For every trade
The best invoice app for a tradesman is the one that has already written the invoice
You finish the last job and sit in the van. Tap once and the invoice is written, or leave it and it writes itself by the end of the day. Either way you read it and tap send. That is the whole evening.
The one test that matters
Most invoice apps were built for somebody at a desk. You open a blank invoice, find your notes, and type the job in for the second time. A tradesman is not at a desk. It is half past six, you have had eight jobs and a wasted hour at the wholesaler, and typing out an invoice from memory is the last thing that is going to happen.
So there is really only one test. How much is left to type once the job is finished?
What to look for
- It already knows the job. The customer, the address, the hours you were there, the parts you fitted, the price you agreed. If the job was booked in the app, none of it gets typed a second time.
- It works on the phone. Not a shrunken version of a desktop screen. Buttons your thumb can hit while you are standing in somebody's hallway.
- It drafts by itself. A blank invoice is a job you put off until Sunday. A finished draft is a job you tap.
- It never sends on its own. You read every invoice before a customer does. Anything else is a price mistake going out in your name.
- It tells you who has not paid. One list, oldest first, so chasing is a minute and not an evening.
- It is not a separate app. The quote, the booking, the job sheet, the invoice and the customer record are one trail. Four apps that do not speak to each other is four lots of typing.
- It handles labour and materials apart. If you work for a contractor, that split is the whole invoice. There is more on that on the CIS invoice template page.
What happens in DRSaaS
Half an hour after your working day ends, DRSaaS looks for any job whose last booked day has gone by with no invoice on it. It writes the invoice from the job itself: your hours, your price list, the parts, the customer. Then it tells you the draft is ready.
Nothing is sent. The draft sits there until you have read it and tapped send, and that is deliberate. The app is allowed to do the typing. It is not allowed to talk to your customers without you.
The working day runs from seven in the morning to seven at night unless you set your own hours, and the draft lands at half past seven.
If you would rather do it on the spot, you can. Open the job, tap make the invoice, and the same draft appears while you are still parked outside. The day end pass is only there for the ones you forget, which is most of them.
Invoicing on its own is not a business
This is worth saying plainly, because a single purpose invoice app will sell you the invoice and stop. DRSaaS is the everything app for trades and service businesses. One sign in holds the quote you sent, the job it turned into, the days it is booked for, the sheet you filled in on site, the invoice that came out of it and the customer it all belongs to.
That matters on the invoice more than it sounds. An invoice is only quick to produce when something upstream already recorded the work. If the quote, the booking and the job sheet live in three other places, your invoice app has nothing to work from and you are back to typing.
For electricians there is a certificate side as well, with the EICR and the other certificates in the same account. That is an extra, not the point.
What it costs
No card. No trial clock. Free for every business until 500 are active on it. After that it is £49 a month for one person, and no account pays anything without 90 days written notice first. Your first 12 months are free whatever happens.
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