Tradify’s Most Popular Features For Tradies
Tradify is one of the best-rated business management apps out there for trade business. Here are 10 of the top features that put it above and beyond the competition. If you’re trying to make your mark on the world as a trade business, you’ll definitely want to consider using this app.
1) Recording Notes And Photos
This may seem like something that you could just do on your own without an app. Maybe you already keep this stuff down on paper somewhere in your van or office. However, there’s a reason that the ability to record notes and photos is one of the most talked-about features on the entire app!
Being able to keep the notes and photos in the same place as the records and invoices associated with the job makes it easy to find your notes when preparing for a job. It also helps keep everyone accountable and up to date if your customers come back and blame you for some new problem that’s popped up with their water heater three months after you touched it.
The reason why this is the number one most popular feature on Tradify is that everyone, regardless of how many employees they have, can find a use for this. Many of the other features on this list only apply to you if you have employees, but keeping good, easy to manage records is one of the best ways for anyone to improve their business
But this is actually only the beginning of the organizational help that Tradify can offer to your business, and this next feature is almost as universally useful as the first!
2) Job Management
Job management is the base upon which most of the other features of this program are built upon. Tradify is all about keeping track of the various jobs that your company may receive. The dashboard on the app allows you to organize jobs by importance and by time. All of this can be done from whatever device you’re using, not just a laptop.
From here you can actually see pretty much all of the information for any ongoing or upcoming job. This includes information about what tools went to the job site, the expected price, and who you sent to work there. This makes it easy for you to keep track of things that in the past would have to have taken a lot of time and effort to manage.
3) Scheduling
This is another feature that might seem basic but is actually extremely useful. However, even if you don’t have any employees, you’ll get tons of use out of this feature. Being able to have your whole schedule as far as you’ve planned it all in the same place with your notes and pictures is so convenient.
But more importantly, Tradify allows you to synchronize your schedule between each of your employees so you can keep track of where they each need to be at any given time. This also helps keep your employees in the loop when it comes to their schedule for each day. Just make sure you’re actually telling them where they need to be and not just putting appointments in their calendar without saying anything!
Because the Tradify app gives you control over the calendar, this streamlines the scheduling process by making it so that nobody but you ever needs to schedule the event. This makes it less likely that some silly mistake will put your employee at the job site late or on the wrong day.
This also ties into the app’s feature that’s used for keeping track of timesheets. This aspect makes paper timesheets into a thing of the past. Employees can log into their timesheets at the same place they look at their schedule and keep all of their records. Centralization is key in any business app!
Of course, the really remarkable thing about Tradify is the way that it uses these basic features to take care of some of the most mind-numbing parts of trade work, which makes your job as a business owner much easier.
4) X-ray Vision
Unfortunately, this feature will not allow you to see through walls so that you can have an easy visual of a home’s plumbing structure. Fortunately, what this feature actually does is still extremely useful.
Basically, X-ray vision allows you to see whether or not a given customer has seen the quote or invoice you’ve sent them. This can help you figure out the next step in working with them, whether that be reminding them that you sent a quote/invoice or just waiting for them to reply. Just having that knowledge can take a lot of pressure off your shoulders.
5) Partnership With Xero
When set up and configured correctly, Tradify syncs automatically with the accounting program Xero to ensure that you aren’t left alone during any part of the management part of your job. Information is shared between Tradify and Xero, allowing Xero to gain access to things like your invoices and payments without you having to spend all that time re-entering them into Xero.
Xero is a great service for small businesses for a number of reasons. For one thing, it makes accounting much easier for you, as you probably have a lot going on and probably don’t want to spend your nights and weekends on accounting stuff.
The big selling point here though is that it can share information with Tradify, allowing you to keep track of things like your inventory and your cash flow when you’re out working and then have that information on your accounting software when you get back to the office.
The time and energy savings only increase when you add employees into the mix, as each one who uses Tradify on their phone to keep track of their hours is another source of input for the books. This streamlines the process further because you won’t have to do that inputting manually at the end of the week.
This is a useful feature, although, in order for Xero to be usable you will require a Xero subscription. Whether you end up using Xero for your accounting or not is up to you, but having the option to link the two software systems together is very nice.
Xero can also process several different payment methods, which makes it a lot easier for your customers to get you the money that they owe you. Of course, any accounting program worth its salt would have that capability, but just because it’s expected doesn’t mean it isn’t still good to have.
There are a couple of other programs including MYOB that Tradify can also sync with. More options are always better, right?
6) Invoices
Tradify does several things to make the process of creating invoices much easier. Two of the most helpful features are its ability to take care of timesheets and account for the costs of materials. Not only does this make it significantly easier to produce a quote before a job, but it makes invoicing the job such a quick process! But how does Tradify do this?
Aside from acting as a digital timesheet for yourself and for employees, Tradify can also download lists of material prices to use for calculating quotes. This is extremely useful since it means that you can find the prices you need to find without even leaving the same app that you’re using to take notes in!
This does take a little bit of extra work on your part. You’ll have to email your supplier and ask them for an updated price list, then you’ll have to upload it onto the app yourself in csv format. However, once that’s done you’ll be good to go both for quotes and for invoices!
The fantastic thing about this app is its centralization. Having one place to go for all of these functions makes it way faster to get to the information that you want, and it also makes it easier to perform critical business functions such as keeping track of hours worked and materials used.
Tradify can then send reminders to pay your invoice to your customers, which really simplifies the process of communicating with customers. However, if you don’t like the reminders then you can just turn them off at any time. All of this app’s notifications are totally customizable.
7) Reminders
We talked a little bit about reminders in the last section, but with Tradify you can actually send your customers follow-ups for quotes as well. These automated reminders make your job a lot easier since they take the task of remembering that you need to remind someone of something and give it to the system!
These are the features that everyone who has a subscription to the service will find useful. The next couple of features are more geared toward businesses that have a couple of employees working for them. However, you may still be able to find uses for them depending on your situation even if you’re on your own.
8) GPS Tracking
GPS tracking is one of Tradify’s more powerful features. If you can track your employee’s whereabouts when they’re on the job, this provides several enormous benefits.
Most importantly, the tracking system increases accountability on everyone’s part. Since you can watch your employee’s location at any time, they’ll be more likely to stick to the program. You can also know just how far away they are from the customer’s home just by looking at your phone, which can reassure worried customers that the person you sent really is on the way to help.
But GPS tracking also keeps customer’s accountable for their actions. The records that the app keeps can prove exactly where your employee was while they were doing their job, which means that if somebody disputes your version of events to underpay you, you have the proof right there in the program of how much you’re owed.
This can also be a useful safety feature. If an employee of yours gets hurt and needs help, you can easily find them without them actually having to say anything to you. Even if it does feel like an invasion of privacy sometimes, the tracking does seem to have its benefits for everyone involved.
9) Shareable With Employees
Tradify allows you to share a whole suite of organizational tools with your employees. That means that the money you spend on the subscription will not only be improving your quality of life, but it will also be increasing overall productivity. All the scheduling information, the information on where the jobs are, and the quoting and invoice information can be easily referenced by any of your employees.
All of these tools would be useful even if you were alone, but if you have employees to share with then it will be even better for the company as a whole. It just makes the monthly subscription seem like an even better deal for you.
10) Instant website
For an additional $19 per month onto your Tradify subscription, Tradify will also give you the tools to create your own professional website for your business.
Using this feature will give you the ability to promote your businesses services and attract new customers by having a location to direct traffic generated by marketing campaigns. Existing customers will also benefit as they will be able to easily locate your contact details on the web, if they can’t easily access or have lost your details from the last time you performed work for them.
Instant websites allows you to insert the Google Analytics ID onto your website, so that your can analyse how your customers and prospects are interacting and navigating your website. Google Analytics also gives you the ability to see how these customers and prospects arrived at your website to begin with.
