How to choose between trade management apps

Last updated: September 2026

Why we are not giving you a table

You will find plenty of pages ranking trade apps against each other. Almost all of them are published by one of the products, or by an affiliate paid per sign-up, and almost all of them go stale within months as features change.

We are not going to add another one, and we would rather say why: any table we wrote would put our own product at the top, and any table a competitor wrote would not. Neither is evidence.

What does work is a short, structured trial using your own work. It takes about a week of ordinary trading and it is much harder to argue with.

Pick the test job first

Do not use an easy job. Choose the shape of work that causes you the most trouble, because the differences between products only appear under pressure.

For most trades businesses the awkward shape is something like this: an enquiry arrives by phone, the site is a rented property so the payer is not the occupier, a quote has to be sent and chased, the work needs two visits because of a part, photographs matter, and the invoice gets queried.

Write that shape down before you open any software. It is your specification, and it is worth more than any feature list because it came from your business.

Five things to score

1. Clicks from enquiry to booked visit. Count them. Twice the clicks means twice the abandonment on a busy Friday.
2. Where the address gets typed. Once is right. Three times means three chances to be wrong, forever.
3. What the customer has to do. Accounts, passwords and installs cost you replies. A link they can answer costs nothing.
4. What the phone can do. Try it outdoors, one handed, on the oldest phone in the team. This is the part that decides whether the system is used at all.
5. How the awkward case behaves. Cancel a job, void an invoice, move a visit, refund a deposit. Everything is pleasant until something goes wrong.

Questions to ask the vendor

Four, and the answers are more revealing than the demo.

What does it cost with three users, on the plan that includes invoicing? Beware answers that arrive as a call rather than a number.

What does it not do? Any honest product has a list. A vendor who cannot produce one has either not thought about it or is hoping you will not ask.

How do I export everything if I leave? The shape of this answer tells you how the rest of the relationship will go.

Where is the data held, and who can see it? For a UK business this is a fair question with a factual answer.

Where Dispatch fits, honestly

So that this page answers its own questions: Dispatch is job management for UK trades and field service businesses, priced by seats and report templates with every feature on every plan and a free plan for one user.

It does not work offline, does not track stock, does not file anything with HMRC, does not connect to accounting packages beyond a CSV export, and does not do construction programmes. Those are the honest gaps, and they are the same gaps whichever plan you are on.

Firestore, Storage and all compute run in the UK, in London. The exception, stated properly, is that authentication records sit on Google global infrastructure, because that service offers no region control.

Run the test above with your own awkward job and see how it scores. That is a better argument than anything we could write here.

Decide, then commit properly

Half-adopted software is the worst outcome, so once you have chosen, move everything within a fortnight: all new jobs go in the new system from a fixed date, and the old one becomes read-only history.

Run the fortnight with one rule: if something cannot be done in the system, write it down rather than quietly doing it the old way. That list is either your training plan or your evidence that you chose wrong, and either is useful.

For the underlying question of what to look for at all, what features trade software should have is the checklist version of this page.