Running two trades on one account (and why the diary doesn't care)

A surprising number of trade businesses are two businesses. The window cleaner who does gutters and pressure washing. The gardener who fences. The solar installer who is also the electrician. Most job-management software makes you choose one, or run two accounts and re-type the customer twice.

TradeYoke was built so that compatible trades share one account: one diary, one customer list, one invoice run. This post explains what has to be shared, what stays separate, and why the diary genuinely does not care which trade a job belongs to.

Four things, and they are the four things you would otherwise duplicate. The customer, because Mrs Patel is one person whether you are cleaning her windows or cutting her lawn. The diary, because you have one Tuesday. The money, because she owes you one balance and you want one report of who owes what. And the team, because the same people do both.

Everything else can stay specific to the trade. The window cleaning job knows about frames, conservatory roofs and access. The gardening job knows about the task list and the season. Neither needs to know the other exists, and the shared parts do not need to know either of them in detail.

The scheduler in TradeYoke knows only a small projection of any job: when it is, who is doing it, where it is, which trade it belongs to and what state it is in. That is enough to draw a day, a week or a month, colour each entry by trade, drag it to another day, and put it on the route. It deliberately knows nothing about frames or lawns.

Each trade keeps its own rich job record and its own screens for creating and editing it. When you open a job from the diary, the trade's own panel appears; when you look at the week, the diary draws both trades side by side. That is what "the diary doesn't care" means in practice: adding a trade never changes the calendar, so the calendar is the same one you learned on day one. The platform page shows the schedule and Plan my day.

The customer record is generic. It holds the name, the addresses, the notes, the documents, the communications history and the balance. Jobs attached to it are trade-specific. So a customer who has windows cleaned every four weeks and the garden done fortnightly in summer has one record, two recurring series, one balance and one place where both are visible.

That matters most for money. The morning 'who owes me' email lists her once, with everything owed, and the customer portal shows her everything in one place to pay. Reminders and receipts go from one business identity, so she never gets two texts from two names on the same afternoon. A spreadsheet of customers imports once, with duplicate detection, as described in the move-over-in-an-afternoon post.

Some work is not two jobs for one customer but one piece of work with two trades on it. A solar installation with the electrical certification. A roof repair with the guttering that makes it watertight again. That is what projects are for: a customer, a site, a status and the trades involved, with the visits from each trade on the diary and the quotes and invoices raised from the project.

Projects came out of pilot work with multi-trade site businesses, where almost every site carries more than one trade. The solar installer pilot is the clearest example of it in daily use today.

Window cleaning and gardening are in pilot with selected tradespeople, heading for a first release very soon, and have shared accounts from the start. Electricians, plumbers and gas, and solar installers are in pilot with real businesses, and the pilots include combinations, because that is how those businesses are shaped. The trades page has a page for each.

Each trade has its own settings tab: its prices, its paperwork, its defaults and whether the guided job wizard is on for it. Each trade's certificates and documents are its own. Team members can be marked with the trades they work in, so the window cleaning crew and the gardening crew are distinct on the register even when they overlap on Fridays. Reports show the whole business and the value of each round, and the accountant CSVs cover the business as one; how two trades appear on your tax return is a question for your accountant.

The Squeegee Rush arcade game, for what it is worth, belongs to the window cleaning module and stays there. The gardeners have asked.

Plans are per business, not per user. Free is £0, Essentials is £9.99 a month, Premium is £19.99 a month and Ultimate is £29.99 a month, all plus VAT. Every paid plan includes one trade module, and each extra trade module is £3.99 a month, so a window cleaning and gardening business pays for the second trade and nothing more. Pilot trades are priced with the pilot businesses while the pilots run. The pricing page has the detail, and the 30-day trial of Essentials lets you try it on a real week of your own work.