April 2026: one core, many trades

Part 34 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: March 2026: Plan my day, decide, order, go. Next: How we thought about pricing TradeYoke: four plans, one price per business. See every part on the build timeline.

Quick answer: TradeYoke is built as one shared core with a module for each trade. Window cleaning and gardening are in pilot, with a first release very soon; electricians, plumbers and solar installers are in pilot with real businesses. Each trade brings its own terminology, forms, documents and colour, while customers, scheduling, quoting and invoicing are shared, so one business can run compatible trades on one account.

• There is one core, and each trade is a module on top.
• Window cleaning and gardening are in pilot, with a first release very soon; electricians, plumbers and solar installers are in pilot.
• Each trade brings its own terms, forms, documents and colour.
• A business can run compatible trades together on one account.

When you build for one trade it is easy to build something that only works for that trade. The test of the core we built in 2024 was whether it could carry another. In April 2026 we looked at where the line between shared and trade-specific fell, and what that meant for every new trade.

• Shared: customers, the diary, jobs, quotes, invoices, payments, messages, documents and the map. A customer is one record whichever trade serves them.
• Per trade: the words (a gardener's visit is not a window cleaner's clean), the fields on a customer, the job steps, the forms and the paperwork, and a colour so you can tell them apart on the diary.

The shared parts are the things that would be wasteful to build twice and risky to build differently. The invoice ledger should work the same way for every trade. The per-trade parts are the things a tradesperson would notice if they were wrong. A plumber does not want to see "round" and "frequency" where their trade says "service" and "boiler".

• Window cleaning and gardening are live.
• Electricians, plumbers and solar installers are in pilot with real businesses. They bring their own paperwork, such as electrical certificates, gas safety records and solar commissioning documents, built on the shared document foundation.

"Pilot" means a small group of businesses use the module on their own work while we finish it. If you would like to join, email hello@tradeyoke.net.

If you run two trades, say window cleaning and gardening, you do not need two systems. One diary, one customer list and one invoice run covers both. Two trades, one account goes through it.

The series now catches up with the present. The next articles look back across the whole build.

Related: Several trades, one account · All trades · Two trades, one account · The platform · Pricing · The build timeline