Sweep certificates and annual reminders for chimney sweeps

The idea

Insurers increasingly refuse chimney-fire claims without proof of an annual sweep, so the certificate a sweep hands over has quietly become a document with legal weight. Most sweeps still fill in carbon-copy pads by hand, customers lose them, and when a claim happens two years later, everyone is digging through drawers. Meanwhile the sweep’s biggest revenue lever, rebooking last year’s customers, runs entirely on whether anyone remembers.

The two features belong together because they share the same data: a job record generates the certificate today and the reminder in eleven months. Generic invoicing apps do neither, and the regulatory tailwind of insurer requirements is doing the market education for free.

Who pays

The sweep pays $15/month, and the reminder run justifies it on its own: a typical sweep charges $80 to $120 per job, so a reminder batch that rebooks ten lapsed customers is worth over $1,000. Buyers are solo and two-person sweep businesses, reached through trade bodies (the Guild, NACS, HETAS-adjacent forums), sweep Facebook groups, and suppliers of rods and vacuums who sell to the whole trade.

MVP scope

• Job entry generating a branded, sequentially numbered certificate PDF
• Automatic certificate email to the customer and permanent storage per customer
• Automatic 11-month rebooking reminder with a rebook-request link
• Reminders Due queue with booked/not-booked tracking
• Skip for v1: online payment collection, scheduling/calendar, quotes and invoicing, CCTV report attachments, and multi-van businesses

Build SweepCert, a certificate and rebooking app for chimney sweeps. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth), Stripe for subscriptions, Postmark for email.

Core flow: after a job, the sweep enters customer name, address, email, date, appliance and flue type, work done (swept, inspected, CCTV), and any defects observed. The app generates an industry-standard certificate of chimney sweeping as a PDF: the sweep's logo, business details, and trade-body membership number (HETAS/Guild/NACS style layout), a unique certificate number, the job details, and a signature line. The certificate emails to the customer automatically via Postmark and is stored permanently against the customer record, because homeowners lose them and insurers ask for them after fires.

The second half is the money printer: 11 months after each job, Postmark automatically emails the customer a reminder that their annual sweep is due, with the sweep's phone number and a rebook-request link that drops an enquiry into the sweep's dashboard. The sweep sees a Reminders Due queue and a simple booked/not-booked toggle.

Pages: job entry, customer list with certificate history, reminders queue, certificate template settings (logo, colours, membership number), billing.

Non-obvious details: certificate numbers must be sequential and gap-free per business for audit credibility; reminder timing is editable per customer since wood burners in heavy use warrant 6-month cycles.

Pricing: $15/month flat, unlimited certificates.