Getting started with TradePlanr

Most job management apps fail for the same reason: they ask for an afternoon of setup before they give anything back. TradePlanr is built the other way round — you can create an account, add your business details and book your first job before the kettle's boiled twice, and everything else layers on when you need it.

This tutorial is the full tour. We'll create your account, walk through the five places you'll spend your time — jobs, the diary, customers, invoices and certificates — and finish with the two things worth setting up on day one so the rest of the app works properly from the start.

1. 1. Create your account

   Download TradePlanr from the App Store or Google Play and sign up with your email address. There's no card required to start, and the account you create on your phone is the same one you'll use everywhere — your jobs and paperwork follow you, not the device.

   You'll be asked your trade during sign-up. It's worth answering honestly: a gas engineer gets CP12s surfaced, an electrician gets EICRs, and everyone else skips the certificate clutter they'll never use.

   The TradePlanr sign-up screen asking for email address and trade type

2. 2. Get your bearings: the Jobs tab

   Jobs are the spine of TradePlanr — every quote, invoice, certificate, photo and note hangs off a job. The Jobs tab is your list of everything booked, in progress and done, and it's where most of your day-to-day taps happen.

   Don't worry about filling it yet; there's a whole tutorial on adding your first job. For now, just know that when in doubt, start from the job — everything else in the app reaches back to it.

   The Jobs tab showing a list of upcoming and completed jobs

3. 3. The diary: your week at a glance

   The diary shows your jobs laid out across the week, so Monday morning starts with a look at your phone instead of a search through texts and scraps of paper. Jobs you book land here automatically, and you can drag them around when a customer reschedules.

   If you work with others, the diary is also what you'll share with the team — and it can sync to Google or Apple Calendar so work sits alongside everything else in your life.

4. 4. Customers, invoices and certificates

   The Customers tab is your address book with a memory — every customer keeps their contact details, addresses and full job history, so you know what you did at a property before you knock. Invoices live in their own tab: create one from a finished job, send it by email or text, and see what's paid and what's owed at a glance.

   If you issue certificates — landlord gas safety records, EICRs, completion sign-offs — those are built in too, completed on your phone and sent as PDFs without a pad of carbon paper in sight.

   A customer's detail screen showing contact details and a history of past jobs and invoices

5. 5. Set up your business profile first

   Before anything leaves the app with your name on it, spend five minutes in Settings adding your business name, logo, contact details and payment terms. Every quote, invoice and certificate picks these up automatically — set them once and you never think about them again.

   This is the single highest-value five minutes of setup, which is why it has its own tutorial.

   Tip

   Do the business profile before you send your first invoice, not after. An invoice with a logo and bank details on it looks like a business; one without looks like a favour.

6. 6. Then add your first job

   With the profile done, create your first job — a real one from this week, not a test. Attach the customer, set the date, add a note about what's being done. That one habit, repeated for every booking, is what makes the diary accurate, the invoices one tap away and the job history worth having.

   From there, let the app grow with you: turn on SMS reminders when no-shows bite, connect Stripe when you want card payments, and check the performance reports at month end to see how it's all going.

   The new job screen with a customer attached and a date set in the diary

That's the lie of the land: jobs at the centre, the diary, customers, invoices and certificates around them. Set up your profile, book one real job, and you're using TradePlanr properly — everything after that is refinement.