What do you need?

Your portal is at app.deskbell.net. Bookmark it — that is the only address you need, and it is the same one on every device.

When we set your account up you got an email invite with a link to choose your own password. If you never used it, or you've forgotten the password since, click Forgot password on the login page and a reset link arrives within a minute or two. Check your spam folder once before you email us, because that first reset is the one most likely to land there.

We can't look your password up and we can't read it — resetting is the only way back in, for us as much as for you.

In the portal, go to Settings → My Staff → Add Employee. Put in their name and email, pick a role, and they'll get an invite to set their own password.

Two roles: Admin can see and change everything you can. User sees the conversations, contacts and calendar, which is what most front-desk staff need and all they need.

Removing someone is the same screen. Do it the day they leave — their login keeps working until you do, and the call recordings are in there.

There are two different things people mean by this, and they live in two different places.

Getting calls to Charlie in the first place is set at your phone company, not here. Your published number forwards to the Deskbell number we gave you, and only your carrier can change or remove that forward. If you want it changed, call them and ask to "change the forwarding destination on this line" — they'll want the new number and the account holder on the phone. We can't do it for you and neither can anyone else with your account.

Where Charlie sends a call once she's answered it — the human she transfers to, the order she tries people in, the number she reads out — is ours, and it's a same-day change. Email us the new number and who it belongs to.

If you're moving offices or changing carriers, tell us before it happens rather than after. A forward that gets dropped during a carrier switch looks exactly like an outage, and it is the one failure we cannot see from our side.

She hands off. She doesn't guess.

Charlie is built to work from what she's been told about your business — your services, your hours, your prices, your rules. When a caller goes outside that, she doesn't improvise an answer; she takes it to a person. Depending on what you've asked for, that means transferring to whoever's on, taking a number and a good time to call back, or booking the caller in.

Either way the call is in your portal with a summary, so nothing is sitting only in her memory.

If you keep seeing the same question get handed off, that's worth telling us. It usually means there's an answer she should have and doesn't, and adding it takes minutes.

Open Conversations in the portal and filter to calls, or open a contact and scroll their history — every call sits on the person it came from, with the recording and a written summary.

Recordings are kept for 12 months. If you need one after that, or you need a batch of them for something, ask before the window closes rather than after.

One thing worth knowing: every caller hears that the call is recorded, at the start, every time. That isn't a setting and we won't turn it off. About a dozen states require everyone on a call to be told, we never know which state your caller is sitting in, and a recording taken without notice is worth less than no recording if it ever matters.

She puts them through, if you're available.

Someone asking for you by name is usually a customer you already have, and Charlie treats them that way — she doesn't run them through the questions a new caller gets. She says she's putting them through, and she does.

If nobody picks up, or it's outside the hours you've given us, she says so plainly and offers the two things that actually help: a time on your calendar, or a message with a number and a good time to call back. She will not tell a caller you're in a meeting, or with a client, or any of the other things a receptionist says when the answer is no. Callers know what that means, and it costs you more than the truth does.

Charlie answers. There is no closed greeting and no "our office is currently closed" — the phone is answered at nine at night the same way it is at nine in the morning, because the caller at nine at night is the one you are currently losing.

What changes after hours is what she can offer, not whether she picks up. She books, she takes details, she answers what she's been told. She doesn't transfer to a person who isn't there and she doesn't claim you'll call back in an hour — she says when you will actually see it.

Emergencies are the exception, and they're yours to define. What counts as one, who gets woken, and how they're reached is set on your setup call and written into Charlie. An emergency at a plumbing company and an emergency at a dental practice are not the same thing, and neither of them is ours to guess. Until you've set one, she takes the details and books rather than waking anybody.

If your definition of an emergency changes with the season — and in most trades it does — tell us and we'll change it. That's a five-minute job, not a project.

When Charlie books someone, the appointment is created in the portal immediately and pushed to whatever calendar you've connected — Google or Outlook — usually within seconds. You and the customer both get a confirmation by email.

Two things have to be true for that to work, and when bookings "don't show up" it is nearly always one of them:

Your calendar has to be connected, not just existing. That's a one-time authorisation we do during onboarding, and it can quietly break if you change your Google or Microsoft password or revoke app access. If bookings stop appearing and nothing else changed, this is the first thing to check.

The time zone has to match in both places. If your Google calendar is set to one zone and your Deskbell calendar to another, every booking lands the right number of minutes into the wrong hour, and it looks like a booking problem rather than a settings one. We set both during onboarding. If you ever change one, tell us, and we will change the other.

The calendar only offers times that are still free, and it re-checks the moment someone picks one — two people on the phone at the same time cannot land on the same slot.

It also reads the calendar you connected, so a dentist appointment you put in your own Google calendar blocks that time here too. That only works for the calendars you actually connected. A job written on a whiteboard, or in a scheduling app we don't know about, is invisible to us — that is genuinely the only way to get a double booking, and it is worth knowing which of your calendars are connected and which aren't.

On top of that we set how long a job takes, how much gap you need between jobs, and how many you'll take in a day. Those are yours to change.

In the portal, Calendars → your calendar → Availability. Set the days and the hours, save, and it takes effect on the next booking.

A few things to set while you're in there: how long a slot is, how much notice you need before someone can book, how far ahead people can book, and how many jobs you'll take in a day. That last one is the useful one — it stops a good week turning into a week you can't actually deliver.

Holidays and one-off closures go in the same place. Put them in before they happen, not after someone books into Thanksgiving.

Everything lands in the portal, in three places, and which one you want depends on what you're doing.

Conversations is the running thread — every call, message and web enquiry in one feed, newest first. This is the screen to leave open.

Contacts is the person. Open anyone and you get their whole history: every call with its recording and summary, every message, every appointment.

Opportunities is the work. Every new enquiry becomes a card, and the card moves along as the job does: New enquiry → Contacted → Booked → Quoted → Completed. A job that's quoted before anyone visits just skips a step. Anything that dies is marked Lost rather than sitting in a stage pretending to be alive. This is the screen that tells you what is sitting there not being followed up.

Nothing is only in one place, so you can work from whichever screen suits how you think. Nothing is only in Charlie's head either — if it happened on a call, it is on the contact.

Open the contact and switch on Do Not Disturb. Everything automated stops for that person straight away — reminders, follow-ups, campaigns — while you can still reply to them by hand if you need to. You can switch it off again whenever.

If the customer themselves replied STOP to a text, that is different and it is permanent. The carriers handle that one, not us, and neither you nor we can undo it from this side. The only way that person can start receiving your texts again is if they text START to the same number themselves. This is not a Deskbell rule, it is the law, and the fines for getting it wrong are per message.

If you want someone off everything for good, tell us and we'll do it properly rather than leaving a toggle that the next person to open the contact might flip back.

If you're in your first few weeks with us, it's almost certainly the registration, and it clears on its own. Skip to the bottom for what to do.

The short version. Business texting in the US doesn't work like texting from your own phone. The mobile carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile — decide whether a business text gets delivered, and since 2023 they don't slow down unregistered business texts, they block them outright. Nothing gets through and nothing bounces back to the customer. To stop that, every business has to file a one-time registration that ties your company to your number and says what you'll be sending. Until that registration is approved, texts don't go.

How long it takes. Two steps. The first, registering your business, is minutes. The second, approving what you send, takes ten to fifteen business days and is done by the carriers, not by us. Nobody can pay to speed it up and nobody can escalate it — not us, not the phone company, not anyone selling you otherwise. We start it the day you sign so the clock runs during setup rather than after it. Calls and email are unaffected the whole time; it is texting only.

If your registration is already approved and a text still didn't send, it is one of these, roughly in the order we find them:

• The number wasn't attached to the approved registration. Common right after approval, and a two-minute fix on our side.
• The customer replied STOP at some point, to you or to a previous business on that number. That one is permanent — see the question above.
• The contact is on Do Not Disturb.
• We don't have a record that the customer agreed to be texted, so the message was held rather than sent. Working as intended, and worth knowing about.
• The number is a landline, or it's mistyped.

What to do. If you're inside the registration wait, nothing — it clears and we'll tell you the day it does. Otherwise email us the customer's number and roughly when you sent it, and we'll pull the delivery record and tell you which of the above it was. Don't resend it three times; every attempt is charged whether it lands or not.

One monthly figure, quoted against your call volume, your locations and your package. That number is on your quote and it doesn't move on its own.

Phone numbers, carrier fees and message costs are passed through at what they cost us, itemised separately on the invoice rather than folded into the monthly figure. You can see exactly what they were.

If your volume changes enough to matter, we requote. You'll hear about it before it reaches an invoice — we would rather have an awkward conversation than send a surprise.

Billing runs monthly on the anniversary of your start date — start on the 12th and that's your date every month. It goes to the card on file and the invoice is emailed the same day, so there's nothing for you to do and nothing to remember.

Questions about a specific invoice: reply to the invoice email, or send it to [email protected]. Both reach the same place.

Tell us. There's no form to find and nobody will try to talk you out of it on a retention call.

There's a minimum term because the setup work is real and happens before you see anything back, and the length of it is written on your quote. You can leave at the end of it. There is no exit fee.

What you take with you:

• Your phone number is yours. It ports out to wherever you're going. We'll do the paperwork from our side.
• Your customer list exports on request, in a standard format any other system can read, at no charge. Ask before you go, not after.
• Your call recordings are available to download while your account is open.

Tell us at least 30 days before your renewal date. We'll remind you before that date arrives rather than letting the term roll over quietly, so you shouldn't ever have to remember it — but that is the deadline if you want the account to end rather than renew.