TradeOps · by Eight Mile · this site runs on it
The office software and the website, finally the same thing.
Someone finds you, reads a page about the work you do and sends an enquiry. It arrives as a lead with a name against it. You quote it, book it, do it and invoice it without typing the same address four times. TradeOps is both halves of that, run for you, on your own domain.
Questions get answered by someone who works on it.
Parts of the week
8, in one place
Systems to keep in step
One
Lives at
Your own domain
Data sits in
The UK
one job, one thread
nothing typed twice
What it covers
A working week, and the parts it is made of.
Nothing here is a module you switch on later or pay extra for. It is one system, and these are the places you spend your day in it.
Customers
Addresses, contacts, history, the price you agreed last time. Open a customer and you can see everything you have quoted them, done for them and charged them.
one page per customer
Jobs
An accepted quote becomes a job. The job holds the visits, the notes, the photos and the materials, so six months later you can still see what happened.
a job can take several visits
Your website
The public site is the same system. Pages, articles, photos of finished work, things you sell, all on your own domain and readable by a search engine with the scripts turned off.
same system, same login
Also in there
Which of those you see depends on what your business needs. A one van operation does not want a marketing screen in the way, so it does not get one.
How it holds together
A job is one thread, and everything hangs off it.
This is the part that is hard to see in a demo and impossible to miss after a month. The enquiry, the quote, the visits, the photos, the materials and the invoice are the same record at different ages. Nothing gets typed in twice, so nothing quietly disagrees with anything else.
enquiry → paid
one record
What happens, in order
8 steps, one record
01
An enquiry arrives from your website, or you take it on the phone and type it in.
02
Win the work and it becomes a customer. Their address gets entered once, ever.
03
The quote is line items, with VAT worked out on each line and added up afterwards.
04
They open a link, read it and accept. No account, no password, no app to download.
05
The accepted quote becomes a job, and the job becomes visits in the diary.
06
Materials come off stock as they go on the van, and each movement is kept.
07
The invoice is built from what was actually done, not from what was originally quoted.
08
The figures on your dashboard are worked out from all of that, so they are never stale.
One price for the lot, on the product page.
Honest comparison
Most people reading this are already looking at something else.
So here is what those things are, what they are good at, and where we think TradeOps is the better buy. If a row is out of date, tell us and we will change it.
A job management app
Jobber · ServiceM8 · Tradify · Commusoft · simPRO · Housecall Pro
Good at
The office side, refined over a decade. Quoting, scheduling and invoicing are the whole point of them and they do it well, with big support teams and an app in both stores.
What it leaves you with
Your website is somebody else’s job. It sits on another platform, on another bill, and the enquiries it collects have to find their way across by email or by a connector you set up once and never look at again.
Accounting and a spreadsheet
Xero · QuickBooks · a shared sheet · a group chat
Good at
Cheap, familiar, no training, and your accountant already lives in it. For one or two people this is genuinely hard to beat.
What it leaves you with
The story of a job ends up in three places and one person’s head. Quoting is copy and paste. It holds together until the third pair of hands arrives, and then it stops.
Something you assemble yourself
Notion · Airtable · Monday · a pile of Zaps
Good at
Shaped exactly around how you already work, running by this afternoon, changed whenever you feel like it.
What it leaves you with
You quietly become the person who maintains it. And it still will not send a proper quote, produce a VAT invoice or serve a website a search engine can read.
A build of your own
an agency, or us
Good at
Your process, no compromises, and something that belongs to you at the end of it.
What it leaves you with
Months of work and a five figure number, which is the right call when your process is genuinely unusual. When it is not, TradeOps is the same team’s answer at a fraction of it.
By name: TradeOps vs Jobber · TradeOps vs ServiceM8 · TradeOps vs Tradify. Or all three at once, and how the pricing works.
Side by side
The differences that do not go away.
Features move around. Any of these tools can add a screen next Tuesday. What is in the table is the shape of each option, which is the part that stays put.
| TradeOps | A job management app | Accounting and a spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your public website | Part of it. Built and put live on your own domain | A separate site, or a booking page they host | Separate again, usually a builder |
| Enquiries from that site | Arrive as leads, with the job already attached | A form somewhere, forwarded on by email | An inbox, and good intentions |
| Quote to job to invoice | One thread, nothing entered twice | Their strongest ground, and they are good at it | Copy, paste, hope |
| Articles and pages for search | Written in the same system, rendered on the server | Not what they are for | No |
| Selling something online | Product pages come with it | Rarely | No |
| Stock and materials | A ledger of movements you can read back | An extra, when it is offered at all | A tab that is out of date by Wednesday |
| Reports | Worked out from the records every time you open them | Dashboards, usually decent ones | Whatever you found the time to build |
| An assistant that can read your data | Yes, through a key you create and can revoke | Uncommon so far | No |
| Where the data sits | One UK database, kept apart per business by the database itself | Their platform, in their region | A laptop, a cloud drive and a phone |
| What you pay | One product, one price, on the product page | Per user, per month, for as long as you use it | Per seat, plus the evenings you spend on it |
| Who fixes it when it breaks | The people who wrote it | A support queue | You |
Written from what those tools say publicly, and from watching customers use them. They are decent products built by people who know this trade, and if one of them fits you better we would rather you bought it. If we have something wrong, tell us and the table changes.
Still weighing it up?
The price is the fastest way to finish the decision. It is one number for the software and the website together, and nothing on the product page is per user.
Where it is genuinely different
Five decisions you cannot bolt on afterwards.
Every tool in the table can add a button. None of them can change the shape they were built in, and the shape is what you live with.
The website is not an extra
Your site is built and deployed for your business alone, on your own domain, and the pages come out of the server as finished HTML. That is why they get read properly by search engines, and why a visitor on a bad signal still sees them.
one system, one login, one bill
A lead is never typed in twice
The form on your site writes into the same database your quotes come out of. There is no export, no connector in the middle and no morning where the enquiries quietly stopped arriving because a token expired.
no plumbing between two vendors
The numbers are worked out, not stored
Totals are recalculated on the server from the lines, VAT is worked out per line and added up afterwards, and every figure is held in whole pence. Reports are computed when you open them, so there is no second copy of the truth to go stale.
no rounding surprises at the bottom
Your data is kept apart by the database
Every business on the platform is separated at the database level rather than by a filter somebody remembered to add to a query. If the tenant is missing, the database refuses the read instead of returning somebody else’s row.
the backstop is below the code
An assistant can read it, if you want one to
You can create a key that lets an AI assistant look at your own data and answer questions about it. It is off unless you turn it on, scoped to your business, and you can take the key away again.
your key, your business, revocable
Being straight with you
When TradeOps is the wrong answer.
We would rather say this here than three weeks into a migration. If you recognise yourself below, save your money.
You are one person and the notebook works
Then keep the notebook. Software earns its place when there is a second person who needs to see what the first one did.
You run a hundred vans and need routing
Dispatch optimisation across a big fleet is a deep problem and the large platforms have spent years on it. We have not, and pretending otherwise would waste your month.
You are trading outside the UK
VAT, pounds and UK style invoicing are what it is built around. Other countries are possible but they are a project, not a signup.
You need an app from the app store
It works on a phone because it is a website that is built for one. There is no native app to install, and offline in a basement is not its strong point.
Your team likes what you already have
Moving everyone onto something new costs more than the licence does. If nobody is complaining, there is nothing here worth the disruption.
And when it fits
Two to thirty people. Work that arrives as an enquiry and leaves as an invoice. A website you are not proud of, or one that costs you more attention than it returns. Someone in the office holding it all together with a spreadsheet and a good memory.
That is who it was built for, because that is who we built the first version with.
Not sure which you are? Describe your setup and we will tell you honestly.