The work that never reaches the invoice

Somewhere between the first fix and the final invoice, most jobs quietly grow. The customer asks for a socket on the other side of the wall while the plasterboard is off. You say yes, because it's twenty minutes' work and refusing would be daft. Three weeks later the invoice goes out with the original quote on it, because the socket was agreed standing in a doorway, and doorways keep no records.

That socket has company. There's the extra run of cable, added because the route on the drawing was never going to work in the real building. The second trip to the merchant. The half hour spent showing somebody else's plumber where the pipe actually needs to go. Each one is small enough to wave away in the moment, and by the end of a long job they add up to real money that nobody ever asked to be paid for.

Everyone on the tools is running a business

Ask a sparky what he does and he'll tell you he wires houses. He's also quoting, buying, scheduling, chasing payment and carrying the firm's entire commercial memory around in his head from one job to the next. That second job has no start time, no end time and no training course. It's where a lot of the trouble between clients and trades starts, too: the customer thinks the purchase is a day of wiring, while the person selling it is quietly absorbing a fortnight of admin around it.

Large main contractors sorted this out a long time ago, with paperwork. A change to the specification gets an amendment. A superseded drawing gets a number and a date. Nobody on those sites expects a change to survive on goodwill, because everybody knows what happens to changes that do. A two-van firm has none of that machinery. It has memory, a phone full of photographs, and the hope that the customer remembers the conversation the same way you do.

Big contractors write every change down. A small firm remembers it, or loses it.

The bit you get judged on is the bit nobody equips you for

There is a second unfairness stacked on the first. Every wire in every wall, every boiler that fires on a cold morning, every roof that keeps the rain out is somebody's skilled work, and the country cannot switch its lights on without it. Yet the reputation of a good sparky or plumber gets settled by a missed call and a late invoice rather than by the ten hours of graft that went before them. The stereotype of the trades, unreliable and slow with the quote and never rings back, is a verdict on the paperwork. The work itself is hardly ever what lets anybody down.

The work was never the hard part anyway. The quote promised three days ago and still not written. The receipt turning to mush in the van footwell. The supplier gone quiet on the order you need tomorrow. The invoicing that gets done at nine at night, if you don't fall asleep first. A firm with fifty vans has an office that swallows every bit of that before it reaches anybody's evening. A firm with one van has the evening.

Big companies get trade discounts, admin staff, and systems built to fit them. You get your evenings.

No buying power, no back office, no spare hour. And the software written to help assumes that spare hour exists, along with a desk, both hands free and the patience to answer whatever it wants to know first. Nobody has built serious tools for someone whose hands are full of cable at the top of a ladder. So the admin doesn't get done. It dies in a group chat, in a glovebox full of Screwfix receipts, or in your head, where nobody can bill for it.

The software meant to fix it asks for the wrong things first

The obvious answer is software, and this is where the trades have been let down a second time. The tools sold to solve the problem want a company registration number, bank details, a VAT scheme and the customer's full postal address before they'll do anything at all. Stood in a cold garage with a customer waiting, you can't answer any of that, so the app gets closed and the note goes on the back of a job sheet. Something that demands a form before it earns its keep gets opened once.

What a new user actually wants is to be able to say “write Bob an enquiry, two red plugs, two hundred quid of labour, I can do it in the next fortnight” and get something worth sending back. There's enough in that sentence to work with. Everything else a system might reasonably like to know can be collected later, once it has proved itself worth the bother.

The answer has to fit the hands it is meant for. Not a form, not a spreadsheet, and not another app that wants you to stop, sit down and type. One button pressed with a thumb, on a ladder, in the rain, and what happened said in the words you would use to a colleague. There is a fair amount of machinery under that button, and the whole point of it is that you never have to think about it. The donkey work gets done for you and the decisions stay yours, because it is your name on the van.

We have the same problem

We're not writing this from a distance. Our own firm installs solar and heat pumps, and our costs land at the front of a project while the changes pile up all the way through it. A client watches the array performing better than expected and asks about another string. Somebody decides on site that a different cable route is the safer one. By the time the invoicing run comes round, the job on paper and the job in the ground are two different jobs, and reconciling them means sitting down with several people's recollections and a lot of goodwill.

Which is why the thing gets built between real jobs instead of in a boardroom. Every feature in it is there because a job demanded it that week, and the annoying parts get fixed on the evening we hit them. We aren't guessing at any of this. We have the same invoicing still waiting when the day is over, the same drawer of unread supplier statements, the same job that finished a month ago with nothing sent out for it. We are building what our own firm needed and would rather hand it round than keep it.

The money is made or lost at the moment the work is agreed out loud, in a doorway or at a trade counter or across a garden fence, and never at nine o'clock that night when the invoice finally gets written. Red Button exists to catch that spoken moment and hold onto it, so that the tally at the end of a job becomes a matter of record instead of a matter of memory.

Catch the moment work is agreed, or spend the rest of the job arguing about it.

One rule above all the others

If that's the job, then one requirement outranks everything else on our list: it can never fail to record. If the storage is full, if the audio isn't reaching the disc, if anything at all has gone wrong, the app has to say so the instant you press, while the customer is still stood in front of you and you can simply say it again. Every other feature we build can be argued about. That one can't.

We are after the whole pile

Anybody can build one clever tool for one job. What we are after is the entire pile of office work sitting behind trade work, lifted off every tradesperson at once and for good, rather than one plumber's Tuesday rescued by a decent app.

Something has changed that makes this worth attempting now. The kind of help that used to mean hiring an office full of people got cheap, and it got cheap all at once. A shift like that comes round perhaps once in a working lifetime, and the people with the least spare time to chase it, the ones on the tools until it goes dark, should be at the front of that queue rather than the back. One sparky in a van can now carry the clout the big outfits used to keep for themselves. That is a dent worth making, so it is the one we are making.

We also intend to be judged the way you are. A tradesman gets paid when the boiler fires. Nobody pays for the hours spent sitting near it. Red Button should be measured on the same terms: the quote sent, the receipt filed, the supplier chased. A longer list of features is not payment for anything.

We iterate at the speed you complain.

There is no support ticket to file, either. You press the button and say what's wrong, out loud, the same way you use it for everything else. Fixes ship in days rather than quarters. That loop is how the product is being built right now, on our own jobs, so it isn't something we are promising to add later.

What we believe

Everything above comes down to nine lines, which we keep where we can see them.

• An empty head is the sharpest tool you own.
• Say it once. Let it go.
• Your thumb shouldn't need a desk.
• Nothing sent without your say-so.
• You can always see exactly what it did, and why.
• Paid for the boiler working, not the hours.
• Built on site, not in a boardroom.
• One firm should carry the clout of a hundred.
• If it can't be said out loud, it's too hard.

This is the first entry in the record, written on the day the project started and since grown into the long version of why we are doing any of this. The next one, what happens after you let go of the button, walks through the machinery. The worst place to keep a business is about what the same gap costs a person, rather than a firm.

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