Operations · The post-booking sequence
Most people think a move begins when the truck pulls up. By then the job has already been priced, sized, sequenced into a day and confirmed twice. Here is what happens on our side between your deposit and your crew’s arrival — and why each step is where it is.
Quick answer
Booking locks a date and a crew size — it does not finish the job. Between your deposit and your crew’s arrival we confirm your written total, come back for the access details the booking form deliberately skipped, send any certificate of insurance your building needs, confirm how you will pay the balance, and confirm your arrival time the day before. Your confirmation email is the bill of lading for the move. Read it the day it lands.
A reservation is secured when the deposit — 25% of the estimate — clears on Stripe’s hosted checkout. The card details never touch our systems, and the deposit is credited to your final invoice rather than charged on top of it.
What that deposit actually reserves is a date and a position in that day’s route. It does not fix your final number, because the final number is built from actual hours. It is also worth knowing the boundary: once a reservation form has been submitted, deposits become non-refundable inside 72 hours of the move. Rescheduling is treated differently from cancelling, so if a date is looking shaky, the call is worth making early rather than late.
This is the step almost everyone archives without opening, and it is the most consequential one in this list.
Under our terms of service, confirmation emails — reservation confirmations, estimate confirmations and move-detail summaries — are the bill of lading for your move. That email states the agreed services, the scheduling, the crew details, the pricing basis and our liability for loss or damage. It is the contract, and you are responsible for reviewing it and telling us about any discrepancy before service begins.
It takes two minutes. Check five things:
Why this matters operationally
On move day the crew works from what that confirmation says. A wrong unit number or a missing flight of stairs caught in the email costs nothing to fix. The same error caught at the truck costs hours, and hours are what you are billed for.
A reservation is a row in a calendar. A job is a crew, a truck, a route position and a plan. Dispatch does that conversion, and it is working from different inputs than you might expect.
Crew size is sized against access rather than bedroom count, because access is where the hours come from — stairs, how far the truck can park from the door, whether there is an elevator to reserve, and how much is still unpacked. The date matters too: weekends, same-day bookings and moves 25 or more miles from downtown carry a three-hour minimum instead of the standard 2.5.
Your job also gets a position in a day’s sequence, which is the single biggest reason moves are scheduled as windows rather than appointments. More on that below.
One thing that is decided here rather than later: the crew is ours. We dispatch our own background-checked movers and our own trucks, so the people who arrive are the people the job was planned around. A broker sells your job on to whoever takes it, which is why a broker cannot tell you in advance who is coming.
The reserve flow tells you plainly that street details like gate codes and parking can wait, and that we will ask after booking. That is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight. The booking flow exists to lock a date in a couple of minutes, and none of those details change the date — they change the plan. So they get collected in the window between booking and move day.
What we come back for:
The reserve flow also has a note field for your crew. It is not a marketing inbox — it goes to the people doing the job, and it is the right place for “the fragile boxes are in the guest room” or “the neighbour’s car blocks the driveway before eight.”
If either end of your move is a managed building, there is paperwork the building wants before it will let a crew work, and it runs on the building’s clock rather than ours.
The split is straightforward. The certificate of insurance is ours to send — tell us 48 to 72 hours ahead and it goes to the property manager. The elevator or loading-dock reservation is yours to make, because most buildings will only take it from the resident. Strict buildings want more lead time than 72 hours, and high-rise and managed-building moves are where that gap most often turns into a delay.
Watch out
Elevator and dock waits run on the hourly clock. A crew standing in a lobby because a slot was never reserved, or was reassigned, is the most expensive avoidable line on a move. If the building changes your slot after you have booked, that is a call to make the same day.
This one surprises people, and it exists to prevent a much worse surprise.
Your deposit is paid by credit or debit card at booking. The balance is a different transaction, due on completion and calculated on actual hours — and card payment for that balance is not guaranteed. We confirm accepted payment types with you before move day rather than at the destination, so nobody is working out how to settle a bill with a truck already unloaded. Cash App and Zelle are among the accepted final-payment methods.
It is a five-minute conversation weeks out, or a genuinely awkward one at the end of a nine-hour day. We would rather have it early.
At booking you chose an arrival window — morning 8–10, midday 11–1, or afternoon 2–4. The day before your move, we confirm your arrival time.
Most moving advice on the internet tells you to ring your mover the afternoon before to check they are still coming. That is reasonable advice for the industry in general. It is not how this is meant to work: confirming your timing is our job, not a task on your checklist.
Windows exist to make scheduling more accurate, not less. The alternative is padding every appointment with hours of buffer, which makes every quoted time useless. It also gives the crew ahead of you the time to finish their move properly — the same consideration you get if your own move runs longer than estimated.
Normal variability comes from a short list of real things: metro Atlanta traffic at peak periods, an earlier move running longer than estimated, conditions at a home that nobody can know until a crew is standing in it, and a single day that can run between very different parts of the metro. Variability is most common in the afternoon, for the obvious reason that it accumulates.
Arrival within your window means your move is properly scheduled and underway. And if an unexpected delay materially affects your expected arrival, we will make reasonable efforts to reach you and give you updated timing. We do not promise a specific minute, and you should be wary of any mover who does — that promise is only keepable by padding, and padding is what makes windows meaningless in the first place.
Your crew will contact you as they head to the property and arrive within the agreed arrival window. That contact is the last link in the chain — the point where a plan built over the previous weeks becomes a truck on your street.
Two moments in the day that follows are the payoff for everything above, and both are about records rather than lifting.
The opening walkthrough is where the confirmation email from step two gets checked against the actual house. An item list is a planning instrument — crew, truck and hours are all sized from it — but it is a description of a home written from memory, and memory leaves out basements, attics and garages. Reconciling it takes minutes at the start of the day. The same gap found at hour five is not a conversation, it is a problem, and it is a problem billed by the hour.
The final walk-around is where the record gets made. Damage claims have to be reported within two calendar days of completion, and an item that was never documented as loaded is very hard for either side to establish afterwards. A note made on the paperwork while the crew is still there is documentation; the same observation a week later is a recollection, and there is a real difference between the two.
Everything between those two moments — protection, disassembly, loading, the sweep before the truck rolls, placement and reassembly — is already documented step by step on our moving preparation page, along with what to finish the night before and what should never go on the truck. That is the page to read the week of your move, and there is no reason to repeat it here.
Every step in this sequence exists to move a decision earlier, where it is cheap, instead of later, where it is expensive.
The balance is settled on completion, calculated on the actual hours from your crew’s arrival to the job being finished, with the applicable minimum as the floor. Your deposit comes off it. The hourly rate is all-inclusive — truck, fuel, blankets, equipment and standard furniture disassembly and reassembly are already in it, and there are no separate fuel, stair or long-carry charges. The one exception is the $100 specialty-item fee for pianos, gun safes and items over 300 pounds, and it only appears on your bill if it was on your written quote before you booked.
If you want the full breakdown of what the hourly rate does and does not cover, that lives on the local moving service page. And the number on your final invoice should reconcile against the confirmation email from step two — which is exactly why step two is worth two minutes when it arrives.
Everything above happens on our side. Your half — the packing, the parking, the reservations, and knowing when to ring the office instead of the crew — is laid out on a single page, in sequence. Read it the week of your move.
The day before your move. At booking you pick an arrival window — morning 8–10, midday 11–1, or afternoon 2–4 — and we confirm your expected arrival time ahead of move day. The window is the period we plan and work to arrive within, not a promise of a specific minute. If an unexpected delay materially affects your arrival, we will make reasonable efforts to reach you with updated timing.
Yes. Under our terms of service, confirmation emails — reservation confirmations, estimate confirmations and move-detail summaries — are considered the bill of lading for your move. Each one states the agreed services, scheduling, crew details, pricing basis and our liability for loss or damage. You are responsible for reviewing it and telling us about any discrepancy before service begins, so it is worth reading the day it arrives rather than the week of the move.
Call as soon as you know. When you reschedule, your deposit stays credited toward your move. Cancellation is treated differently from rescheduling and has its own terms, including a 72-hour boundary, so an early call gives you options that a late one does not. Changes to inventory, access or crew size are the same principle — the earlier dispatch knows, the more of the plan can still be adjusted.
Yes. Tell us 48 to 72 hours ahead and we send the COI to your property manager. The elevator or loading-dock reservation is the one piece you need to make yourself, because most buildings will only accept it from the resident. Some buildings want more lead time than 72 hours, so it is worth asking your manager what they require as soon as your date is set.
Because the deposit and the balance are two different transactions. The deposit is paid by card at booking through Stripe’s hosted checkout. The balance is due on completion based on actual hours, and card payment for that balance is not guaranteed — so we confirm which methods will work for you ahead of time rather than at the destination with a truck already unloaded. Cash App and Zelle are among the accepted final-payment methods.
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Read next
Cancelling or Rescheduling a Move: What Happens to Your DepositMore in Moving Guides.What a Move Does to Your Home: Floor and Wall Protection, and What Counts as DamageMore in Moving Guides.Do Movers Disconnect Appliances? What Happens With Your Washer, Dryer and FridgeMore in Moving Guides.When to bring in the pros: stairs and long carries, heavy or fragile pieces (pianos, safes, glass), a building that requires a COI, or a timeline that slipped. See how a LIOO crew runs it →