Why I built ProQuoter — 23 years on the tools and done with the paperwork

I started tiling when I was nineteen. There wasn't much of a plan — a friend's dad was a tiler, I needed work, and it turned out I was decent at it. Over two decades I built a reputation in the North West: bathroom renovations, wetrooms, large-format floors, commercial work. Tiling is a proper craft when it's done right. You're reading substrates, managing waterproofing, dealing with out-of-square walls, making complicated spaces look seamless and level. I take real pride in it.

But every tradesman who works for themselves is actually doing two jobs. There's the trade — the one you trained for and actually care about. And then there's the business: quoting, following up, invoicing, chasing payments, tracking which job is at what stage. Nobody trains you for that second job. You figure it out as you go, usually by getting it wrong a few times first.

For years I managed with a combination of notebooks, spreadsheets, and what I'd describe generously as a system. The honest version: I kept a lot in my head and hoped nothing slipped. Eventually things slipped.

The quoting was the worst part. Every customer deserves a proper written quote — not a number on a text message. A quote that shows the breakdown: what they're getting, what the prep involves, what's included and what isn't. But writing that properly takes time, and time spent on paperwork is time you're not billing.

When I was busy, it took me two or three days to turn a quote around. By then, some customers had already gone with someone quicker. I wasn't necessarily cheaper or worse — I just hadn't got back to them fast enough. That's work I should have won.

Following up was inconsistent. I'd mean to chase a quote after a week, get caught up in a job, and six weeks later realise I'd never sent a second message. Some of those jobs I could have won with a single follow-up. I'd done all the work of the site visit and the quote and then dropped the ball at the last step.

Invoicing had its own rhythm of frustration. Finish a job on Friday, come home exhausted, intend to invoice that evening. Wake up Saturday, kids need things, tools need cleaning. Invoice goes out Monday. By then the happy customer who was ready to pay at the end of a good job is back at work and less responsive. Late invoices extend your payment cycle for no reason except that you were knackered when the job finished.

And keeping track of who'd paid and who hadn't meant going back through bank statements because nothing was connected. I'd been managing jobs as a customer management exercise without any tools to actually do it properly.

I tried the obvious options. Jobber, Tradify, ServiceM8. I looked at several others too. They all had feature lists that sounded right: quoting, scheduling, invoicing, job management. But when I sat down to actually use them on real jobs, the problems started appearing quickly.

Most of them were clearly designed for a multi-trade business with an office. The UX assumed you were at a desk, with time to navigate menus and configure templates. The mobile experience felt like something bolted on afterwards — technically functional, but not how a tradesman actually works on site.

The quoting tools inside these apps were often capable on paper but slow in practice. I didn't want to spend fifteen minutes building a quote structure from scratch every time. I wanted to tap through it fast while I was still at the customer's property, before I'd even driven away. None of them made that feel natural.

There was also a pricing problem. These tools treated materials and labour as the same type of line item, without understanding how tradesmen actually price work. I price prep separately because it varies so much job to job. I price waste into materials because the customer needs to see it's accounted for. I have different rates for different types of tiling. The existing options either couldn't accommodate that structure or made it so complicated to set up that it wasn't worth the effort.

Most of them also pushed towards accounting integrations and VAT workflows that assumed you had a bookkeeper. I'm a sole trader who wants to know, at a glance, which jobs are paid and which aren't. Those are different requirements entirely.

I'm not saying those apps are bad. They're capable products for the audience they were built for. They just weren't built for the person doing the work themselves, on a phone, in a muddy van, trying to finish a quote before the school run.

The decision to build ProQuoter didn't happen overnight. For a long time I assumed someone else would solve it. I improved my own systems — better quote templates, a consistent folder structure, reminder notes — and that helped at the margins. But the fundamental problem remained: every part of the process lived somewhere different, nothing was joined up, and nothing worked properly on a phone.

A friend who works in software suggested I describe exactly what I needed, and we'd see if it was buildable. That conversation took about two hours. By the end of it, the basic shape of ProQuoter was sketched out.

The first version was stripped back. It did quoting and basic job tracking, nothing else. But I could build a proper structured quote in under five minutes on my phone, send it while I was still at the customer's property, and chase it automatically a week later. That alone changed how I worked.

We built from there. Invoice software that sends properly formatted invoices directly from the job record, the same day the work finishes. A diary that shows what's genuinely booked versus what's still tentative. Customer records that keep every conversation, quote, job and invoice in one place so you can see the full history in thirty seconds.

ProQuoter is software built for tradesmen — not adapted from office software, not designed for a business with a team of ten. Built for one person or a small crew doing real work, trying to run the business side properly without it taking over their evenings.

You can't describe what you want until you try using what you've built. Every feature I thought was finished came back with changes after I'd used it on actual jobs. The measure pad started as three input fields. It's now a proper measurement tool with waste calculations, section-by-section breakdowns, and a clean handoff to the quote builder — because that's what the real work required.

Most tradesmen don't struggle with admin because they're disorganised. They struggle because the tools are wrong. When quoting takes five minutes instead of thirty, people do it properly and on time. When invoicing is three taps from a finished job, it goes out the same day. The behaviour that looks like a personal failing is often just a rational response to a bad process.

The feedback from other tradesmen has been the most valuable thing throughout. Builders, plumbers, electricians, bathroom fitters — they describe problems I hadn't thought to solve and workflows I hadn't encountered. Every trade has different specifics, but the underlying frustration is shared: the back-office side of being self-employed has always been harder than it needed to be, and nobody has done much to fix it from the tradesman's side.

The hardest thing I learned is that nearly good enough isn't good enough. Software that's seventy percent right frustrates people more than software that doesn't try. The details matter: how quickly a tap responds, whether the form remembers what you entered, whether the quote looks professional when it lands in someone's inbox. That stuff is the difference between a tool you use every day and one that sits on your phone unused after a week.

ProQuoter started as a tiler's problem, but I'm building it for every trade that faces the same friction. The core won't change: software for tradesmen that works the way tradespeople actually work — quick to use on a phone, designed around the real job rather than the paperwork around it. Less time on admin in the evenings means more capacity for work, more time with your family, and less of the business carrying around in your head.

In the short term, we're focused on making the end-to-end workflow — from first enquiry to final payment — as frictionless as possible. Better AI tools to help write quotes and catch gaps before they become problems. Clearer financial visibility without needing to wade through spreadsheets. Better tools for tradesmen who work with a small team.

Longer term, I want ProQuoter to be the thing that makes running a trade business feel manageable. Not because it's simple — it isn't — but because the tools shouldn't be the part that grinds you down.

If you've sat in your van at seven in the evening writing quotes you should have sent at lunchtime, if you've chased invoices on your days off, if you've lost track of a customer you meant to follow up with three weeks ago — that's the problem ProQuoter is built for. I know exactly what that feels like. I lived it for 23 years before I built a better way.