tidy operating radius. Generic software usually assumes both, and the workaround is normally a second spreadsheet.
Will it work with no signal? +
Yes. Everything built for outdoor or in-cab work records on the device and syncs when a connection returns. On this side of the county that is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
What does it cost? +
Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then a fixed price from £8,500. For a contracting business the comparison worth making is against the hours currently spent reconstructing what happened last week from a notebook.
Are you not a long way away in St Austell? +
About fifty minutes, which is closer than the Exeter and Plymouth firms most Launceston businesses end up dealing with. And we are Cornish rather than treating this end of the county as an outpost.
Our operator writes everything in a notebook. Will he use an app? +
Only if it is faster than the notebook, which is the bar we design to. If it is slower or fiddlier, he will keep the notebook and he will be right to. That constraint drives more of the design than anything the office asks for.
Do we own it? +
Yes. Repository, documentation and deployment configuration transferred on delivery. Nothing stops working if you stop dealing with us.
Also covering
Bring the notebook.
Whatever is actually being written down in the yard is the real specification. Show us that and we can scope and price the build from it.