I’ve been where you are.
Jobs on the go, lads on site, invoices going out — and absolutely no idea whether the business is actually making money. Not a clue. You’re busy, you’re billing, but at the end of the month you sit down and wonder where it all went.
I’m a trade contractor. I’ve run my own decorating business for years. And before I built Grafter Lab, I tried pretty much every piece of job management software out there that promised to fix this problem.
Here’s what actually happened.
When the business was small, Tradify did the job. Quoting, invoicing, basic job tracking. Easy to use, nothing complicated, around £45 a month. For a one or two-man band — whether you’re a sole trader electrician, a small plumbing outfit or a decorator just starting out — it makes sense.
But then the team grew.
And that’s where the per-user pricing starts to bite. Every new person costs you more. Add your foreman, your admin, a couple of subbies — the bill keeps climbing. You end up keeping people off the system to save money, which defeats the point.
The bigger issue was reporting. There wasn’t any. Not real reporting. I could see what jobs were on and what I’d invoiced — but I couldn’t tell you whether a job was actually profitable. No live gross profit. No cashflow forecast. No labour versus materials breakdown.
Flying blind. That’s every trade contractor’s problem — not just decorators.
As the team grew I needed to track hours on site. Who’s where, how long they’ve been on a job, scheduling. So I brought in Timekeeper alongside Tradify.
Now I’m running two apps. Neither talks to the other properly. Everything in between gets done on spreadsheets. Every week — manual input, copying data across, trying to make the numbers add up.
Sound familiar? Ask any plumber, electrician, roofer or builder running a team of five or more — most of them are doing exactly this. A different combination of apps, all held together with spreadsheets and manual effort.
It works. Just about. But it’s a grind, and you’re always one mistake away from the numbers being wrong. And when the numbers are wrong — you don’t find out until it’s too late.
Fergus had better reporting than Tradify and better API access, so I could pull data out more easily. I made the switch.
Same problem though — per-user pricing. At around £49 per user per month, a team of five is £245 a month. A team of ten is nearly £500. Just for the software. On top of that I was still running Timekeeper and still maintaining spreadsheets to fill the gaps.
And despite the better reporting, I still couldn’t see what I actually needed. No live gross profit per job. No 12-week cashflow forecast. No retention tracking. No proper breakdown of where the money was going.
Fergus is widely used across the UK trades — decorators, plumbers, electricians, builders. It’s a solid product. But if you want proper financial intelligence, not just job tracking, it falls short.
Jobber is popular with service trades — plumbers, electricians, HVAC engineers. Clean interface, good scheduling. But again, per-user pricing, and it’s not built for a UK contractor who needs CIS support, retention tracking and a real cashflow forecast. It’s field service management, not financial intelligence.
Tradify, Timekeeper, Fergus, Jobber — they all do a similar thing. They help you manage jobs, send quotes, raise invoices. What none of them do well is tell you whether your business is actually making money, right now, per job.
I sat down one evening with three apps open and a spreadsheet I’d spent two hours updating and thought — there has to be a better way.
Not just better. One place. One login. Everything talking to each other. Built around the things that actually matter to a trade contractor running a real UK business.
Not just quoting and invoicing — anyone can do that.
I mean: is this job making me money right now? What does my cashflow look like in eight weeks? Have I got retention sitting out there I haven’t chased? Am I going to be able to pay the lads on Friday?
Those are the questions that keep contractors up at night. Decorators, plumbers, electricians, roofers, groundworkers, builders — every trade, same problem. None of the software I’d used could answer them.
So I built Grafter Lab.
Everything in one place — job tracking, quoting, invoicing, staff scheduling, GPS clock-in, time logs, supplier documents, cashflow forecasting and financial reporting. One login, one flat monthly price.
No per-user charges. Ever. Whether you’re running 5 staff or 20 — your whole team gets on for the same price. That alone makes a significant difference to a growing trade business.
Live gross profit on every job. See at a glance whether a job is on track, over budget or heading south — before it’s too late to do anything about it. Fixed-price jobs and day-rate jobs alike.
A 12-week cashflow forecast. Based on your actual jobs, invoices due, wages going out and overheads. See a cash problem three weeks before it becomes a crisis.
Retention tracking. Every penny held back tracked and chased. You’d be surprised how much gets left on the table.
CIS built in. For CIS-registered contractors — builders, groundworkers, roofers, electrical firms — deductions, Xero push and calculations handled automatically.
Staff app on iOS and Android. Your lads clock in from site on their phones. GPS-verified. Feeds straight into job costs, time logs and your payroll report.
Monthly financial review. A board-level snapshot of how your business performed — labour, materials, gross profit, operating profit, overheads. The kind of report most contractors never see until their accountant produces it six months too late.
Starter — £39/month
Quoting, invoicing, job tracking. Everything you need to run your jobs and get paid. Perfect for
sole traders and small teams. Unlimited users from day one.
Pro — £75/month
Everything in Starter, plus cashflow forecasting, full financial reporting and gross profit
tracking per job. This is where most growing trade contractors land.
Scale — £149/month
The full package. Staff app, GPS clock-in, live scheduling and time tracking. Your lads clock in
from site, you see it in real time, it feeds straight into your job costs and payroll report.
One price. Whole team. No per-user fees.
If you’re a sole trader and all you need is quoting and invoicing — Tradify is fine for where you are right now.
If you’re growing, managing a team across multiple jobs, and you can’t tell me what your gross profit is this month — that’s when the tools most contractors start with stop being enough.
Grafter Lab was built by a contractor who used the same tools, hit the same walls, and got fed up of the answer being “buy another app and build a spreadsheet to tie it all together.”
Built for UK trade contractors. Decorators, plumbers, electricians, roofers, builders, groundworkers. Any trade, any size team, one flat monthly price.