Checkatrade has just launched TradeMore, a free AI powered job management app open to every UK tradesperson, not just those already signed up to Checkatrade. It lands at a genuinely uncomfortable moment for the trade: research behind the UK Admin Drain Report 2026 found the average small business owner in trades loses eight hours a week to manual admin, invoicing, chasing payments, juggling messages across three different inboxes. That is 384 hours a year, roughly ten working weeks, and for a self-employed electrician billing at an effective £45 an hour, it works out to more than £17,000 in lost billable time annually.
We work with trades businesses across London and the UK, and admin overload is the single most common complaint we hear before AI ever comes up. So when a brand with Checkatrade’s reach puts a free AI tool directly into that gap, it is worth a proper look, not just a press release summary.
What TradeMore actually does
TradeMore pulls messages from Gmail, Hotmail and Checkatrade’s own enquiry system into one unified inbox, so a tradesperson is not hunting across three apps to find out who still needs a reply. From there it auto-builds a customer book from conversation details, handles intelligent scheduling with automated reminders, and lets you send quotes and invoices from inside a chat thread using a saved price list, without switching screens. Certificates are supported too, and the platform connects to popular accounting software rather than trying to replace it outright.
It is built to flex across trade types, from a single call-out job to a multi-stage renovation, and it works for electricians, plumbers, builders, roofers, decorators, gardeners, heating engineers and carpenters alike. Crucially, it is available on iOS and web to any UK tradesperson, whether or not they have ever used Checkatrade to find work.
The problem it is actually aimed at
The eight hours a week figure is the number worth sitting with. Spread across a year it is not a rounding error, it is ten working weeks spent on admin instead of on tools, materials or the next job. A separate survey from Powered Now and Installer, the NOW Report, put the time specifically spent on quoting, invoicing and chasing payments at five hours and twenty minutes a week, much of it happening in the evenings or at weekends rather than during paid hours. Either figure tells the same story: the paperwork does not stop when the tools go down, it just moves into the tradesperson’s own time.
That is the gap TradeMore is trying to close, and it is not alone. Tradify, Powered Now, ServiceM8 and BigChange’s Cooper have all been pushing AI-assisted job management at trades this year, and we covered the BigChange launch on this blog only last week. What makes TradeMore different is the free entry tier and Checkatrade’s existing reach into a huge slice of the UK trade, which means adoption could move faster here than with a paid-only competitor. It also means TradeMore has a built-in incentive to keep tradespeople inside the Checkatrade ecosystem, worth remembering when you weigh up a tool that is nominally independent of the marketplace you already use to find work.
The wider pattern matters more than any single launch. Every major job management platform serving UK trades is racing to bolt on the same short list of features this year: a unified inbox, AI-drafted quotes, automated scheduling and payment chasing. When several competitors converge on the same feature set within months of each other, it is usually a sign the underlying pain point is real and large enough to be worth building for, not that any one vendor has found something the others missed.
Free is the headline, read the rest of the page too
A genuinely free entry plan lowers the barrier to trying an AI job management tool to almost nothing, and that matters for a trade where a lot of software still gets adopted by word of mouth on a job site rather than through a sales call. But free tiers in this category tend to work the same way everywhere: enough functionality to get hooked on the unified inbox and the auto-scheduling, then a nudge toward a paid monthly or yearly plan once you want deeper accounting integration, more customer records, or certificate storage at scale.
None of that makes it a bad deal. It makes it a normal software business model, and the sensible move is to treat the free tier as a genuine trial rather than a permanent home, and to check what happens to your customer data and price lists if you ever want to move to a different platform later.
What we would tell a trades client before switching
If admin is eating your evenings, do not wait for the perfect tool, start capturing where the hours actually go this week. Time yourself on quoting, invoicing and chasing one overdue payment, because that single number is what tells you whether a free unified inbox and auto-scheduling would move the needle for your business specifically, or whether your real bottleneck is somewhere else entirely, like job scheduling clashes or supplier ordering.
Run TradeMore alongside whatever you already use for a fortnight before you commit to anything, rather than ripping out an existing system on day one. Check the accounting integration actually covers the software your bookkeeper uses, and ask what exporting your data looks like before you need to do it in a hurry. AI job management tools are converging fast this year, which is good news for tradespeople, but the free launch price is the easy part. The habit of actually using it every day, and having a plan for what happens after the free tier, is what turns eight lost hours a week into hours back on paid work.
Kaizen offers a free 30 minute AI audit for trades and small business owners who want a second opinion on which of these tools genuinely fits their workflow before they commit.