A quote app for your handyman business — where the list is the quote

How handyman work goes unpaid

• The list that grows all day. You quoted five tasks. By the time you're packing up it's eight, because every room you walk through reminds the customer of something. Each add-on is small — $80 here, $120 there — which is exactly why nobody writes them down. Across a week, the unwritten add-ons are a day's wages.
• The materials run nobody bills. Twenty minutes to the hardware store, $63 in parts, and it's gone from your head by the next job. Handyman margins live and die on whether the small materials and the time to get them actually make the invoice.
• “Casual” hourly work with no record. Regulars love an arrangement: come over Tuesday, sort a few things, invoice me whenever. Six weeks later you're reconstructing what you did from memory and a photo of a gate. Work with no record gets rounded down — by you, to avoid the awkward conversation.

The handyman problem isn't one lost variation. It's that the whole trade runs on micro-variations, and the paperwork habit that suits a $30,000 job doesn't survive a day of $90 tasks. The fix has to be faster than not doing it.

A half-day list that gained three tasks

Thirty seconds of talking, and the three add-ons exist as priced lines on the Riley job — next to the original quote, not in your head. Text her the draft before lunch and the afternoon's work is agreed in writing. At invoice time there's nothing to remember and nothing to argue: the document already matches the day.

Quoting handyman work: itemise, don't lump

A lump-sum “odd jobs — $600” quote invites haggling and hides your value. An itemised list does the opposite: the customer sees what each task costs, drops the ones they don't want, and — usefully — learns that added tasks have prices too. Talk the list to Timmy the way you'd say it to your apprentice, prices and all, and it comes back as a professional itemised quote with your numbers untouched. Materials runs work the same way: say the parts and the amount while the receipt's still in your pocket, and it's a line on the job instead of a donation to the hardware store. The finer points are in how to write a professional trade quote.

What Timmy asks when a handyman note is missing details

When an important detail is missing (a price, a customer, a scope item), Timmy asks rather than making it up. With a trade this varied, that matters more than usual:

• A task with no price. “She also wants the letterbox straightened” becomes a scoped line with the amount open, and Timmy asks for your number — it won't decide what a letterbox is worth.
• Which customer? Four small jobs a day means four active customers. Timmy confirms which job an add-on belongs to before it lands anywhere.
• Vague items. “Fix the thing on the deck” gets a question, because a line the customer can't recognise is a line they'll query on the invoice.

Who it fits — and who it doesn't

TradieCue is built for solo tradies and small owner-operated trade businesses (roughly 1–5 people) in australia. For a solo handyman or a two-person outfit doing maintenance rounds, rental touch-ups and homeowner lists, it fits the rhythm: quote the list, capture the adds, follow up the slow payers with a polite drafted message. What it isn't: a booking or scheduling system, a payment processor, or accounting software — it drafts the documents, you run the diary and the books. Drafts aren't legal advice, nothing sends without you, and it's iPhone only for now.

Common questions