Is job software worth it when it's just you?

Every company selling this software answers this question yes, and that includes us. So read what follows knowing where it comes from, and hold it to the arithmetic rather than the enthusiasm.

The money part is the easy part

At around £25 a month, job software costs £300 a year.

Published rate guides put trade hourly rates somewhere around £40 to £80, and day rates between roughly £200 and £400. Set £300 against that and the bar is low: the software pays for itself if it saves you about half an hour of billable time a month, or if it wins you one extra job across the entire year.

One quote that went out on Tuesday instead of Sunday, once, covers it.

That's a real answer, and it's why the cost question mostly resolves itself. But it's also why the cost question is the wrong one to spend your time on.

The part that actually decides it

The failure mode here isn't buying the wrong product. It's buying one and not using it.

A system you use half the time is worse than a notebook you use every time, because now the information is in two places and you trust neither. Plenty of sole traders have paid for a year of something that got opened four times in March.

So the honest question isn't "is it worth £25 a month?" It's "will I put every job through it, including on the bad weeks?" And that depends less on the product than on whether the admin is currently causing you enough pain to change a habit.

When the answer is no

Four situations where you shouldn't buy any of this, ours included:

A handful of jobs a month, and nothing slipping. If you can hold the lot in your head and nothing falls out, there's no problem here to solve — and paying to solve it anyway is how you end up resenting a monthly charge.

You work day rate for one or two contractors. This is the case the category ignores. If your week is booked by a builder, you don't quote, and you invoice one payer monthly, then quoting, chasing and job tracking are solving problems you don't have. A spreadsheet and your accounting software cover it. Come back if you start taking direct domestic work.

You've already tried two and stopped using both. That's a pattern, and a third product probably isn't the fix. It's worth working out which specific thing you kept not doing — the quoting, the invoicing, the recording — and solving just that, possibly on paper.

Money is genuinely tight this month. £300 a year is real money when it's tight. The stack you already have — your accounting software's invoicing, a calendar, a customer list in a spreadsheet — costs nothing and works for a small workload. Nobody selling software will tell you that, but it's true.

When the answer is yes

The signals are specific, and they're all about work leaking rather than time being spent:

• Quotes going out too slowly to win. If the customer's had three others by the time yours lands, you're losing jobs you already did the work of pricing.
• Invoices you forgot to send. Not disputed, not chased — forgotten, and sent a fortnight late.
• Chasing that never happens because it feels awkward and there's always a reason to leave it until Friday.
• Not knowing who owes you what. The test at the bottom of this post.

Any one of those is worth more per year than the subscription. Two of them and it isn't close.

At one person, price is nearly a wash

Worth being straight about this. The main UK options for a single user land between about £25 and £34 a month. That's a £108-a-year spread at the extremes, and most of it is closer than that.

The per-user pricing that separates these products sharply at three or four people barely bites at one, so price shouldn't be your deciding factor here. Pick on whether it fits how you work: whether you can do the whole job from your phone, whether it connects to your accounts, and whether the bits you'd use every day take two taps or six.

That answer doesn't favour us particularly, which is rather the point. Our flat pricing is an argument at four people; at one it's a rounding difference.

Two questions, right now

Without looking anything up:

1. Who owes you money, and how much?
2. Which quotes are still waiting on an answer?

If both answers come easily, your system is working — spend the £300 on something else.

If you'd need half an hour and a rummage through your phone, that half hour is precisely what you'd be buying back, and you'd get it back every month.

How to decide properly in a week

Run your actual work through a trial rather than touring the features — there's a fuller version of how to do that in the comparison guide. Most products offer one; ours is 30 days with no card.

But for a one-person business the thing to measure is different, and it isn't capability. They can all raise an invoice. What you're testing is whether you reach for it unprompted on a Thursday when you're knackered. Watch that, not the feature list. If a week goes by and you've opened it twice because you made yourself, the habit isn't there — and no product installs a habit for you.

That's a genuinely useful outcome, by the way. Finding out in a free month that you won't use it beats finding out in month eleven of a contract.

If you get to the end of the week and the two questions above are easier to answer than they were, that's worth £25 a month by any measure you like.

Still weighing up which one? What actually differs between them covers the six things worth comparing, and our own pricing page shows what a one-person business pays across the main options.