The team at Pandle, understandably, advocate cloud accounting for any small business and with good reason. Every business is doing itself a huge favour if they use cloud accounting tools. However, some businesses stand to benefit more than others depending on their nature. One area that this applies to is trades.

There’s a few different reasons for this, so grab a cup of tea and a biscuit while we explain.

Your average tradesperson

Ok, there’s no such thing as average, but there are certainly commonalities. Firstly, tradespeople are busy in a way run of the mill office workers aren’t going to grasp. They are the ultimate plate spinners.

Secondly, they are largely doing this without technological tools at hand. They’ll have a toolkit, yes, but not a desk with everything in perfect reach whilst on the move. They are field-based and therefore so is their office. In fact, essentially, their ‘desk’ needs to fit in their palm, aka the smart phone.

This poses some obvious problems when it comes to traders’ businesses and their accounting. The mobile nature of the job means accounting can easily fall by the wayside becoming a huge job once a month. Therein lies another problem. Tradespeople usually do what they do because of their skill in that area. A tree surgeon for example knows their arboriculture jargon inside out, they possibly aren’t so enthused about bookkeeping.

How does cloud accounting solve this?

This is where cloud accounting via a mobile app comes into its own. Even though you’re mobile with an ever-changing place of work, you can keep on top of your accounting as you go. That means no nasty evenings spent sat at a laptop when you’d rather be anywhere but. This allows you to:

• Provide quotations: You can send out quotations in moments and then link these to actual work and future records. This prevents mistakes and makes things considerably easier.
• Make payments easy: You don’t have time to be chasing clients, and every aspect of invoicing can be automated. Additionally invoices can be routinely raised. Furthermore, rather than having to deal with cash or cheques clients can easily pay using PayPal.
• Work wherever you are: Sat down grabbing a bite to eat? With cloud accounting you can use that time to catch up on the ‘paperwork’ without seeing a single piece of paper at all. Being cloud-based, as long as you have mobile reception then you can login and get busy. This also makes your procedures easier as you can, for example, send the invoice whilst you’re still on site at the end of the job.
• Boost your reputation: Tradespeople get a bad rap, so you need to do everything you can to boost the reputation and standing of your business. At Pandle we enable you to add logos and customise invoice templates, so that all communications look professional and sleek.
• Monitor expenses: Of course you’ll still need to hold on to receipts for auditing, but being able to log expenses as you make them helps to minimise errors and gain visibility over your spending.

Get cloud accounting for your trade business

So yes, cloud accounting for tradespeople makes fantastic business sense. It’s about making the mundane and cumbersome part of the job easier, so that you can get on and do what you love and what makes the money. Download Pandle for Android or for iPhone today and get your office as mobile as you.