Turn job photos into invoices for UK one-van tradies

Dan has been a self-employed plumber in Wakefield for nine years. He works out of a battered Transit, charges £55 an hour, and turns over comfortably. Every Sunday evening he sits at the kitchen table with a Tesco mug of tea, his missus's old laptop, and a stack of crumpled till receipts from Screwfix. He works through the week's jobs from memory, types "1 x boiler service, parts as discussed" into an invoice template he downloaded in 2019, hits send, and hopes the customer remembers what was actually done. About a third of the time he forgets to bill for parts. He tried Tradify last year, lasted four days, cancelled because "it wants me to plan my whole life into it." He tried QuickBooks Self-Employed and gave up because the bank feed kept asking him to categorise things he did not understand.

Then his apprentice mentions an app her brother uses on a building site. Dan downloads it on Friday. Standing in the customer's hallway he takes three photos: the new combi on the wall, the box the part came in, the old bit of pipe in the bin. The app already knows it is the Henderson job because he set the address that morning. Thirty seconds later there is a fully itemised invoice in his drafts, the customer report includes before/after photos, and Mrs Henderson can pay by card on her phone before he has packed his tools. He has not opened a spreadsheet in a week.