“It helps us with everything from accounting to timesheets.”

Nobody learns a trade because they love paperwork. So if admin’s squeezing your working day, stealing your evenings and stopping you doing your thing, how about trying something new?

YourTradebase is full of time-saving, trade-friendly tools you’ll love, and you even can grab a trial for free. But don’t just take it from us. In today’s blog we’re meeting another long-time YourTradebase customer, Alison from Earthstone Landscapes in Kent…

We started Earthstone Landscapes in 2014, when we brought two sole trader businesses together. We work throughout Kent, designing, creating and maintaining gardens for private customers, local government, schools and businesses.

When we became a limited company, we wanted to improve the way we worked.One of the things I was struggling with was the paperwork. I was typing every invoice out individually, which was taking forever – and we just thought there had to be a quicker way. We were working with a business advisor on how to take the company forward and we started investigating different software to see what would be useful for us.

I didn’t want something it was going to take me six months to get to grips with. I wanted something straightforward and easy to understand so I could teach myself to use it quickly and get the business running more smoothly and cost effectively. We came across YourTradebase and they were offering a free trial, so we gave it a go.

YourTradebase seemed just the sort of thing we were looking for. It was simple and visually it looked good. That’s important because what you see on the page is what gets emailed to your clients. There were lots of good things about it – we could customise the invoices to add our logo and choose from lots of other options.

We’ve worked really closely with Adam and the team.In the beginning, YourTradebase were quite new as well, so I worked quite a lot with Adam and his team to ask if we could add new features, or give feedback on what we needed. They actually tweaked their programme to help us with our business, which was really valuable.

It’s speeded things up a lot, and it’s handy to use on my phone.Inevitably the bigger we get, the more paperwork there is to do, but YourTradebase lets me work quite flexibly. If we’re travelling somewhere and I’m not behind the wheel, I’ll often use it on my phone to do quotes as we’re going along. I’ll do invoices on my phone as well, just sitting in the van in my lunch hour. And if we’re discussing how to price up a job, I can look up similar projects straightaway, rather than struggling to remember or waiting till I’m back in the office.

Another thing I really like is how everything links together. I just put the customer details in and everything we need will be under that heading. Every quote we do for them will be there. The nature of our company is that we tend to get a lot of repeat business, especially on the maintenance side. It’s really good to have that client file, with all the notes I make on site, so everything’s in one place and I can find it quickly.

It helps us quote for bigger, one-off jobs too, like garden installations and paving.Because YourTradebase lets us save a whole price list of regular materials and services, we can use it to build estimates and invoices really quickly, uploading saved information and tweaking it to fit each job. We don’t have to start afresh every time, and that really speeds up the process.

It helps us with everything from accounting to timesheets.Both my accountant and my virtual assistant have access to our YourTradebase account, which is really useful and saves a huge amount of time.

I’d definitely say do the free trial – see if YourTradebase is for you.I’ve recommended it to several people already. What’s good about the trial is you can actually play with the software and see how you’d use it day to day, before you commit.

Thank you so much Alison for taking time out to chat to us, and for all the great feedback. We’re really happy to be helping you do your thing.