What's New in Traddie: the 1.8 Update

This one is about the back and forth

Think about where a job actually loses time. Not the work. The messages that live in one app while the job lives in another. The sum you do on a calculator and copy onto a form. The customer who wants to know what the cheaper option would be, so you write the quote out again. The enquiry that says "need a socket moved" and nothing else, so you drive across town to find out what the job is.

Traddie 1.8 goes at all four. None of them is a new thing to learn. Each one is a conversation you are already having, had once instead of three times.

WhatsApp, in Traddie

Ask any trade where the work actually comes in and the answer is WhatsApp. Not email, not a web form. A photo of a leak at half seven in the morning and a question about whether you can come out.

You can now connect the WhatsApp Business number you already give out, and those messages arrive in Traddie. They thread on the customer they came from, so the conversation sits beside that customer's jobs, quotes and invoices instead of in a separate app with a separate history. The address you agreed, the price you said on the phone, the photo of the board: all of it is in one place when you come to raise the certificate or chase the money.

Keep the WhatsApp Business app on your phone. Both work at the same time, so you can answer from whichever is in your hand, and your customer sees the number they have always had. Nothing about your side of it changes for them.

It is free to connect and included in your plan. It is an inbox, not a broadcast tool: customers message you, you reply. Traddie is not going to start sending marketing out of your number.

The certificate does the maths

A certificate has always been two jobs. Take the reading, then do the sum the reading feeds. The second one is where the calculator comes out, or the phone, or the laminated card in the van.

Gas rate is the obvious one. Put in the dial size and the time off your stopwatch and Traddie gives you m³/h and ft³/h, and kW gross and net, then compares it against the appliance data plate so an under-gassed boiler shows up while you are still at it. The calorific value is a box you can edit, because it is on the bill and it is not the same everywhere.

Oil got the same treatment. The nozzle rating and the pump pressure give you litres an hour and kW, and it follows the square root law off the nozzle's 100 psi stamp rather than pretending a 0.55 at 145 psi is still passing 0.55. The pressure box takes psi or bar and works out which you meant. Gross and net efficiency come off the fuel's own calorific value ratio, so the net figure is the larger one, as it should be.

On the electrical side, the maximum Zs lookup now knows the difference between a fuse and a breaker. This is worth spelling out, because it was wrong before: a BS 88, a BS 3036 rewireable or a BS 1362 plug fuse was being matched to a breaker curve off the first B, C or D letter in the device description, so a 32 A BS 88-2 was being checked against 1.37 ohms instead of 0.99. Fuses now read their own table, and that includes the Max Zs column printed on the certificate itself. If you have issued certificates with fuses on them, that column was reading off the wrong table. Anything you issue from now on is right.

Minimum earthing conductor and main bonding sizes now come out of Tables 54.7 and 54.8 from your meter tails, which is a new box on the supply details. On a PME supply the bonding is sized off the neutral, which is the bit people get wrong. And a dozen quiet cross-checks now run beside the box you are typing in rather than at the end: RCD trip times, the insulation resistance minimum for the circuit voltage, the ring r1 against rn, the TT electrode maximum, measured heat input against the data plate.

Three prices on one quote

Customers do not really want a price. They want to know what their choices are. Ask a plumber how often somebody says "what would it be for the better one" and the answer is most jobs, and the answer to that has always been to write the quote out again.

A quote line can now be marked as one of several options, and the customer is asked to choose at the top of the quote. The important part is that an option is a set of lines, not a line. A real boiler quote reads "Option A: boiler, flue, filter, fitting", and you can write it that way now. Three lines belonging to Option A, four belonging to Option B, and the customer picks the option rather than picking one product out of context.

Whichever one they pick is what gets invoiced, at that price, with the lines that belong to it and nothing else. That sounds obvious and it is the whole point: the answer the customer gave survives all the way to the money, instead of being a note on the quote that somebody has to remember when it comes to billing.

Your optional extras still work the way they did, banded underneath for them to tick on top of whichever option they went with. One is a choice between things, the other is a choice about adding things, and a quote can carry both.

Ask before you price it

A lot of enquiries arrive with nothing in them. "Need a socket moving." "Boiler making a noise." You cannot price that, so you either guess, or you ring and play phone tag, or you drive over to look at a fifteen minute job.

There is a new automation for exactly that. When an enquiry comes in thin, a short message with no photos, Traddie waits a couple of hours in case you have already replied, then emails the customer and asks for what you need to price it properly.

You choose the questions. There is no default set and it will not send until you have picked something, because the questions a gas engineer needs are not the ones a sparky needs. Ask for a written description of the job, ask for a photo of the consumer unit, ask for a video of the noise it is making, ask how old the property is. A question can take typing, or a photo or video, or either, and it is answered as soon as they do one of them.

It comes back on the lead, so when you sit down to price it you are reading their description and looking at their pictures. And if somebody rings you instead of using the form, you can send the same set of questions by hand off their lead.

Also in this update

Reminders can go by text. Every automation used to be an email and nothing else. Now you put email and text in the order you want them, on all nine, and your customer gets one message by the first way you can actually reach them. Texting needs a number of your own, which is the messaging bundle at £5.99 a month with 100 texts included, then 10p a text. Email stays free and unlimited, and an automation always falls back to it.

You can bring your history with you. The import now takes a rental book, so the property, the landlord, the tenant, what was done and when it is next due all come across, and it works out what each date is for so the renewals start chasing themselves. Your old invoicing can come too: connect Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent, tick the box, and years of customers, quotes and invoices arrive with what was settled still marked settled. It only happens if you tick it, and the whole batch undoes in one go.

Recurring work no longer has to wait for Traddie to watch a job finish. Type the date something was last done and the interval, and it starts chasing from that, which is what you need the day you move across with fifteen years of service dates behind you.

Your logo has a size control on the quote and invoice style screen. And your phone calendar can be read into Traddie on both apps, so the school run and the dentist show up next to the jobs. It is read only and it never leaves your phone.

As ever, all of it is included in your existing plan. The only thing here that costs extra is the texts.

Where to get it

Traddie 1.8 is on the App Store and Google Play now, and everything above is on the web app today. If you have automatic updates on, you already have it.

If there is something in here you would have built differently, hit reply on any Traddie email. We read every one.