#How to Get the Job Details Out of Him (Without Another Row)

There's a conversation that happens in a lot of trade households at about half five in the evening. It goes:

"What did you do today?"

"Bathroom at the Parkers."

"Right. What did you actually do, though? I need to invoice it."

"...I'll write it down later."

He won't. Not because he doesn't care, and not because he doesn't want to get paid, but because "later" is after tea, after the kids, after he's had five minutes, and by then the day has gone. So on Sunday night you're reconstructing a week's work from memory and a photo of a wall, and you're both a bit fed up about it.

This isn't a relationship problem. It's an information-capture problem, and it has fixes.

#First: it genuinely isn't laziness

Worth saying, because it's easy to read it as not caring.

Consider what you're actually asking. You want a structured, itemised record of work — description, materials, times, variations — produced by someone who is up a ladder, kneeling in a loft, or holding a soldering iron. His hands are dirty, his phone is in the van, and the moment he stops to write something down, he stops earning.

Then he gets home shattered and you ask him to recall four jobs in detail. Recall is a genuinely hard task; it's much harder than writing it down at the time. So the answer comes out as "did the bathroom, bit of pipework, few bits from the merchant" — which is true, and useless for invoicing.

The problem isn't willingness. It's that you're asking for the information at the worst possible moment, several hours after the only moment it was easy to give.

#Second: know exactly what you need

Half of the friction here is that "tell me about the job" is an enormous question. Nobody knows where to start with it, so they give you the summary.

You almost certainly only need four things:

1. What was done — a sentence, in his words. "Replaced the cylinder and re-piped to the airing cupboard" is plenty.
2. What went in — the materials, roughly. The merchant receipt covers most of this on its own.
3. Anything extra that wasn't quoted — the socket while he was there, the extra half day, the making good. This is where the money is.
4. What he told the customer — especially about price, and especially about when he's coming back.

That's it. Four things, most of them one line. Ask for four specific things and you'll get four specific things. Ask "what did you do today" and you'll get "the bathroom".

Number three is worth being slightly ruthless about, by the way. Unbilled extras are usually the single biggest leak in a small trade business — each one too small to argue about, and collectively worth thousands a year.

#Third: move the capture to the moment, not the evening

This is the whole thing. Everything else is detail.

Information recorded at the job, by the person doing it, while it's happening costs about thirty seconds. The same information extracted afterwards costs both of you an evening and is less accurate.

What that looks like in practice:

The photo rule. Photograph everything. The finished work. The receipt at the merchant's counter, before it goes anywhere near the van. The meter reading, the serial number on the boiler, the state of the wall before he started. Photos take two seconds, need no typing, and answer an enormous number of questions later — including "we never agreed to that".

Capture before leaving. Not at the end of the day, not at the end of the week — before he pulls off the drive. The van is the last quiet moment where the job is still fresh. Two minutes there saves twenty later.

Voice, not typing. Nobody types on a phone with cold hands. Speaking a note is much more likely to happen than typing one.

Receipts at the counter. The merchant's counter is the only place a receipt is guaranteed to exist. Once it's in the footwell it's Schrödinger's receipt.

The rule that matters: if it takes more than about thirty seconds, it won't get done — not once, not reliably. Any system that asks him to sit down and fill in a form at the end of the day is a system that will work for a fortnight and then quietly stop.

#Fourth: one place, not five

The other half of the problem is that details do arrive — just scattered across everything you own.

A text about the Parkers. A photo in WhatsApp. A price in a phone call you half remember. A note on the back of a bit of plasterboard. A receipt in the van. And a diary that lives partly on his phone and partly in your head.

Nothing is missing, exactly. It's just that assembling one invoice means visiting six places, and you're the only person who knows where they all are.

The fix is that everything hangs off the job. One record per job — the address, the customer, what was quoted, what was done, the photos, the receipts, the extras. He adds to it on site; you work from it at the kitchen table. Not because software is inherently better, but because the assembly step disappears, and the assembly step is what's eating your evenings.

Ordinary phone apps won't quite do this, incidentally, and it's worth knowing why: notes don't attach to a customer, WhatsApp isn't searchable in any useful way six months later, and a shared calendar doesn't hold a price. Whatever you use, the test is whether one job is one thing.

And it has to work with no signal. Basements, plant rooms, new-build sites and half of rural Britain have no reception, and that's precisely where the work happens. If capture fails there, it fails where it matters.

#Fifth: have the conversation once, properly

Not at half five. Not while he's eating. Pick a Sunday morning, and make it about the business rather than about him.

A few things worth saying:

Lead with the money, not the paperwork. "Invoices are going out ten days after the job finishes, which means we're getting paid ten days later than we could be" is a business fact. "You never tell me anything" is an argument. The first one gets action.

Ask for something small and specific. Not "be more organised". Photograph every receipt at the counter, and add the job on your phone before you leave. Two habits. That's the whole ask.

Show him what happens at your end. A lot of tradespeople genuinely don't know how long the office takes, because they've never watched it. Fifteen minutes sat next to you on a Sunday night while you rebuild a week from photographs is more persuasive than anything you could say.

Agree the fallback. There will be days it doesn't happen. Agree what then — a two-minute voice note before bed, say — so it's a known exception rather than a row.

Try it for two weeks and then look at it. Not forever. Two weeks, then sit down and see whether the invoices went out faster. If they did, it stays. If they didn't, change something else.

#What actually changes

When capture moves to the moment, three things happen fairly quickly.

Invoices go out days sooner, because there's nothing to reconstruct — which pulls the same number of days off when the money arrives.

Extras get billed, because they're recorded while they're still happening rather than remembered a fortnight later.

The five-thirty conversation stops. Which is worth more than either of the above, honestly.

He doesn't have to become an office person. He has to take a photo and spend thirty seconds in the van. That's a fair ask, and it's the difference between an evening's work and a glance at a screen.

TradePlanr keeps everything on one job record — the address, the quote, the photos, the receipts, the extras and the invoice — added on his phone on site (offline, if there's no signal) and open in your browser at the kitchen table. There's more written for the partner who runs the office. Free to start, no card needed.