Job tracking for a trade business: build it without coding

The jobs live in your head, the quotes live in your sent folder, and the question "did anyone invoice the Riverside job?" gets answered by scrolling through texts in the truck. Every trade business hits this point. The work is fine. The tracking of the work is the problem, and it costs money in a way that never appears on any bill.

This guide covers what job tracking for a trade business needs to hold, the screens worth opening each morning, and how to set the whole thing up in Diract without writing code or paying a developer.

What a trade business actually tracks

Strip away the software question and a trade business tracks a short list of things. A developer would call them tables; in Diract that is a table you build for anything you track.

• Enquiries. Who called, what they want, where the job is, how they found you. Without them, nobody can say how many enquiries turn into work.
• Quotes. The job, the price, the date it went out, and whether it was accepted, declined or is still waiting. A quote with no status is a job quietly going to someone else.
• Jobs. The customer, the address, the agreed price, the date, who is doing it, and a status that means something: booked, in progress, done, invoiced, paid.
• Customers. One record per customer, connected to every quote, job and invoice they have had. Repeat customers are invisible if every job is a fresh text thread.
• Invoices. The job, the amount, the date sent, the date paid. The gap between those last two dates is where trade businesses bleed.

Notice what connects to what. An enquiry becomes a quote, a quote becomes a job, a job becomes an invoice, and all of them belong to a customer. Five lists, four connections. That is the data model of most trade businesses, whether one van or six.

The screens worth opening

A pile of lists is a filing cabinet. Job tracking only pays off when the lists are drawn onto the two or three screens you actually open, which in Diract is a dashboard you assemble from widgets.

• This week. Every job in the next seven days, with the address and who is on it. This is the screen the vans look at.
• Money. Quotes awaiting an answer, jobs done but not invoiced, and invoices sent but not paid. Three columns, and the middle one is usually the shock.
• The pipeline. Enquiries not yet quoted, and quotes older than a week with no answer. A follow-up on a five-day-old quote wins work, if something tells you it is five days old.

Pick two or three numbers for the home screen and no more: jobs on today, dollars not yet invoiced, dollars unpaid. If you pick ten you will read none of them.

The spreadsheet stops here

A spreadsheet holds the lists and fails at the connections. Once the apprentice and the office are editing the same sheet, rows get overwritten and nobody trusts the version in front of them. That failure is covered in when to replace spreadsheets with a dashboard. The usual next step is off-the-shelf trade job management software, which works if your business matches its mould and grates forever if it does not. The trade-offs are in custom software vs off the shelf.

The third option is describing your business and having the workspace built around it.

Setting it up in Diract

At sign up, pick Something else as the business type, then type your trade in the box, for example plumber or electrician. About forty trades are recognised as you type, spelling mistakes included. A matched trade starts on a workspace set up for it: jobs with their lines and what is owed, an Enquiries list, and the tools a trade works in, Quotes, Invoices, Routes, Recurring jobs and Equipment.

Then answer What does your business do? For a matched trade it is optional. Write it anyway, because it shapes everything past the trade's defaults. Write a paragraph, not a label. "Plumbing business" adds nothing. "Two-van plumbing business doing emergency call-outs and bathroom renovations for homeowners and two real estate agencies, quoting on site, taking a deposit on renovations before ordering fixtures, invoicing on completion with seven-day terms" names the lists, the stages and the money.

The plan appears under Our suggestions on your home screen. Click Open setup and it is laid out in parts: What you'll keep track of, The screens you'll work from, What you'll land on, On your phone and Tools you'll use. Read the first part twice, because every other part is built on it. Click Confirm this part when a part is right, or type what to change and click Send. Nothing is built until every part is decided and you click Build my workspace. The full walkthrough is in build a business app without coding, and why the review matters is in AI-generated business apps: can you trust them?

Then put a fortnight of real work through it. You will find the field you forgot, usually a "parts ordered" status, and add it through Build your process in the sidebar.

Checklist: before you build

• Your five lists are written down, with the fields each one needs
• You know which lists connect: customer to job, job to invoice
• You have picked the screens: this week, money, pipeline
• You have picked the home screen numbers and stopped at three
• You know who uses it and what each person needs to see, a permissions decision worth making once

Conclusion

Job tracking for a trade business is five connected lists and three screens. The trade is yours; the tracking should not need a developer. Name your trade, describe the business, review the plan carefully, and run real jobs through it within the week. The next steps in the flow are quoting and invoicing.

Build your app free at diract.io. Every plan starts with a 7 day free trial, and no card is charged until it ends.

Questions

Is there a workspace for my trade?

Probably. About forty trades are matched at sign up, from builders, electricians and plumbers to cleaners, gardeners, locksmiths and pest controllers. If yours is not one of them, click Not my trade and the plan is built from what you write about the business instead.

Can the people in the vans use it?

Yes. Give each staff member a login and a screen showing their jobs for the day. What each person can see and change is set by role, so the office sees money and the vans see work.

What about the photos and certificates for each job?

Attach them to the job record, or keep them where they already live. Diract can leave your documents in your own Google Drive or SharePoint rather than holding them itself.

Current as at 19 September 2026. The product changes often, so check the screen before relying on a detail here.