You set how far you will travel, from each place you work out of. The default is 40 km. You can narrow it to one kilometre or widen it to two hundred, and you can add more than one base if you genuinely work from more than one.
Why 40 and not 50
Because 50 km from a Brisbane northside base reaches the Gold Coast, and almost nobody drives that for a callout. A default that puts you in front of jobs you would never accept wastes your time and the customer’s, so the starting figure is deliberately the one you would actually say yes to.
Why there is a ceiling
Two hundred kilometres is generous enough for a genuinely regional operator, and it stops anyone claiming an entire state. Without a limit, the winning move would be to set the radius to infinity and appear on every job in Australia — which would make distance meaningless for everybody, including the tradies who set an honest number.
Several bases, not one big circle
If you keep a van at a second yard, add it as a second base with its own radius. Two sensible circles describe where you actually work far better than one enormous one drawn to cover both, and the space between them is space you were never going to drive to anyway.
You cannot remove your last base. A tradie with no service area cannot be matched to anything, so we do not let you quietly switch yourself off by deleting one.
Distance carries the most weight of anything we rank on
More than specialty, more than rating. On urgent work it is close to everything, because the only tradie who can help somebody in the next hour is a nearby one.
That means a smaller, honest radius is not a disadvantage. It is a strong signal on every job inside it.
We sanity-check the coordinates
A base has to sit inside Australia. This is not a border check — it catches a dropped minus sign, a transposed pair of numbers, or a default that never got set, which are the things that actually go wrong and would otherwise put your business in the ocean.