Best apps for self-employed tradesmen in the UK
An honest category-by-category pick of the apps a UK self-employed tradesperson actually needs - job management, accounting, card payments, receipts, photo, and messaging - with named options at every price point and a no-bloat recommended stack for solo vs growing-crew trades.
There is no single app that does everything a self-employed tradesperson needs, despite what the ads imply. Most UK trades end up running four to six apps in parallel: one for client and job admin, one for accounting, one for getting paid on site, one for receipts, one for messaging, and usually one for photos. Picking the right four is the difference between an evening of admin and an hour.
This guide is honest about which app wins in each category for a UK solo or small-team tradesperson, and where the popular pick is the wrong one if you are a sole trader rather than a multi-engineer business. It also covers the apps you do NOT need - because the most common admin problem is not having no software, it is having too much, with the same client name typed into three different tools.
CMA is one of the apps mentioned because CMA is the all-in-one trade CRM this site is built around, but the article names every credible UK competitor for the categories where the comparison is real. The recommended stacks at the end are app-agnostic - swap CMA for Tradify or YourTradebase if either suits you better and the rest of the stack still works.
1. Job management and quoting (the core app)
The job-management app is the spine of your admin stack. Everything else (accounting, receipts, photos) either feeds into it or runs alongside it. Pick this one wrong and you will pay for it every day. The UK solo-trade market has roughly five credible options that all do quote-to-invoice on mobile; the differences are pricing model, polish, and where they put the client relationship.
- CMA - flat £49/month single tier, includes the client portal where customers see their own quotes/invoices/files in one place. Best fit: solo or 2-3 person trade who wants one app that holds the whole client relationship without per-seat costs.
- Tradify - around £34/month, the most-cited UK pick in review-site roundups. New Zealand-built, strong Xero integration. Best fit: solo or small-crew trade already on Xero and happy to send PDF quotes rather than use a client portal.
- YourTradebase - UK-built, around £39/month-equivalent, focus is "paperwork made easy" with a visual schedule calendar. Best fit: UK trades who want quote templates as the centrepiece.
- Workever - from £29 per user per month, London-based, route optimisation for multi-engineer crews. Best fit: 3+ engineers driving between jobs daily; per-seat cost makes it expensive once you grow.
- Powered Now - UK mobile-first app for quotes, invoices, appointments. Best fit: phone-only tradespeople who never sit at a laptop.
- What to skip - generic CRMs (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho) unless you already use them for sales. They have no trade terminology, no quote-to-invoice flow, and no UK VAT handling. Cobbling one together with a spreadsheet is the most expensive false-economy in trade admin.
2. Accounting and bookkeeping
Self Assessment is the deadline that decides which accounting app you pick. Every option here is Making Tax Digital (MTD) compatible because non-MTD software is no longer legal for VAT-registered businesses, but the user experience varies. Most tradespeople either run accounting separately and connect it to the job-management app, or hand the job over to an accountant who picks the platform for you.
- Xero - around £15-£42/month depending on plan, the de-facto UK accountant default. Most trade CRMs (CMA, Tradify, YourTradebase) integrate. Best fit: trades who use an accountant; the accountant will thank you.
- FreeAgent - free with a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster, or Mettle business account; otherwise around £19/month. Built for sole traders and small UK businesses. Best fit: sole traders banking with NatWest group, where the cost is zero.
- QuickBooks - around £14-£38/month, US-origin but solid UK presence. Best fit: trades whose accountant prefers it; otherwise Xero is usually the easier UK choice.
- FreshBooks - around £15-£45/month, North American positioning so weaker on UK VAT and Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) handling. Best fit: niche - usually not for UK trades unless your accountant uses it.
- What to skip - spreadsheets for VAT. Since MTD for VAT, spreadsheets alone are not compliant. You can keep a spreadsheet workflow but you have to file via bridging software, which adds friction; a proper accounting app costs the same and saves the bridge.
3. Card payments on site
A card reader pays for itself the first time a customer says "I have not got cash on me, can I bank transfer it tomorrow?" and you avoid the chase. UK trade is now mostly card-paid; the question is which reader has the lowest combination of upfront cost + per-transaction fee for the volume you process.
- SumUp - £39 reader (frequently on offer for £19), 1.69% per transaction, pay-as-you-go with no monthly fee. Best fit: most UK self-employed tradespeople, especially those taking under £10,000/month in card payments.
- Zettle (by PayPal) - £29 reader, 1.75% per transaction. Best fit: trades already using PayPal; slightly higher fees than SumUp but identical UX.
- Square - £19-£59 reader, 1.75% per transaction in person. Best fit: trades who want an in-app invoice option built in alongside the reader.
- Stripe Terminal - higher upfront, lower fees once you scale. Best fit: trades doing online invoice-pay-by-link AND on-site card; usually overkill for solo traders.
- Bank transfer with the invoice (no reader) - 0% fee but typically 1-3 day clearance. Best fit: B2B trade work where customers pay on invoice anyway. Pair with a reader for domestic jobs where the customer expects to pay on the day.
4. Receipts, expenses, and mileage
Every receipt you lose is a higher tax bill. Snapping receipts is the most under-used admin habit among UK self-employed tradespeople, and the apps for it cost less than one missing receipt per month. Mileage tracking is the same problem - HMRC allow 45p/mile for the first 10,000 miles, and most tradespeople under-claim it by thousands every year.
- Dext (formerly Receipt Bank) - around £20-£40/month, the standard for accountants. Snap the receipt, Dext extracts the data, syncs to Xero/QuickBooks. Best fit: VAT-registered trades whose accountant uses Dext.
- AutoEntry - around £12-£25/month, similar to Dext, often cheaper. Best fit: VAT-registered trades doing their own bookkeeping with Xero.
- Built-in receipt capture in your accounting app - Xero, FreeAgent and QuickBooks all have decent receipt-snap features built in at no extra cost. Best fit: sole traders with low receipt volume; the built-in tool is good enough.
- MileIQ - £4-£6/month, runs in the background and logs every drive automatically. Best fit: tradespeople driving to multiple jobs per day. Pays for itself in the first week of proper claiming.
- Spreadsheet + photos of receipts in a phone album - free, works, but harder to file at year-end. Best fit: tradespeople with very low expense volume (under 10 receipts/month).
5. Messaging and customer communication
WhatsApp is the default UK trade messaging channel and that is not going to change. The decision is whether to run it as personal WhatsApp (free, fast, but mixes work into your private life and loses messages when the phone breaks) or WhatsApp Business (separate, archived, with auto-replies), or to pipe customer messages through your job-management app so they live against the client record.
- WhatsApp Business - free, separate app from personal WhatsApp, supports auto-replies, business hours, and quick replies. Best fit: every UK self-employed tradesperson who uses WhatsApp for work. There is no reason not to switch off personal WhatsApp for client messages.
- In-app messaging via your job-management app - CMA, Tradify and Workever all have in-app messaging that logs against the client record. Best fit: trades who care about the audit trail (variation approvals, scope changes, missed appointments). Pair WhatsApp Business with in-app messaging - use WhatsApp for casual updates, the in-app channel for anything that matters financially.
- SMS-via-the-job-app - useful for arrival texts and appointment reminders that customers respond to better than email. Most trade CRMs include this at no extra cost.
- Email - still the right channel for quote PDFs, invoice PDFs, and contract-bearing communication. Use the job-management app to send these so the email lives against the client record automatically.
- What to skip - paid CRM messaging tools (Intercom, Front, Zendesk). Built for SaaS customer support, not for a sole trader sending six messages a week.
6. Photos, site media, and before-and-after
Photos are how you sell the next job. Most tradespeople take them and lose them. The right photo workflow is the one that gets every photo against the right job without manual tagging, and keeps before-and-after pairs findable when you need them for marketing six months later.
- Google Photos - free up to 15GB, smart search, automatic backup. Best fit: every tradesperson as the catch-all backup. Cannot tag by job, so works best as the safety net rather than the primary tool.
- In-app photo upload in your job-management app - CMA, Tradify and YourTradebase let you take photos directly inside the job record so they tag themselves to the right client. Best fit: every active job; this is the workflow that makes the photos findable in three years.
- CompanionLink and similar dedicated trade-photo apps - free, geo-tag job photos. Best fit: trades who want a free standalone tool and have not yet picked a job-management app.
- Instagram - good for marketing the before-and-after publicly, terrible as a photo archive. Best fit: a small sub-set of your best work, not the photo dump.
- What to skip - separate file-sharing tools (Dropbox, OneDrive) as the primary site-photo system. Photos in Dropbox folders go stale fast because they have no link to the client record.
7. The recommended stack for a solo or small-team UK trade
Stacking apps adds friction every time you cross between them. The minimum viable stack for most UK self-employed tradespeople is four apps, with a fifth and sixth only if you have specific needs. The stacks below are the ones we see actually used (and abandoned) by CMA customers and competitor reviews.
- Solo trade, no employees, under £85K turnover - four-app stack: job-management app (CMA / Tradify / YourTradebase) + accounting (FreeAgent if NatWest, else Xero) + card reader (SumUp) + WhatsApp Business. Skip mileage tracking until you cross 5,000 business miles/year; skip dedicated receipts until you cross 20 receipts/month.
- Growing 2-5 person crew - five-app stack: trade CRM (CMA / Tradify) + Xero + SumUp + WhatsApp Business + Dext/AutoEntry for receipts. The fifth app pays back fast as receipt volume grows.
- Specialist with regulated paperwork (Gas Safe, NICEIC, Part P) - same five-app stack plus the certificate-management tool your trade body recommends (Gas Safe Register login, NICEIC online, Building Control gateway). Avoid software that promises to "replace" certificate management; trade bodies have the legal copy.
- B2B contractor / sub-contractor (CIS work) - core trade CRM + Xero (or FreeAgent) with CIS turned on + dedicated invoice-via-bank-transfer flow. Card readers less important; CIS-compliant invoicing far more important.
- What to NOT do - run a separate quoting app, invoicing app, scheduling app, and CRM. The "best of breed" approach loses every time to one decent all-in-one because the data never crosses cleanly between four tools. If you cannot pay for the all-in-one, pick one as the system of record and use the others as feeders rather than peers.
Jednostavan radni tijek za bolju pripremu ponuda
Pick the job-management app first - it is the spine the rest of the stack feeds into.
Add an accounting app your accountant agrees with (or knows is on the way) so VAT/Self Assessment is handled.
Add a card reader so on-site payment is never the blocker.
Switch WhatsApp work-conversations to WhatsApp Business; if you use a trade CRM with messaging, log the important ones there too.
Add receipt-capture and mileage tracking once volume justifies the £10-£20/month - usually around the 20-receipts-a-month mark.
Review the stack every 6 months; remove any app you have not actively opened in 30 days.
The best-apps question for UK self-employed tradesmen is really two questions: which app is the system of record for the client relationship, and what feeds into it. Get the first one right and the rest of the stack picks itself. Get it wrong and you will be retyping client names for the next three years.
Pick one trade CRM as the spine, one accounting app the accountant approves of, one card reader, and WhatsApp Business. That is the four-app stack ninety percent of UK self-employed tradespeople should be on. Add receipt capture and mileage as the volume justifies it - and resist every app that promises to replace one you already have for a marginally better feature.
Česta pitanja
What is the single best app for a self-employed tradesman in the UK?
There is no single app that covers everything. The closest are trade-specific CRMs like CMA (flat-fee, client-portal-led) or Tradify (Xero-integrated, market-leading in UK review roundups). Most tradespeople end up running four apps: a trade CRM, accounting (Xero or FreeAgent), a card reader (SumUp), and WhatsApp Business. Picking the trade CRM right is the highest-leverage decision because everything else feeds into it.
Do I need separate apps for quotes, invoices, and scheduling?
No, and you should actively avoid this. A modern UK trade CRM (CMA, Tradify, YourTradebase) handles all three on one record, so a quote becomes an invoice with one click and a job becomes a calendar appointment without retyping. Running three separate tools means typing the client name three times and losing data between the apps; it is the most common avoidable admin tax in solo trade work.
Which accounting app should a UK sole trader use?
FreeAgent if you bank with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster, or Mettle - it is free with the business account. Xero if your accountant uses it, which is most of them in the UK. QuickBooks if your accountant prefers it. The accountant preference is the deciding factor for most tradespeople; the apps are similar enough that fighting the accountant on it is rarely worth it.
What is the cheapest card reader for a self-employed tradesperson?
SumUp at £39 (often on offer for £19) with 1.69% per transaction is the lowest combined cost for most UK self-employed tradespeople. There is no monthly fee, no subscription, and it pairs with iPhone or Android via Bluetooth. Zettle and Square are close alternatives if you already use PayPal or want an in-app invoice tool built in.
Should I use WhatsApp Business or a trade CRM for customer messaging?
Both, in parallel. WhatsApp Business for fast informal updates ("on my way", "running 10 min late") because that is what UK customers expect. A trade CRM with in-app messaging for anything financial - variation approvals, scope changes, quote follow-ups - because those need to be logged against the client record for the audit trail. The combination beats either one alone.
Is it worth paying for receipt-capture and mileage apps?
Yes once you cross roughly 20 receipts a month or 5,000 business miles a year. Dext or AutoEntry pay for themselves on the first set of receipts you would have lost; MileIQ at £4-£6/month pays for itself in the first proper mileage claim. Below those thresholds, the built-in receipt capture in Xero/FreeAgent and a manual mileage log are usually enough.
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