Getting started as a trade

Hit Join as a trade, sign up with an email and password or with Google, and you're in. No card, no contract.

Pick the trade option, not the customer one — it's what puts the trade tools in your menu. If you've already signed up as a customer by mistake, tell us and we'll switch it over rather than you starting again.

Straight after signing up you'll do a short setup: your trade (pick as many as you actually do), your business (name, area you cover, day or hourly rate, phone and links) and about you (a few lines on the work you take on).

Be specific about the area you cover. It's what decides which jobs get put in front of you and which customers find you in search.

Your rate is a guide, not a commitment — it helps customers filter out people who are wildly out of their budget before either of you wastes an evening.

Go to My trade profile and upload photo ID under Verification. Add your trade certificate and insurance too if you have them — both are optional, both make a difference.

We check them by hand, so give it a day or so. Once approved you get the verified badge on your profile, your ads and every job you apply to.

Your documents are stored privately. Customers never see the files — only whether you're verified.

Add a profile photo, a banner, and portfolio photos of jobs you've finished. Photos of your actual work do more than any amount of writing.

Set your handle in Settings — that's your shareable address, the one you put on the van and in your TikTok bio.

Three ways work reaches you, and you should use all three:

• Find work — the live list of jobs posted near you. Check it daily.
• Job matches — we notify you when a new job matches your trade and your area. This is the one that needs notifications switched on.
• Customers coming to you — from search, your profile, or an ad you've posted.

When you apply to a job, the customer sees your profile alongside everyone else's. Apply early and say something specific about their job; a bare application next to a considered one loses every time.

A customer can hire you two ways: by picking you from the people who applied, or by sending the job straight to you from your profile or one of your ads.

Either way it arrives as a request, not a booking. You get a notification, you open the job, and you accept or decline. Nothing goes in your diary until you say yes.

Declining costs you nothing and isn't held against you. Leaving a request sitting for days is what loses you the next one.

Every job has a message thread. Keep the conversation there — it's the record if anything's disputed later, and it means you're not digging through texts to find what was agreed.

Accepted jobs land in your Calendar automatically, and you can block out days you're not available. You'll get a reminder the day before a booking and again on the morning.

Under Estimates & invoices you can build either from scratch, or straight from a job you're on — which fills in the customer for you and sends it to them properly instead of as a photo of a scrap of paper.

• An estimate can be turned into an invoice in one click once the work's agreed.
• Every document downloads as a tidy PDF with your business details on it.
• Snap a photo of a written quote or a merchant receipt and we'll draft the lines for you — you check the figures before anything is issued.

Totals and VAT are always worked out by us, not typed in — so a slip of the thumb can't send a customer the wrong number.

• Material calculators — how much you need, and roughly what it'll cost.
• Regs & safety lookup — Building Regs and safety guidance in plain English, with the part it came from.
• The assistant, for the questions that don't fit a form — it only ever sees what you can already see.

Post ads for the work you want more of, put finished jobs on the feed, and link your TikTok so people can see you work.

Ask every happy customer to leave a review when they mark the job complete. Reviews are the single biggest thing a customer looks at, and the first few are the hardest to get.

Refer a mate and you both get an extra month free.

8 months free from the day you join. After that it's £11.99 a month — that's the whole price, there's no VAT added and no commission on any job you win.

You'll be reminded well before the trial ends, and you can add a card, change it or cancel any time from Billing.

There's no App Store download — the website installs itself. You get an icon like any other app, it opens full screen without the browser bars, and on an iPhone it's the only way to receive alerts. Takes about ten seconds.

Installing doesn't take up much room — it's the same website, just wrapped in an icon. You can drag it off your home screen any time and nothing is lost.

Push notifications land on your phone or desktop the moment something happens — a job offer, a message, a booking reminder — even with the site closed. Without them you only find out next time you open the app.

Your browser will ask you to allow them. Say yes — if you say no by mistake, you'll have to re-allow Plug a' Trade in your browser's site settings before the button works again.

iPhone: add the app to your home screen first (the step above), then open it from that icon and turn notifications on there. Safari tabs on iOS can't receive them at all — that's Apple's rule, not ours.

You pick which kinds you get — applications, hiring updates, messages, reminders, reviews and so on — in Settings → Notifications. Switching one off stops it being created at all, so it won't reach you in the app either.