Quick Answer
Two evenings and a Saturday afternoon is enough to go from blank Tradify trial to live invoicing. Friday: download the app, register, get the basics in. Saturday: load customers, build quote templates, connect Xero. Sunday: send your first quote, send your first invoice, take your first card payment. The hardest part is sitting down to do it. Everything else is pointing and tapping.
Table of Contents
- Why bother with Tradify when the notebook works fine
- What you will need before you start
- Friday night: 30 minutes to register and lay the foundations
- Saturday morning: customers, items and your first quote
- Saturday afternoon: connect Xero properly
- Sunday: send your first real quote and invoice
- The AI bit: SmartRead, SmartWrite and Xero bank rules
- Common mistakes UK trades make in week one
- What tradespeople are saying about Tradify
- Recommended videos
- Frequently asked questions
- My verdict
TradifyTradify
Job management built for UK trades. From £34 per user per month.
XeroXero
UK accounting platform. Two-way sync with Tradify, handles VAT and CIS.
Why bother with Tradify when the notebook works fine
I spent the first three years of running Elite Heating and Plumbing with a paper diary and a folder of carbon-copy quote pads. It worked. Until it didn't. A quote I had written for a boiler swap sat in the van for nine days because I forgot to type it up. The customer rang a competitor. That single forgotten quote cost me about £4,800.
Tradify is built to stop that happening. It is not glamorous software. It does the basics very well: customers in one place, quotes that look professional, invoices that go straight into Xero, and a calendar that does not lie. For a sole trader or a small team of one to five, that is enough.
The reason people pay £34 a month for it rather than using a free spreadsheet is simple. The free thing costs you about ten hours a week. Tradify gives most of those hours back. I will take the £34. If you want to extend that further, our Tradify–Xero–Stripe integration guide shows how to close the loop from quote to bank deposit in one chain.
What you will need before you start
Before you sit down on Friday, get these things in a pile so you are not hunting for passwords on Saturday morning.
- A laptop or desktop for the heavier setup work. The mobile app is excellent, but customising templates is faster on a real keyboard.
- Your smartphone, with at least 1GB free for the Tradify app. iOS or Android, both work identically.
- Your existing customer list, in any form. Spreadsheet, exported contacts, even a notebook page you can type up.
- An active Xero subscription, or a 30-day Xero trial. If you are not on Xero yet, get the trial running before Friday night.
- Your business logo as a PNG file. If you do not have one yet, your trading name in plain text will do.
- Bank details for invoice payment. Sort code, account number, account name.
- Your VAT number if VAT-registered, and your CIS UTR if you are a subcontractor.
- A list of 8 to 12 jobs you do most often, with rough pricing. Boiler service, EICR, small bathroom refit, whatever your bread and butter is.
Friday night: 30 minutes to register and lay the foundations
The temptation is to crash through it and try to do everything in one sitting. Don't. Friday night is a foundations job. Get four things done and stop.
One. Go to tradifyhq.com/uk and click "Start free trial". Email, password, business name, country. Pick the UK option. This sets your default currency, tax rates and the Gas Safe integration option later.
Two. Add your business details under Settings then Company. Trading name, address, phone, email, VAT number if you have one. Upload your logo as a PNG. This is what customers will see on every quote and invoice you send, so do it once and do it properly.
Three. Set your default tax rates. UK trades usually need 20 percent standard VAT, 5 percent reduced for certain energy work, and 0 percent for zero-rated items. Add Reverse Charge VAT if you do CIS subcontract work. Settings, Tax Rates, add them in.
Four. Install the mobile app. Search "Tradify" in the App Store or Google Play. Log in with the same credentials. Allow notifications, allow camera access, allow location. You will need all three. Then close the laptop and have a beer. Friday night is done.
Saturday morning: customers, items and your first quote
Saturday is the work day. Block out three hours with the kettle on. This is the bit where Tradify starts to look like a real business tool rather than a glorified address book.
Import or add your customers
Tradify takes a CSV file with the standard fields: name, address, email, phone, notes. If your customers are in an Excel file already, save it as CSV and drag it into the import wizard under Contacts. If they are in a notebook, just add the regulars manually. Ten or fifteen is enough to start. The rest will trickle in as jobs come up.
Spend a couple of minutes filling in the notes field for each one. Boiler model, postcode of the property, gate code, dog that bites. These are the details you will be glad of in six months when you cannot remember which Mrs Patel had the Worcester 30Si.
Build your price list and quote items
This is the bit most people skip and regret. Go to Items in the main menu. Add a "Quote Item" or "Bill Item" for every common task you do. Boiler service £95. Standard EICR up to 5 circuits £180. First-hour rate £75. Hourly rate after that £55. Materials at trade plus 20 percent. Whatever your actual numbers are, get them in.
If you have a wholesaler price list, you can also import that under Pricelists. Edmundson, City Electrical Factors, City Plumbing and most of the big merchants offer downloadable CSV catalogues. Import them once and Tradify will price-match parts automatically when you build a quote.
The first time you build a quote using your saved items and templates, it will feel slow. Maybe two minutes. By the tenth one, you will be at 47 seconds, which is what Tradify themselves quote as the average. That is faster than handwriting it on a quote pad. If you want to push the quoting time down even further, our AI quoting from job photos guide shows how a picture of the job becomes a costed quote in under five minutes.
Save your first quote
Pick a real job you have in mind for next week. Build the quote inside Tradify. Add the customer, add the items, set the validity period at 30 days, attach a photo of the site if you have one. Save it as a draft. Do not send it yet. We will send the first real one on Sunday once the Xero connection is live.
Saturday afternoon: connect Xero properly
This is the section where most setup guides skip the detail and you end up with double-entry duplicates or invoices that never sync. Take 45 minutes on this and you will save yourself a year of accounting headaches.
Authorise the connection
In Tradify, go to Settings then Integrations then Xero, and click "Login to Xero". You will be redirected to Xero, asked to log in, then asked which organisation to connect to. Pick the right one. Click "Allow access". You will be sent back to Tradify automatically.
Set the integration presets
This is the page everyone clicks through too fast. Read each toggle properly.
- Use Xero invoice numbering sequence: turn this on if you have already been invoicing through Xero. It keeps your invoice numbers continuous rather than starting again at 1.
- Send invoice description to Xero: turn on. It puts the full job description on the Xero invoice line, so your accountant or HMRC inspector can see what each invoice actually covered.
- Create inventory items in Xero: turn on if you want stock tracking. Turn off if you just want simple sales accounts. For most sole traders, turn off.
- Send files to Xero: turn on. It attaches photos and PDFs from your job notes onto the Xero invoice. Useful if HMRC ever asks for evidence.
Map your accounts
The next screen asks which Xero account to send sales to, which to send expenses to, and which tax rates correspond to which Tradify tax rates. The defaults are fine for most trades. If you do CIS, make sure the CIS Reverse Charge rate in Tradify maps to the matching CIS tax rate in Xero. If you are not sure, ring your accountant. This is the one phone call worth making.
Sunday: send your first real quote and invoice
Sunday morning is when you stop setting up and start using Tradify for real. The whole point of the weekend project was this single moment. You send a real quote to a real customer, win the work, and you are live.
Send your first quote
Pull up the draft quote you saved on Saturday. Check the pricing one more time. Hit "Send". Tradify emails it to the customer with a clickable accept button. You will get a notification on your phone the moment they open it, and another when they accept. That second notification is properly satisfying the first few times.
Turn the accepted quote into a job
When the customer accepts, Tradify creates a job automatically. Open it. Add a scheduled date. Add yourself as the assigned tradesperson. Add any materials you need to order. Done. The job is now on your calendar and your phone.
Do the work, log the time
When you actually do the job, open it on the mobile app. Hit "Start" when you arrive. Add notes, photos, materials used. Hit "Stop" when you finish. Tradify logs every minute. If you charge by the hour, you can convert the time entries straight into invoice lines.
Send your first invoice
From the completed job, tap "Create invoice". Tradify pulls in the quoted price, plus any materials or extras you added on site. Adjust if needed. Tap "Send". The invoice goes to the customer with a Stripe pay-by-card link built in. It also lands in Xero automatically within about 30 seconds, ready for your VAT return.
That is the loop. Quote, accept, job, time, invoice, payment, accounting. The whole thing on one platform with no double entry. Once you have done it once, the rest is just repetition.
The AI bit: SmartRead, SmartWrite and Xero bank rules
If you are on the Plus plan at £44 per user per month, you get two AI tools that earn their keep. The rest of the trade press treats them as a gimmick. They are not.
SmartRead for Bills. Open the app, tap the camera icon on the Bills page, photograph a paper supplier receipt. Tradify's AI reads the supplier name, date, total, VAT, and individual line items, then creates a draft bill ready to push to Xero. It is not perfect. I have seen it misread handwritten merchant scribbles on a Wickes receipt. But it gets about 90 percent right and the other 10 percent takes five seconds to correct.
SmartWrite. Generates customer-friendly job descriptions from your engineer notes. Useful if your scribbled "checked PRV, refilled F&E, vented rads" needs to read like "system bled, expansion vessel checked, pressure restored" on the customer's invoice. Saves about 90 seconds per invoice for me.
Once a bill is in Xero, Xero's own bank reconciliation AI handles the rest. When the bank feed brings in the payment to that supplier, Xero matches it automatically. The combination of Tradify's SmartRead and Xero's bank rules means receipts go from glove-box paper chaos to fully categorised expenses with almost no typing. For a one-man business, that is the difference between doing your VAT return on a Sunday afternoon and doing it on a Sunday evening.
Common mistakes UK trades make in week one
I have set up Tradify for myself and watched four mates set it up. The same mistakes come up every time.
Mistake one: pricing items at trade cost. Set your prices at sell price, not what you paid at the merchant. Tradify will not mark them up automatically. If you put a Worcester 30Si in at £980 because that is what you paid, you will send a customer a quote with no margin on the boiler.
Mistake two: forgetting to enable Stripe. The whole point of digital invoicing is that customers can pay on their phone. If you do not connect Stripe under Settings then Payments, your invoices will be just PDFs. Connect it, accept that Stripe takes about 1.5 percent, and watch your payment times drop from 23 days to 3 days. It pays for itself in cash flow.
Mistake three: ignoring the Xero sync log. Every now and then a sync will fail because of a duplicate invoice number or a missing tax code. Tradify shows you exactly which one and why in the Xero sync log under Settings. Check it once a week. Three minutes of housekeeping prevents three hours of accountant emails later.
Mistake four: not adding the team. If you have an apprentice or a part-timer, add them as a user even if you think they will only use the calendar. £34 a month per user feels like a lot until you realise the alternative is them texting you "where am I tomorrow?" at 8pm every Sunday. I have written before about how getting your team onto the same accounting setup pays off long before the Making Tax Digital deadline arrives.
Mistake five: trying to migrate three years of old jobs. Don't. Start fresh from your trial start date. The historical stuff stays in your old system or your paper folder. Tradify is for the next year, not the last one.
What tradespeople are saying about Tradify
Recommended videos
Tradify in Action: 6-Minute Guide (UK Edition)
Tradify Help & Training
How To Set Up Xero With Tradify
Tradify Help & Training
New to Tradify? This is how I set it up. Part 1/3
Alpha Tradie
Tradify Tutorial For Beginners
Speak About Digital
Using Tradify's SmartRead
Tradify Help & Training
How To Use the Tradify Mobile App (iOS & Android)
Tradify
Frequently asked questions
You can. About six hours of actual work spread across Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday will get a sole trader from blank trial to first paid invoice. The setup itself takes 90 minutes. The rest is loading customers, building a price list, and learning the workflow. If you have more than five users, budget a full week.
The Lite plan is £34 per user per month and covers job management, quoting, invoicing, scheduling, accounting sync and online payments. The Pro plan is £37 and adds custom branding, timesheets and subcontractor scheduling. The Plus plan at £44 unlocks the AI tools (SmartRead, SmartWrite), purchase orders and reporting. Most sole traders are fine on Lite. Add Stripe transaction fees of about 1.5 percent on card payments and you have the real annual cost.
Yes. The mobile app caches your jobs, photos, notes and time entries locally. You can log a full day's work in a basement with no signal and everything syncs the moment you get back into Wi-Fi or 4G range. This is the single feature that separates Tradify from the cheaper web-only competitors.
Tradify integrates with Xero, QuickBooks Online, MYOB and Sage. Xero is the smoothest connection in the UK because of the Reverse VAT handling for CIS subcontract work. If you are already on QuickBooks the integration works fine, you will just have a bit more manual mapping to do for CIS tax codes. If you are on no accounting software yet, get Xero. The Tradify–Xero combo is the closest thing to a complete UK trades back office.
Yes, but only if you set it up properly. You need to add the CIS Reverse Charge tax rate in both Tradify and Xero, then map them to each other in the Xero integration presets. Once that is done, Tradify will apply the reverse charge automatically when you invoice another VAT-registered builder. Spend twenty minutes with your accountant on a screen-share for this one bit. Worth every penny.
Yes. UK gas engineers can submit gas notifications to the Gas Safe Register directly from the Tradify mobile app without re-entering job and customer details. This single feature saves about 90 seconds per notification, which adds up to roughly four hours a year for a busy gas engineer.
Tradify lets you export all your customers, jobs, quotes and invoices to CSV before you cancel. There is no long-term contract, no exit fee and no notice period; you can cancel from inside the app. If your Xero connection is set up properly, your accounting records stay in Xero regardless of what you do with Tradify.
Tradify offers free one-to-one onboarding calls with a real human in the UK during the 14-day trial. Book one for the middle of your Saturday afternoon. They will walk you through Xero mapping, tax rate setup and templates. The same support continues after you subscribe; phone, email and in-app chat all answered by UK-hours staff.
My verdict
Tradify is not the cheapest job management software. It is not the most powerful. It is the simplest one a UK sole trader can pick up on a Friday night and have working by Sunday lunchtime. That ratio of setup time to long-term value is what makes it worth the £34 a month. If you are still running quotes on carbon paper or invoices on a Word template, this weekend is the one to fix it. Skip the perfectionism. Get the basics in. The 47-second quotes will come.
