UK Removals Software Compared: Three Generations, and Which One You Need

The three generations

First generation. Desktop software, spreadsheets, paper diaries. It records what happened so you can invoice for it. Reliable, familiar, and it tells you nothing until year end.

Second generation. Cloud CRM with a diary attached. Enquiries captured, quotes out, deposits taken, jobs on a calendar, invoices raised. This is where most of the UK market now sits and it is a genuine improvement on the first generation. The defining characteristic is that it holds the sell side well and the cost side barely at all.

Third generation. The system runs the operation rather than recording it. Quotes costed from your actual vehicles and actual payroll so margin is known before the job is booked. Vehicle and driver compliance held against the same records as the jobs. What the surveyor estimated reconciled against what the crew actually loaded. Automation across the parts of the week that currently need a person.

Nobody needs the third generation because it is newer. You need it when the second generation stops being enough, and there is a reasonably clear point where that happens.

Where the line sits, and why it is around five vans

One to four vans. Your constraint is commercial. You need enquiries captured before they go cold, quotes out fast, deposits taken, and the diary full. You can hold the whole operation in your head, you know which jobs went well, and you probably do not hold an operator licence.

For that business, a good second generation platform is the most cost effective solution available, and anyone selling you more is selling rather than advising. Move and Store at £29 or £79 a month, or Removals Manager from £45 plus VAT, will do the job properly. i-mve covers this ground well too. Moovi is the wrong answer here and we will tell you so on a call.

Five vans and up. Three things change at once.

You stop being able to hold it in your head. With five crews out you cannot personally know which jobs are running late, which surveyor is under-estimating, or which of last month's jobs actually made money.

You probably hold an operator licence. Anything over 3.5 tonnes carrying customers' goods requires a standard licence and a Transport Manager exercising continuous and effective management, with walkaround checks, defect reporting, maintenance scheduling, driver licence and CPC expiry, and the evidence to prove all of it. That is a second administrative business running alongside the first, and almost no removals platform addresses it.

And small errors start compounding. At two vans, a badly estimated job is a bad day. At ten, a systematic ten per cent under-estimate by one surveyor is a five figure annual hole nobody can see, because the estimate lives in the quoting system and the actual lives in the crew's memory.

That is the point where optimisation and automation stop being luxuries. Not because the business is bigger, but because the feedback loops that worked at four vans have broken.

The vendors

MoveMan. Enhanced Operating Systems Limited, company number 03091944, incorporated August 1995. The longest established UK specialist. Modular: core workflow plus international, trade storage, commercial and crate hire, a customer portal, a lead ingestion API, and crew, storage and surveyor apps. Full Sage integration, and the company are registered Sage developers. On premise or MoveMan Cloud on Azure. BAR affiliate. States it supports nearly 300 companies. Founder Kenneth Maystre resigned as director in August 2025 after thirty years. No pricing published.

Move Administer. Administer Software Limited, company number 05225818, incorporated September 2004, director Colin Michael Wynn. Single entry workflow from enquiry through survey and quotation to invoice and management statistics, with modules for archive storage, commercial relocation, crate hire, self storage, shipping and surveying. No pricing published.

Moveware. UK entity Moveware Ltd, company number 06346375, incorporated August 2007, directors Dean and Tony Kent, both resident in Australia. Product originated in Australia in 2001. Full ERP scope including integrated accounting, storage and container registers, international agent management, tablet surveying and a customer portal. Built for mid market and enterprise, particularly international volume. States over 200 clients in 35 countries. No pricing published.

i-mve. Operating company appears to be Red TwentyThree Limited, company number 14800035, incorporated April 2023, directors Warren Daniel Leggett and Robert Melbourne Sinclair. Leggett also directs Warrens Removals and Storage Limited, and built the product for his own firm before commercialising it, which shows in the workflow. CRM, surveys with imperial and metric volumes, quotes and contracts with e-signature, online payments, invoicing with reminders, multi currency, storage management, and accounting sync with Xero, QuickBooks and Sage. Lead ingestion from Compare My Move, PinLocal and reallymoving. Fourteen day free trial. Pricing page publishes no figures.

Move and Store. Xiza Ltd, company number 13285302, incorporated March 2021. Explicitly aimed at one to five van operators and small self storage. Quoting with a room by room inventory builder, customer quote portal with online acceptance and deposit payment, CRM, self storage unit management, automated review requests. Publishes pricing: free, £29 and £79 per month. Candid about its own gaps.

Removals Manager. UK product covering removals and storage including containerised and trade storage. Publishes pricing from £45 plus VAT per month, no contract.

Move Agent. As at 20 July 2026 its own website describes an early rollout with an Early Partner Programme and states full rollout as coming February 2026. Advertised scope includes AI lead qualification, an AI property scanner, surveys, quoting, diaries, crew job sheets and storage billing. No pricing published. Establish what is live today before committing.

Moovi. Third generation platform, 330 capabilities across eight modules, built on Microsoft Azure with UK data residency. Publishes pricing: Core from £180 per month.

What the third generation actually does

Naming the capability is more useful than describing the category.

Margin at quote time, not year end. Quotes are costed from your real fleet and your real payroll, so the margin percentage falls out of every quote automatically. Licence aware vehicle and driver matching picks the eligible driver pool for a van, a 7.5 tonne or an HGV. Crew sizing comes from the volume and flags over capacity, no available fleet or no eligible driver before you commit to a date.

The estimate reconciled against the actual. The surveyed volume is compared against what the crew actually loaded on the day. Rolled up, that names the surveyor, ranks accuracy and totals the annual leak. This is the most valuable number in a removals business and almost nobody measures it, because in a second generation system the two figures live in different places.

Compliance held against the vehicles doing the jobs. Daily walkaround checks, MOT, service and brake test tracking, driver licence expiry, insurance renewals, Working Time Directive hours, ISO 17451-1 inventory enforcement, Consumer Contracts cancellation notices and GDPR retention. The crew app carries a vehicle compliance hard stop, so a non compliant vehicle cannot quietly go out.

Surveys that produce a quote rather than a note. Room by room capture with volume auto-tallying, AI photo survey that detects items and flags access issues including stairs, parking and narrow doorways, and AI note parsing turning dictated notes into a structured inventory. A shared volumetric engine means a manual entry, an AI parse and the website booking widget all produce the same cubic metres, so the same house never gets two different quotes.

Warehouse as a logistics operation. Rack grid with live occupancy, containers as assets with movement logs, boxes as records with permanent QR identity, seal and scan back reconciliation against an immutable manifest, and a box locator across the estate.

Automation across the week. Deposit and balance invoices issued automatically on quote acceptance with VAT apportioned correctly. Recurring storage billing with catch up so a missed run never skips a month. AI drafted customer messages on five triggers with guardrails. Screen pop on inbound calls. A thirteen tab reporting dashboard covering intelligence, leads, revenue, crew, warehouse, profitability and move by move P&L.

International as a custody chain. A fifteen state custody machine, a regulatory deadline engine with dated cited cut offs and named penalties, corridor document checklists, and a partner portal for overseas agents built as an allow list that physically cannot display margin, values or personal data.

Pricing transparency

The published figures are not comparable with each other. Move and Store at £29 and Moovi at £180 are not the same product priced differently. The first is a quoting and booking tool for a firm with a few vans. The second is a platform for a firm running an operator licence, a warehouse and multiple crews. Compare what sits underneath the number, not the number.

If you are running a proper comparison, specify the same thing to every vendor: number of users, which modules, cloud or on premise, support level, data migration, and any setup fee. Then compare the written quotes.

What to ask any vendor

Where is the data hosted and in which country. What is the total first year cost including setup, migration and training. What happens to your data if you leave, and in what format. Which features are live today rather than planned. Can it tell me the margin on a specific job I did last month. Does it hold my walkaround checks and driver licence expiries. How many UK removals firms currently use it, and can I speak to two of them.

The last one is the most useful and the least often asked.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best removals software in the UK?

It depends on fleet size. Below about five vans, Move and Store or Removals Manager are the most cost effective answers and both publish pricing. Above five vans, with an operator licence and storage, the choice is between the established specialists MoveMan and Move Administer, Moveware for heavy international volume, i-mve, and Moovi.

How much does removals software cost in the UK?

Only three vendors publish pricing: Move and Store from free to £79 per month, Removals Manager from £45 plus VAT, and Moovi from £180. MoveMan, Move Administer, Moveware, i-mve and Move Agent all require a quote.

At what point does a removals firm outgrow entry level software?

Usually around five vans, and usually at the operator licence. Three things change: you can no longer hold the operation in your head, you acquire compliance obligations that entry level products do not address, and estimating errors start compounding invisibly across multiple crews.

Is Moovi suitable for a small removals firm?

Generally not. At £180 a month plus an install fee it is more platform than a one to four van operator without an operator licence needs. Move and Store and Removals Manager are built and priced for that end of the market.

Which removals software includes fleet compliance?

Most do not. Walkaround checks, MOT and service tracking, driver licence expiry and Working Time Directive hours are usually bought separately from Tachomaster, Convey, FleetCheck or CheckedSafe at around a pound per vehicle or driver per week. Moovi holds these in the platform alongside the jobs, with a vehicle compliance hard stop in the crew app.

Is Move Agent available now?

As at 20 July 2026 the Move Agent website describes an early rollout with an Early Partner Programme and refers to a full rollout. Confirm directly which capabilities are live today.

Sources

• Companies House: 03091944, 05225818, 06346375, 14800035, 13285302
• Vendor websites and pricing pages, all accessed 20 July 2026
• Microsoft AppSource listing for MoveMan Cloud