Getting your first round into TradeYoke in an afternoon

Quick answer: moving a round into TradeYoke takes an afternoon, not a weekend — import the customer spreadsheet you already have, set a frequency and price on each property, drag the stops into driving order once, and switch on the reminder text. Everything after that runs itself.

Key takeaways

• Import a spreadsheet you already have — TradeYoke flags likely duplicates rather than asking you to clean the list first.
• A frequency and a price, set once per property, is what makes the diary fill itself from then on.
• The driving order you set on day one sticks for every future visit of that round, not just today's.
• The "we're coming tomorrow" text goes out on its own once you turn it on — nobody has to remember to send it.
• Nothing here needs the office computer: the same setup works from a phone.

Why the first afternoon matters more than it looks

Moving a round off paper or a spreadsheet is the single biggest barrier to trying new software, and it's usually imagined as worse than it is. The fear is re-typing forty or four hundred addresses, guessing at frequencies from memory, and losing a week to admin before the app does anything useful. That fear is the reason most trade businesses put it off for a year and keep losing evenings to a notebook. The actual job is shorter than the imagining of it, because the round doesn't need re-planning — it needs importing, and the plan you already run in your head is the one you're about to write down once.

1. Import your customers

Export your existing list — a spreadsheet from a previous system, a phone contacts export, or a simple "name, address, phone, price" sheet you've kept for years — and import it. TradeYoke matches names, addresses and phone numbers as it goes and flags likely duplicates rather than silently merging or silently keeping both, so you decide what a genuine duplicate is rather than the software guessing wrong in either direction. A messy list with inconsistent formatting still imports; it just needs a slightly closer look at the flagged rows afterwards.

2. Set a frequency per property

Open a customer, choose the job type and how often it repeats — every 4, 6 or 8 weeks is typical for a window cleaning round — and set the price. The diary then projects every future visit from that one setting; you never type "every 4 weeks" again for that address. A property with a different rhythm in winter can have that set too, so the round doesn't need manual rescheduling every time the season changes.

3. Order the day

Drag the properties into the order you actually drive them — start of the street to the end, or however your round really runs, not how the spreadsheet happened to list them. That order sticks for every future visit of the round, not just today's; you're setting the shape of the round once, not re-planning it every morning.

4. Turn on messaging

Connect a sender — email, SMS or both — and switch on the "we're coming tomorrow" reminder. It goes out automatically the evening before each visit from then on, and a customer's reply lands on that job rather than on a personal phone that isn't always to hand. This is the step most people skip on day one and regret within a fortnight, because it's the one that stops the "sorry, can you come another day" phone calls.

5. Do the round

Mark each job done as you go, on the phone, whether or not there's signal at that particular gate. Pay links go out on completion for the trades that support it, and the office — even if the office is also you, later that evening — sees progress as it happens rather than reconstructing the day from memory.

Questions people ask

Do I need to clean up my spreadsheet before importing it?

No. Import it as it is; duplicate detection flags the rows worth a second look rather than requiring a perfect list first. Fixing the odd address afterwards is quicker than tidying four hundred rows before you start.

What if two customers share an address, like a block of flats?

Each is its own customer record with its own price and frequency; the address is shared, not the account, so the round and the invoicing stay correct for both.

Can I do this from my phone, or do I need the office computer?

The whole walkthrough works from a phone. Some people prefer a bigger screen for the first import, but nothing about it requires one.

What happens to the round order if I add a new customer later?

You drop the new stop into the order once, at the point that makes sense for the drive; everything else keeps the order you already set.

That's it — the whole thing is an afternoon, and most of that is the kettle.