Frequently Asked Questions About Anslora

Anslora is an AI receptionist and back-office platform built for home service contractors. It answers your inbound calls 24 hours a day, books jobs onto your calendar, and keeps a customer record for every caller. Beyond the phone, it sends estimates and invoices, takes card payments, tracks equipment, and syncs to QuickBooks Online. The idea is that one system covers the whole path from the first ring to the paid invoice, so a contractor does not need a receptionist, a separate CRM, and a separate invoicing tool.

Anslora is built for home service contractors — solo operators through to businesses running several crews. It fits trades where work arrives by phone and a missed call is a lost job: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, cleaning, landscaping, pest control, restoration, appliance repair, and others. A solo operator typically uses it as their receptionist. A larger shop uses it as a safety net behind the people who already answer the phone.

A traditional answering service takes a message. Anslora completes the work. It recognises returning customers from their phone number, pulls up their service history, books the job onto your calendar during the call, and writes the customer record as it goes. You get a transcript, a recording, and an AI-written summary of every call. A message service hands you a callback list; Anslora hands you a booked schedule.

Yes. Anslora answers inbound calls at any hour, including nights, weekends, and holidays. There is no queue and no voicemail box — the call is picked up and handled. You choose how much it handles using the Trust Ladder, so you can have it answer everything, only answer outside your business hours, or only pick up the calls you do not get to first.

Yes — that is what the Trust Ladder is for. Observer never lets the AI speak to a caller; it rings you, logs which calls you answered and missed, and texts back the ones you missed. After-Hours lets the AI answer only outside your business hours. Human-First and Decide ring your phone first and let the AI catch the call if you do not pick up. Receptionist rings you and records the call. Auto-Pilot lets the AI take everything. You can move up or down the ladder whenever you want.

English and Spanish, with automatic detection at the start of the call. The caller does not have to choose or press a key — the AI hears which language they are speaking and continues in that language for the rest of the conversation. Other languages are not supported today.

The AI introduces itself using your business name and handles the conversation naturally, and most callers carry on without remarking on it. If a caller asks directly whether they are speaking to an AI, it answers honestly rather than pretending to be a person. We would rather a caller know than feel misled after the fact.

It does not guess. When a caller asks something outside what the AI has been set up to handle, it takes the caller's details and the reason for the call and routes it to you rather than inventing an answer. If the call ends without a booking or an escalation, Anslora texts you the caller's number and a link to the call so you can follow up. You are never left with a silent gap where a job used to be.

Yes, in two ways. Several Trust Ladder modes ring your phone before the AI ever picks up, so you can simply answer and the call is yours. Separately, an in-progress AI call can be transferred to you so you can take over the conversation. If you want the phone to reach you first as a rule, Observer, Human-First, and Decide modes all do that by default.

Yes. Anslora matches the incoming phone number against your customer records and, when it finds a match, greets the caller as a returning customer and has their history available during the call — previous jobs, the address on file, and any equipment logged against them. New callers get a customer record created automatically as the conversation happens, so the second call is always better informed than the first.

Yes. Every call produces a full record in your dashboard: the transcript, the recording, an AI-written summary, and the outcome of the call. That applies whether the AI handled the call or you answered it yourself — when you take a passthrough call, it is still recorded, transcribed, and summarised, and the customer is linked automatically. In Receptionist mode, callers hear a recording disclosure before the conversation begins.

Yes. When a call results in a booking, Anslora creates the job and places the appointment on your connected Google Calendar during the call. It checks your real availability first, so it will not offer a slot you are not free for, and it will not double-book a time that is already taken. Cancellations remove the calendar event as well, so the calendar stays true to what is actually scheduled.

Google Calendar. You connect your Google account, choose the calendar to book onto, and Anslora reads your availability and writes appointments to it. Outlook, Microsoft 365, Apple Calendar, and other calendar providers are not supported today.

Anslora listens for urgency in the call and, when it identifies a genuine emergency, escalates to you rather than leaving it in a queue. The escalation runs as a ladder: a push notification, then a text message, then a phone call to you, stopping as soon as you acknowledge it. A no-heat call in January or a burst pipe at midnight reaches you the same night instead of appearing in a summary the next morning.

Anslora texts the caller back. In Observer and After-Hours modes, when your phone rings and nobody picks up, the miss is logged and the caller receives a text so they are not left with silence. That matters because a caller who gets nothing usually rings the next contractor on the list. You can see the answered-versus-missed pattern for your business in the dashboard.

A customer can cancel by replying to their appointment text in plain language — Anslora reads the intent, cancels the job, removes the calendar event, confirms to the customer, and alerts you if the appointment was close at hand. One caveat worth knowing: a message containing only the single word "cancel" is treated by mobile carriers as an unsubscribe request before it ever reaches us, so customers should write a full sentence such as "I need to cancel my appointment".

It is included, on every plan, with no separate charge. There are no per-customer fees and no per-user fees — you can store as many customer records as your business generates. The CRM is not a bolt-on module you switch on later; it is where every call, job, estimate, invoice, and piece of equipment is filed as it happens.

No. The record builds itself from the call. Anslora captures the caller's name and number, geocodes the service address, retrieves past service history, attaches the transcript and the AI summary, and files any equipment discussed — without anybody typing. You can still edit anything by hand, and you can import an existing customer list from a CSV file, but the day-to-day expectation is that records accumulate on their own.

Yes. Anslora has a self-serve CSV import: you upload your file, map your columns to Anslora's fields, review a dry-run preview before anything is written, and then commit the import. Rows that fail validation are kept rather than dropped, so you can download them, fix them, and add them without re-running the whole import. Imported customers are not marked as having consented to marketing messages — that consent has to be collected properly, not assumed.

Yes. Photograph the data plate on a unit and Anslora reads the make, model, and serial number from the image and files it against that customer. From there it builds a maintenance profile — service intervals, warranty, and expected lifespan — so the system knows when that unit is due again. On the next call from that customer, the equipment you installed is already on the record.

Yes. You build a branded estimate, the customer opens it on their phone and approves it with one tap, and the approved estimate converts into an invoice. There are trade-specific templates so you are not starting from an empty page each time. Because the estimate is tied to the customer record, the job, the quote, the invoice, and the payment all stay attached to the same history.

Yes. Customers pay their invoice by card and the money goes to your own bank account. Anslora does not take a percentage of your revenue — standard Stripe processing fees apply, as they would with any card processor. You can also request a deposit against an estimate rather than waiting for the whole balance at the end of the job.

Yes. An estimate can carry a required deposit, so the customer pays a percentage up front at the moment they approve rather than after the work is done. Estimates can also capture the customer's approval as a signature on the estimate itself, giving you a record of what they agreed to and when.

Yes. Anslora syncs customers, estimates, invoices, and payments to QuickBooks Online automatically — no double entry. QuickBooks sync is included on every plan, starting with Reception.

No. The integration is with QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Desktop is not supported.

Google Calendar for scheduling, QuickBooks Online for bookkeeping, and Stripe for card payments. Those are the live integrations today. If you are evaluating Anslora against a specific tool in your stack, ask before you buy rather than assuming a connection exists.

Yes. There is a drag-and-drop dispatch board for assigning jobs across the day and across your crew. Technicians get a mobile portal — they open their own jobs on their phone, see the address and the customer history, and work through the day without ringing the office to ask what is next.

Yes. Anslora has distinct roles — owner, manager, and technician — and each one sees a different slice of the system. Technicians are limited to their own portal and the jobs assigned to them; they do not get the owner's view of the business. Managers can work across the business without reaching owner-only areas such as billing.

No. Anslora is priced per business, not per seat, so adding an office admin or another technician does not change what you pay. Check the plans page for which plan includes team logins for your crew.

Yes. You can sell recurring service agreements that bill the customer automatically and drop each scheduled visit onto your calendar without anyone remembering to book it. Contractors use this for spring and fall tune-ups, quarterly treatments, weekly routes, and seasonal maintenance — work that is predictable but easy to let slip.

There are three: Reception, Business, and Enterprise. Reception covers what a solo operator needs — the AI receptionist, the customer CRM, estimates and invoices, card payments, and QuickBooks sync. Business adds the growth and team tooling on top: automated customer texts, equipment intelligence, the dispatch board, the mobile technician portal, recurring service plans, and revenue tracking. Enterprise is custom and sales-led for larger operations. The pricing page has the current figures and the full comparison.

No long-term contract is required for the standard plans — they are billed monthly and you can cancel. Enterprise agreements are negotiated individually, so terms there depend on what is agreed.

Yes. You can move between Reception and Business as your business changes — up when you take on a crew, down if you go back to running solo. Your customer records, call history, and job history stay with you either way; changing plan changes which features you can reach, not what you have already accumulated.

There is a 30-day money-back guarantee rather than a free trial. Every account gets hands-on onboarding where the receptionist is configured for your business, which is not something a self-serve trial can deliver. If you cancel within 30 days of your first payment, we refund your first month's subscription fee. Setup fees and usage charges are not refunded.

No. Your customers keep calling the number they already have. During setup, that number is forwarded so Anslora can answer it — you keep the number on your truck, your business cards, and your online listings exactly as it is. Nothing about how a customer reaches you needs to change.

Setup is white-glove rather than self-serve: your AI receptionist is configured for your business — your trade, your services, your hours, how you want calls handled, and where notifications should go — before it takes a live call. You connect Google Calendar and, if you use it, QuickBooks Online. The pricing page describes the onboarding time we set aside for each account.

Yes, and it is the fastest way to judge it. The homepage has a live demo where you pick a trade and call the AI that was built for it — you speak to it exactly as a customer would. You can also book a demo if you would rather be walked through the dashboard and see what happens to a call after it ends.

Anslora supports a wide range of home service trades, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, cleaning, general contracting, landscaping and lawn care, pool and spa service, restoration, garage doors, pest control, appliance repair, septic and drain, locksmiths, windows and doors, and handyman businesses. Each trade gets its own receptionist persona, its own prompt library, and trade-specific estimate templates rather than a generic script with the trade name swapped in.

Get in touch before assuming it will not work. Anslora includes a general home-service configuration that covers multi-trade and less common operations, and the receptionist is tuned to your specific business during onboarding regardless of which trade page brought you here. The honest answer is that it depends on how your calls actually run, which is a short conversation rather than a guess.

Yes. Each trade has its own template, so the receptionist asks the questions someone in that trade would ask and understands the urgency that comes with them — a no-heat call in January, a burst pipe, water coming through a ceiling, a customer locked out at midnight. During onboarding it is tuned further to your services and how you like calls handled.

You do. The customers, call history, jobs, estimates, and invoices in your account are your business records. Anslora does not sell customer data or use it for advertising. If you sync to QuickBooks Online, that data also lives in your own QuickBooks account, which you control independently of Anslora.

Transactional texts — appointment confirmations, reminders, and replies to a customer who contacted you — are handled separately from marketing texts, and marketing messages are only sent to customers who have actually opted in. Consent is recorded rather than assumed, customers can opt out at any time by replying STOP, and an opt-out is honoured immediately. Marketing messages are also held back outside reasonable local hours.

The access tokens for connected accounts such as QuickBooks Online and Google Calendar are encrypted where they are stored, rather than held in plain text. You can disconnect either integration yourself from your settings at any time, which revokes Anslora's ongoing access to that account.

No. Anslora writes a factual summary of what was discussed and what the outcome was — it does not perform sentiment analysis or assign mood scores to your callers. If you see that claimed about Anslora anywhere, it is wrong.