Running jobs from the notes app on your phone

It is the fastest system on this list to start and the hardest to get anything out of. Notes takes a job detail in four seconds, standing in a hallway, which is more than most software manages. The trouble arrives later, when you need a total, a document, or an answer to who owes you what. Here is where the line is, and what the options cost.

How it usually goes

One note per job, mostly. A couple have two jobs in them. The measurements are in one, the price you said out loud is in another, and the photos are in the camera roll between a screenshot of a parking sign and a picture of the van's mileage. At the end of the month you have everything you need to invoice and no way to assemble it that does not take an evening.

What the notes app cannot do

Not a list of its faults. A list of the three jobs it was never built for, which is a different thing and the only part worth paying to fix.

• 1.Nothing adds up. Notes has no totals, no VAT line and no idea what a day rate is, so every invoice starts with mental arithmetic.
• 2.The photos are somewhere else. The record of the job is split across two apps that do not know about each other, and only one of them is in date order.
• 3.There is nothing to send. Whatever the customer gets, you are typing it again from scratch.

What the admin actually costs a business of one

Every method on this site, ours included, is trying to buy back the same thing. It is worth knowing what it is worth before you spend anything on it, so here is our own analysis of the public figures, with the working published.

The honest limit on that: it describes businesses affected by late payment, not everyone, and the notes app is not what caused it. The narrower claim is the one that matters here. None of the methods on this site chases anybody on its own, so whatever that time is worth, you are paying all of it.

You are also not unusual. Comparing the Department for Business and Trade's business population estimate against the ONS register of VAT and PAYE registered firms puts roughly 500,000 UK construction businesses, 57% of the sector, below both thresholds with no payroll. Almost every one of them is one person running the whole thing off a book, a phone or a spreadsheet.

Full working, primary sources and the limitations → Last checked 31 July 2026. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

The options, with prices

Including doing nothing, which is a real option and the right one for some of the people reading this.

If you do move, do these first

• 1.Do the unpaid ones first. Work out which jobs are finished and not yet invoiced, and get those into whatever you move to. Everything else can be historical.
• 2.Pull the photos out by job. The camera roll is the hard part and it gets harder every week you leave it. Start with the last three months, which is where anything still disputed lives.
• 3.Keep the notes. Do not tidy them away. They are the record for the period they cover, and six years is how long you might need to produce it.

Questions people ask

What should a sole trader use instead of the notes app for jobs?

Anything that does the three things Notes structurally cannot: add up, produce a document, and tell you what is unpaid. It should still be as fast to open on a phone, because if it is slower than Notes at the four-second job of writing something down in a hallway, it will not get used and you will be back in Notes within a month. That speed test is the one that decides it, not the feature list.

Is there a free option, or does this mean a subscription?

There is a free plan here that needs no card and does not expire, covering 10 quotes, 10 invoices and 10 emailed PDFs a month with unlimited clients and jobs. There is also a free invoice generator on this site that needs no account at all, which is the smallest possible step from Notes. Elsewhere, Zoho Invoice is free to 500 invoices a year and FreeAgent is free with certain banks.

Can I keep the notes app for anything?

Yes, and most people do. Notes is genuinely good at the thing it is good at: a measurement, a part number, a gate code, captured in seconds without opening anything. Keep it for that. What moves is anything with a price on it or anything a customer is going to see.

How long does moving off Notes take?

An evening for the unpaid work, which is the only part that is urgent, and then it happens gradually as new jobs come in. There is no migration to run because there is nothing structured to migrate. The photos are the slow part and they can be done a month at a time.

Coming from something else

• SpreadsheetsMoving off a spreadsheet, for a one-person trade
• Paper job sheetsAn alternative to paper job sheets, for one pair of hands
• WhatsAppRunning your jobs out of WhatsApp

Written for your trade

• SoloDesks for Tilers →
• SoloDesks for Carpenters →
• SoloDesks for Plasterers →