Free forum for UK tradespeople. What a job should be priced at, which reg applies, which tool is worth it, and how to get an invoice paid without chasing it four times.
Welcome. This is a board for people who work in the UK trades — on the tools, running a van, or running a small firm. What it's for. Asking what a job should be priced at. Checking a reg before you c…
Everyone has a first reminder. Fewer people have a second, a third and a point where it goes somewhere else. What does yours look like, and at what point does the tone change? And has anyone got a de…
Work is done, they were happy on the day, and now the phone goes to voicemail and the emails do not land. At what point do you stop being polite? And has anyone had a customer resurface months later…
We are calling this one TradeLinkers 1.0: the first release where the app, the web portal and your customer's portal all do the same job the same way. The big one is addresses. Every form that takes…
Two things went live this week for anyone invoicing through TradeLinkers. Put your own payment link in Settings → Business and every invoice you send carries it twice: a Pay this invoice button in th…
MTD for Income Tax has been live since April for anyone with qualifying income over £50,000. HMRC says more than 436,000 sole traders and landlords got their first quarterly update in, and the next d…
The EAS competence changes land on 1 October, and they are the ones a lot of firms have been putting off. One Qualified Supervisor covering the rest of the team stops being enough for periodic inspec…
Driving an hour each way to price a job you have a one-in-four chance of winning is a day gone by Friday. Some people charge a survey fee and knock it off if they get the job. Some quote off photos.…
From 27 August anyone in England, Scotland or Wales can buy an accredited plug-in solar kit of up to 800W and plug it into a socket, no installer needed. The government claims up to £110 a year saved…
Amendment 4 to the Wiring Regulations was published on 15 April and the six-month transition ends on 15 October 2026, when the previous version is withdrawn. The revised sections cover medical locati…
Peugeot research reported by Professional Builder puts the average clean air zone bill for a non-compliant van at £780 a year: £99 a month in London, £82 in Tyneside, £8 to £10 a day elsewhere in Eng…
Three things in the last fortnight: this Community went live on 31 August, the Trade News section is up, and app version 1.2.0 landed on Google Play on 29 August with deposits on estimates and invoic…
Plenty of jobs happen in a plant room with no signal, in a basement, or out somewhere with one bar. If you have used TradeLinkers with no connection, what worked and what did not? Did anything fail t…
You get called to a small job, open it up, and now you are looking at something that is not safe and is not yours. What do you do — refuse to touch it, quote for the remedial, do the minimum and put…
Every trade has one. Choc blocks in a wall void, a live feed to nowhere, a joist notched to within an inch of its life, a soil pipe going somewhere it definitely should not. Post yours. Half of this…
Not the biggest one. The one where it all went right, the customer was decent, and you drove away pleased with it. What was it, what made it good, and is there anything in how you ran it that you hav…
If something in the app is not working, post it here rather than giving up on it. What helps: what you were doing, what you expected, what happened instead, and whether it happens every time. Android…
Nobody puts a photo of a properly dressed board or a first fix on Instagram, and those are often the bits that took the skill. Post the ones that look like nothing and took twice as long as the shiny…
There is almost always a sign, and it is almost always in the first conversation. What was yours? "The last three trades were useless." Haggling before you had given a number. Wanting it started tomo…
Genuine question and we read every answer on this board. If there is one thing TradeLinkers does not do that would take real time out of your week, tell us what it is and roughly how often you would…
Almost everyone has a story, and the useful part is always what people did afterwards. What went, how did they get in, and what did you actually change — deadlocks, alarm, emptying it nightly, a diff…
The jump from working alone to being responsible for someone else is the one most people get wrong at least once. Which way did you go first, and what would you do differently? Interested in the prac…
Mileage, age, what has gone wrong, what it costs to keep on the road, and whether you would buy another one. Especially interested in anyone running something with serious miles on it, and anyone who…
Not the one you enjoy owning. The one that shortened jobs or won you work you would otherwise have turned down. What was it, roughly what did it cost, and how long before it had paid for itself? Bonu…
Wide range on this and the published minimums are not what most decent employers actually pay. What are you paying, what year are they in, what trade, and roughly where? And does it step up on a sche…