What’s new
What changed,
What changed,
and when.
Every entry below is dated to the day the change was made. Fixes are listed alongside features, because a tool you price real work with should be honest about both.
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Every saved job now opens on a page of its own
- A saved job opens on a record, not back in the builder. Open one from your quotes and you get the job itself: the quote, what has been paid, what is not included and the schedule of works, each on its own tab with a count beside it, so you can see what a job holds without reading through it.
- Three copies of the same job, and you choose which one you are looking at. Your copy shows everything, costs and margin included. Client copy is the document exactly as your customer received it — your costs, your margin and your own notes are not in it. Schedule only is the works with the money taken out, for a subcontractor to price or to take to site.
- Printing the schedule does not send anything. It prints the description, quantity and unit and no prices at all. It does not mark the quote as sent, does not save a new version and does not go in the record of what was sent — it is a working paper for the site, not a document going to a customer.
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A Save could wipe your bank details, and a quote opened on a phone reads at phone size
- A Save could wipe your bank details. It cannot now. On a device that had never opened TradeDraft before — a new phone, a different browser, or one where you had cleared your browsing data — your settings could come up blank while everything was still stored safely. Typing your business name and pressing Save then wrote those blank fields over the real ones, taking the bank account, sort code, address and phone number with them, and your next quote would print with nowhere for the customer to pay. The screen now tells the difference between "nothing has been set up" and "this could not be read", and will not save over what it did not manage to load.
- A quote opened on your phone lays itself out for the phone. Opening a quote, or a final account, from your quotes on a phone showed it at full A4 size: the figures out of line with one another, addresses breaking mid-word, and the page sliding sideways. Both now re-set themselves for the screen — the same easy-read layout your customer has always had when they open the link you send them.
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The app works with no signal again
- The app works again with no signal. Since 1 August the files it needs to run had stopped being saved to your phone for offline use, the pricing engine among them. Open it in a basement or a dead spot and it would not have worked properly. All of it is saved again, so a quote you start on site finishes on site.
- A stage invoice shows the CIS it deducts. It now prints the deduction taken off that payment, and the costs excluded from it, the way a full invoice already did.
- A job you marked won by hand adds up on its final account. Figures were stored to a fraction of a penny and rounded again on the way out, so a closing statement could list rows that did not quite come to its own total. They agree now.
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Solar and heat pumps price at the right VAT, and our name is off your invoice
- Solar, batteries and heat pumps price at the right VAT rate. The app was treating energy-saving materials as 5%, and as 20% if you answered that the work was on an existing building. Both disagreed with our own VAT guide, which was right. A solar install is a job the app suggests, so it was mispricing work it had offered you.
- Our name is off your invoice. The TradeDraft wordmark was printing across the top of the bill you hand your customer, above your own letterhead, and again at the foot of it. That is your paperwork, not ours. Both are gone.
- Five things that only went wrong on paper. A quote whose only payment line was payment in full still offered your customer the option of paying a deposit. An invoice printed the amount payable and the balance now due one above the other, the same figure twice. Item numbers dropped their full stop onto a line of its own from item 10 down. A “Pay by card” button printed on the paper copy and pushed it onto a fourth sheet. And the final account repeated its balance on every page.
- Sixty-eight more items in the rate book, across all eleven trades: solar and battery, heat pumps, dry-fix ridge and verge, access equipment for plasterers, permeable driveways, FD30 doors, minimum charge and out-of-hours. They arrive without a price. A number we guessed at would be read as a recommendation, and these are the jobs where that costs the most, so they are yours to fill in.
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Find an address from the postcode, and the job reads on two lines
- Type the customer’s postcode and pick the address. It fills the address and tidies the postcode for you. If you already know the address, ignore it and type — and if you have no signal the boxes work exactly as they always did.
- Your quotes list shows what the job actually is. The heading you gave it, and the fuller description on the line underneath, the way the client’s address already sits under their name.
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The deduction, the branding and the paperwork all got stricter
- Your accreditation marks now print on the quote your customer signs. They were only reaching your own PDF, and uploading one could be undone by pressing Save. Both fixed — if you uploaded marks before today, please add them again.
- A quote you have already sent keeps the letterhead it was sent with. Change your logo and old quotes stay as your customer received them.
- Your rate book speaks up while you price. Type a cost that differs from the one you saved and the quote tells you, with one tap to update it.
- The workings are on screen. Your markup is shown as the margin it actually produces, and a CIS deduction is worked through on your own figures.
- Site setup is in every trade’s starting price list — waste, protection, access, parking, welfare: the costs most often left out of a price.
- Every document says where it ends, so anyone holding a printout can tell whether a page is missing.
- Your books get a file they can actually import. The accounting export now writes for Xero and for QuickBooks as well as in plain English. It asks once for the names your software uses for each VAT treatment — because those belong to your account, not to us — and if one is missing it writes no file rather than a file that would apply the wrong rate.
- The CIS question tells you what that customer was on last time. It still makes you answer, and nothing is pre-selected: a subcontractor's status changes, and it is not ours to assume.
- Help in your account knows which screen you are on — the guides offered are the ones that screen is about, and the way to reach a person is in the same place.
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A job can be priced as one figure
- For work you would rather quote as a single price than line by line. The schedule of works still prints in full — the line prices do not.
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A refund can be recorded against a job
- Money you return to a customer is money the job’s figures know about, so what is left to bill stays right and the final account still adds up.
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Say where the work is, when it is not the billing address
- For a landlord, a letting agent, or a main contractor billed at their office. It prints with the scope on the quote and on the page your customer signs.
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Your quotes, rate book, account and settings got their own addresses
- Each section of your account is now a real page you can bookmark and go straight back to, instead of one address for everything.
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A job won on a doorstep can still be invoiced
- Acceptance works with no signal. Take the signature on your phone in a cellar or on a site with one bar; it syncs when you are back in range and the job carries on as though it had been online.
- Your rate book curates itself. The rates you actually use come to the top, and one you delete stays deleted.
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Invoicing, deposits and staged payments
- An accepted quote becomes an invoice without retyping anything, a deposit can be taken at acceptance, and a long job can be billed in stages against the schedule the customer already agreed.
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Your own rates, and the tax worked out as you build
- A price list you build once and reuse on every job, and VAT, CIS and the Domestic Reverse Charge decided by answering questions about the work rather than picking a rate and hoping.
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The reverse charge, done properly on the page your customer signs
- The online acceptance document carries everything the reverse charge requires — not just a note saying it applies.
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Free calculators, and Continue with Google
- Day rate, markup against margin, and the VAT threshold — worked out on the site, with no account needed. And you can sign in with Google instead of keeping another password.
Updated whenever something ships. If a change here affects a quote you have already sent, it will say so.