Everything we change, with dates on it. The fixes as well as the new bits, because a list with no fixes on it is a list somebody is editing.
If your working days were saved as "mon,tue,wed" rather than "Mon,Tue," "Wed", the whole week read as closed. Every job brief sat waiting for a working morning that never came, your crew were never texted, and nothing anywhere said why. Capital letters no longer decide whether you work Fridays.
Asking "anything been found at the Vella place?" searched for that whole phrase rather than the words in it, so it found nothing and said so — about an address with asbestos written against it. It reads the words now, and answers with what is actually on file.
"Sam, put the meter box one on the Kerr St project" went to Drizzy, who asked which job you meant. Starting a message with a name reaches that person now, with or without the @.
Tell her the photos on a job have nothing written on them and she works through them: looks at each one, says what it shows, and writes that down. Then "put the meter box one on the Kerr St project" finds it, because somebody named it. A photo with no label is one nobody will ever find again, so a job with six unnamed pictures on it is six things lost.
The check that stops one of them saying "nothing has been reported" without looking was firing even when they had looked — so a correct answer got argued with. Looking something up does not change anything, and the check was only counting things that do.
Nothing in the app was an address, so the browser’s back button left it altogether, a reload always put you back on Drizzy, and a quote you opened from a chat had no way out except opening somebody else and coming back. Every screen has its own link now — a job, a quote, an invoice, one of their conversations, the diary — so back goes back, reload keeps you where you were, and you can send somebody straight to the thing you are looking at.
Anything you set up for yourself rather than the crew — chasing what is past thirty days, the BAS one — only ever appeared inside the app. A BAS reminder on a screen you did not open that morning is not a reminder, and the setup screen said "just you", which reads as a promise it goes somewhere. It texts you now. The crew still never see a note you wrote to yourself.
Every so often one of them would come back with "I did not catch that one" having understood you perfectly, and the work would not be done. They think before they answer, and the room they were given to reply had to cover the thinking too — so they would work through your drawing, weigh it up, start on the numbers and run out of room mid-sentence. Nothing came back and there was no way to tell that from them deciding to do nothing. Penny wrote a quote three times out of eight before this and eight out of eight after.
Ask for something that belongs to somebody else and now and then they would come back with "I did not catch that one" and nothing done — about a message they had understood perfectly. There was already meant to be a second go at it, and it turned out never to have worked: it was checking whether they had said anything, and the apology counts as saying something. It goes on what they actually did now.
"What have we got back from the jobs?" answered "that one did not go through" if you owned a single file. It only worked while there was nothing to report. Asking about a job by the customer’s name found nothing either — she was matching on the job title alone, and nobody calls a job by its title.
A jobsite photo is unreadable six weeks later — a wall is a wall. Say "that one is the old Rheem before we pulled it out" and she writes it down; ask for "the one of the old Rheem" and she finds it. She looks across what you called it, what anybody said about it, and the job it is on, because any of those is how somebody describes a photo.
Nothing in the crew’s instructions ever said who was who, so they guessed, and got it wrong about each other in front of you.
Three more ways she got out of writing a quote, all closed. She would look up old prices, find none, report that, and stop — which looks like work and leaves you with nothing. She would ask you what work you wanted old prices for, straight after you had told her. And handed something she would sometimes come back with nothing at all, so you got "I did not catch that one" and Drizzy apologising for her.
The line under her name could be clicked, and what opened was a rename box filled with "Jobs and the crew" — the title of a room belonging to somebody else. Only a heading that really is a conversation’s name can be renamed now. The line is gone from their boards anyway: the buttons beside it already say what the page is.
Every board had its own "Tell Penny instead" sitting under the "Talk to Penny" already in the header. Same for Gus and Sam. The one in the header stays, because it is on every screen.
Opening one played a scroll down the whole thread before settling. It starts at the bottom now. A message that lands while you are reading still slides in, because that movement is what tells you it arrived.
A quote written out of a conversation lands as a draft, and a draft row had one button on it: Edit. No way to send it, so no way for it to be accepted, so no way to turn it into an invoice — the whole path only worked from inside the editor, and only if you had their email. Drafts get a Send it button that readies the quote and hands you the link, and a quote you texted can be marked as won without pretending it was emailed.
Quotes written from a conversation get called whatever the conversation was about, and that name is what the customer reads at the top of their copy — and what the invoice inherits. It was only fixable while the quote was still open, which is before anybody has seen it. Accepted ones can be edited now.
The Owed to you figure left out invoices that had been drawn up and not sent, so it could read $0.00 while the list beside it showed one owing. Same for the total under her name in the sidebar, which also went stale the moment you marked something paid. All of them count the same things now, and say how much has not been sent yet.
Opening one from a conversation left you stuck on it: the browser back button leaves the app, so the only way out was to open somebody else and come back. There is a way back to Penny’s page now, the same as projects have always had.
An invoice used to be a view of the quote behind it, which is why you could not change one, could not raise one without writing a quote first, and why a quote went read-only the moment you billed it. It is a document of its own now, with its own lines. Quotes and invoices have a tab each on Penny’s page.
Most small work is never quoted — a tap swap, a callout, an hour on site. "Invoice Mr Chen four fifty for the leaking tap" now writes the invoice. It used to manage it by inventing a quote to hang it off, so the customer ended up with a quote in their history for work nobody ever quoted.
"Mr Okafor paid this morning, cash" marks it. Penny could only tell you to go and do it yourself, which is the most common sentence in the business to be missing. Same for changing one: something got added on site, tell her, and the invoice moves. An invoice already paid is not quietly rewritten — she asks whether that is a new invoice or a credit.
Ask what you were owed and the answer counted only invoices already sent. Every invoice the crew draws up starts as a draft, so the answer was "all squared up, nothing outstanding, every invoice’s been paid" with $4,625 on the books. Drafts count now, and are called out separately, because money you have not asked for yet is the most urgent kind.
Tell Drizzy you do not work Saturdays and he would say "keeping you at Mon to Fri" and write it down nowhere. The check that catches an answer claiming something was done had no word for changing a setting, so that one read as ordinary conversation — and a working week nobody saved is a job landing on a Saturday next month.
There is a check that catches an answer saying something was done when nothing was, because that one sends somebody to a job that does not exist. It was letting them through whenever the sentence ended "nobody on it yet" — which is how Drizzy ends nearly every one of them. So the check was excusing the exact sentence it is there to catch.
Yesterday jobs stopped being allowed to have the word quote in their name, which was meant to stop a quote going on the board as a job that cannot hold a price. It also stopped a perfectly ordinary job — going out next week to price something is work, and it belongs on the run. Only a job named after the quote itself is refused now.
When one of them handed work to another, the pictures did not go with it. So every price she has ever been asked for was worked out from a sentence Drizzy wrote about a plan he could see and she could not — which is most of why she kept saying she had nothing to go on. She gets the drawing now, the same as you would hand somebody the plan rather than describe it.
She would look up what you had charged before, find nothing, and stop there — which looks like work and leaves you with nothing. Writing the quote is the job and looking up old prices is a check on the way. An empty search now says so and she prices it anyway, on the same go.
If everything one of them tried came back empty-handed, the turn left no trace and you were told they had not understood you — about a message they had understood perfectly and acted on. They say what they looked for and did not find instead.
Drizzy could hand the same thing over three or four times in a single reply. You read it three times, the second and third came back with nothing because there was nothing new in them, and each one took its own few seconds. One hand over each, per answer.
Only the files attached to the message you were sending had ever been shown to them, so a plan sent at the top of a conversation was invisible by the second message — they were answering questions about it from a description one of them wrote a turn earlier. A drawing stays in the room now for the rest of the conversation.
"No rate on file, so I can’t price it without guessing." Guessing is what she is for — a draft is a proposal you change, not something anybody can send. Most work is work you have not quoted before, so she puts her own number on every line, says which ones are estimates, and you correct the ones she got wrong.
Ask to quote a bathroom and a job went on the board called "Master bath quote". A job holds no lines and no prices, so there was nothing to open, nothing to check and no way to put a price on it. A quote is work that might happen and a job is work that is happening, and asking for one now gets you the right one.
Putting a job on offered the job, but filing a drawing on it or writing a note about it offered nothing — so half the answers in a conversation about one quote were sentences with nowhere to go. Anything that touches a job or a quote can now be opened from the answer.
She would guess at a price, write it into a draft, then look up what you had charged before — and find the guess she made thirty seconds earlier, still with the word guess in it, and treat it as history. Drafts are proposals nobody has agreed to. They are out of that lookup now, and it comes back as one line per thing instead of one per time it has ever been charged.
Send a plan without saying which job, and the nearest thing on the board got picked because it sounded like the same kind of work. Then that job’s name went into the answer, the conversation got named after it, and everybody spent the rest of the morning talking about the wrong job. Nothing gets filed against a guess now, and a conversation cannot be named after a place you never said.
Penny was reading every line of the draft out in the chat and stopping to ask for one missing rate before writing anything at all. She writes it, tells you the total, what she guessed at and the one number she needs — and if the drawing has a bath and a shower on it and you only mentioned the toilet, she asks whether they are in rather than quietly leaving them out.
Type @ and everybody you can name comes up: Drizzy, Gus, Penny and Sam, and everybody on your crew under them. Name one of the four at the start of a message and they answer it, whoever’s chat you are in — talking to Drizzy about a drawing and wanting Penny to price it is one word now. Name somebody on your crew and it is taken as exactly that person, not the closest guess.
Ten jobs deep, the photo of the wall before it was sheeted was inside whichever job it was taken on, and finding it meant opening them one at a time. The project page has the lot now, newest first, from every job on it.
Open a picture in Sam’s and it says which job and which project it is on, with a way to change either and a way straight through to the job. They are two facts about one picture, so putting it on a project no longer knocks it off its job. And a drawing you drop in chat now goes onto the job it becomes, not just the quote.
Hand over a drawing and Penny would write the lines out, put nought against the ones she had no rate for, and save it as a draft anyway. A quote totalling zero is worse than no quote, because it looks like it was done. Now she stops and asks what you charge for that one — and the answer is a rate she has for every job after it.
The same bathroom drawing is a tile job, a fit off, or a full changeover, and the difference is the whole quote. Penny was reading the scope off the page and pricing what she saw. She asks now, in one line, before she prices anything.
Ask for a job to be priced and he would come back wanting materials costs and hours from you first, which is asking you to do the thing you just asked for. Penny can work out an estimate herself and say what she guessed at. He hands it straight over now.
A job goes on and the answer offers the job. Penny writes a draft off your drawing and the answer offers the draft, opened with the lines in it. Being handed a price and told to check it, with nothing to press, was asking you to go back through the menu to find what you had just been talking about.
Every message with an image on it failed, from the moment they could see until about twenty minutes later. One helper was written inside another function instead of beside it, which is fine right up until it runs. Sorry — that was the first thing anybody would have tried.
It showed as the file name, which for a screenshot is a date and a time and nothing about what is on it. The box already showed a thumbnail before you sent it and the conversation dropped it the moment you did, so scrolling back meant opening whatever job it landed on. Tap it for the full size.
Send a drawing, ask Penny to price it, and the drawing stays on the quote — shown on it, under "Worked out from". Six weeks later, when a customer queries a number, the thing it was measured off is on the same screen as the number. It stays on the job as well; it is the same picture and it belongs to both.
She reads what is on it, says the lengths and counts she got off it so you can catch a misread before it is a price, looks up what you charged for the same work before, and writes it up. "You did the Vella bathroom at fourteen a metre in June" — your numbers, not a guess from nowhere, and she says plainly where she had nothing to go on. It lands as a draft. No customer link, nothing that can be sent, every line yours to change. What she still will not do is invent what money has already done: what came in, what a job made, what is owed. Those get looked up, every time.
Drawings, a shot of a switchboard, damage on a wall, a scribble on the back of an invoice. Send it with a message and ask about it. Until now a picture was filed without being looked at — it was told a file had arrived, never shown the file, and asking what was on it could not work. It still puts it on the job; it just reads it first.
How a job is usually done, what a fitting is for, what tends to go wrong, what to check before you start — ask and you get an answer, said as an opinion rather than a fact. What has not changed, and will not: anything about your business is looked up. Who is on what, what a day looks like, what a job made. The trade is something they know. Your business is something they check.
"Move one across", on the project itself. Filing has always worked from the job — open it and pick the project — which is right when you are looking at the job. Sitting on the project and realising last Tuesday belongs to it, the only way was to go and find it. It offers the jobs that are not on a project already, since taking one off another project is a different decision and belongs on the job.
The job card had always let you file one and the form never asked, so the third bathroom job of the week meant making it, finding it again, opening it and filing it. The form asks now, and remembers which project for the next one — only if you have projects, since a picker with one option is a question with one answer.
The Projects section only appeared once there was a project in it — and the only way to start a project was the plus on that section. So there was no way to make your first one, and the whole thing looked like it had been taken out. It is always there now, and when it is empty it says what a project is for and offers to start one. Nothing was removed; it was unreachable.
Press the microphone and the line you type in turns into what it is hearing — a trail that rises when you speak and flattens when you stop, so you can see it is listening without being told. A cross throws it away, a tick writes it down, and that is all there is. There used to be a red square to stop, a Done talking button above it and a Scrap it beside that, which is three things to read on the one feature meant to save you reading anything.
It used to record the lot, then think about it, so a long sentence was a blank box while you talked and then everything at once afterwards. It writes down each bit at the pause after it, so the words turn up while you are still going and the wait at the end is only the last sentence rather than all of them. It waits for a proper pause before breaking, and each bit is told what you already said, so a sentence that carries over a breath still comes out as one sentence.
Talking instead of typing is the thing this does that nothing else in the trade software market does, and it was a small grey square next to a bigger, darker send button — so the one genuinely different thing on the screen was the quietest thing on it. It is round, bigger than send, and it draws a ring around itself a few times the first time you see it, then never again once you have used it. While it writes down what you said the bars keep moving, because a screen that goes still reads as one that has stopped.
For about twenty minutes this afternoon. One line of setup was written a few lines lower down the file than it can be, which is invisible until the screen is drawn a second time — and only somebody logged in ever gets a second time. Signing up and the website were unaffected, which is why it took being told. There is now a check that refuses to let it be written that way again.
Pressing it while already in an empty conversation with somebody made another one, then another, each identical to the last and none of them kept until you say something — so it looked like the button did nothing. There is nothing to make when you are already in one, so it puts the cursor in the box instead, which is what you were about to do anyway. On a phone it does not, because throwing the keyboard up over half the screen is a worse answer than none.
It was a row called Sorted, down in the left menu among the agents, with "and what needs you" underneath — which led with the wrong half, since the reason to open it is usually that something is waiting. It is a bell at the top right with the number on it. The second list inside is "Done" rather than "Sorted without you", because some of it you did.
Thirteen bits of the app asked for colours the app had never been told about, so those lines quietly took the colour of whatever they sat in instead. Captions and hints that were meant to sit back were rendering as ordinary text. They are the colour they were meant to be now.
On both halves of the Notifications screen, and it is the whole row rather than a word at the end of it. A line saying an address went on is words without the thing they are about, and remembering which job "the address is on it now" meant was left to you.
The overnight check put a row on the waiting half for each job, with the crew to pick from — and then wrote the same thing again as a note saying one job is on tomorrow with nobody on them. On the half for things nobody has to do anything about, right next to the one that needed doing. The note is gone; the row that can actually solve it stays.
When Drizzy hands something to Penny or Sam, the exchange is meant to be written into their conversation as well, so opening Penny next week shows what she was asked and what she did. It was being written into nothing — no error, no complaint, and the message never seen again. Three other things were doing the same: the overnight note about tomorrow having nobody on a job, a quote coming back from a customer, and Sam noting files. Everything that had been lost has been put back where it belonged.
A job that went on without a street number showed up under Needs you as the question and a button saying Handled — which offered to dismiss it rather than answer it, after which you still had to go and find the job. There is a box now, and it starts with what is already on the job, so "saratoga ave" becomes "12 saratoga ave" by typing two characters. Saving it puts the address on the job and clears the row. The way past without answering is still there and says "Leave it", which is what it does.
Only your own messages counted as activity, so a conversation where Gus had read a job back, or the crew had answered a text, still showed as last used whenever you had typed in it. The list is ordered by that, so a conversation full of the morning’s news sat below one nobody had touched since breakfast, and a question from Gus about a missing street number was three clicks down. Anything anybody says in a conversation counts now.
A job going on, and anything changing on one, now shows on Sorted as well as in the conversation. Which half depends on whether it is waiting on you: a job with no street number on it needs you, a job that went on complete or an address you corrected is just something that happened. The conversation keeps the message, because that is where you answer him — this is so you can see it without opening anything.
Inside the job, under everything else. Not on the run, where a second date next to the day it is booked for is read as the day it is booked for. Open a job and it tells you how long it has been sitting there.
He has always said when a job went on without one, or with one that has no street number in it. Nothing could act on your answer, though — the best it could do was write the number down as a note, which leaves the job still wrong and the question still open. Telling him the street number now puts it on the job. Same for a customer name or what the job is called.
Job read-backs, crew replies and changes went into whichever conversation you had used last, so one you had started about a particular thing slowly filled up with everything else that happened that afternoon. They go to "Jobs and the crew" now, and a conversation you started stays about the thing you started it for.
First thing, morning, after lunch, anytime — one press each on the job form, because a time on a trade job is usually a shape of a day rather than a number. The box is still there and still takes a real time, since a booking is a booking and "before the school run" is an answer no list is going to have.
Editing a job on the board used to be silent. Whoever did it knew, and nobody else did — an address corrected at seven and somebody swapped off a job at eight both landed as nothing, and the person reading the run found out by turning up. Gus now says what moved, as it moves, and only what moved: who is on it, what day, where, in that order, because that is the order it costs somebody their morning. A change caught at the time is a text that goes out right.
The block introducing Drizzy — his face, his name and a line about telling him what is going on — was showing at the top of a new conversation with any of them, so pressing the plus beside Penny looked like being put back in Drizzy’s conversation. The box underneath said Penny the whole time, which made it more confusing rather than less. His introduction stays in his own conversation now.
Both the line saying you put a job on and Gus reading it back now offer to show you it. Press either and the job opens over the conversation, so you can check what went on without leaving what you were reading or going to find it on the board.
Separate conversations are the point — one endless thread is impossible to find anything in a month later — and the plus is how you start one. Where the list is empty it now says "Ask Gus something" rather than "Nothing yet", which told you what you could already see. And it does not take you to a form: you can put a job on by saying so, which is the thing worth finding out first.
Opening one from the plus beside them showed their conversation with Drizzy’s name over it, and a line underneath telling you to tell Drizzy what was going on. The heading now says whoever you are actually talking to.
Putting a job on is the first thing you do, and Gus reading it back was what created the conversation it went into. So the first time you opened Drizzy you found one message, from Gus, about a job, and it read like you had clicked the wrong one. Gus belongs in there — he is the one who picks the job up. What was missing was Drizzy. He opens his own room now, so what Gus says underneath reads as the thing that was just described to you. Rooms already sitting like that have had the same line added at the top.
Switching from Gus back to Drizzy showed Drizzy’s name with "jobs and the crew" under it and a message from Gus below that, which reads like the tab did not change. Nothing was actually wrong underneath — Gus reads a new job back into the main conversation on purpose — but a conversation nobody has named was borrowing that name for the line at the top of the screen, and jobs are his. Conversations you have named still show their name there. The ones you have not now say what the agent is for.
It asked you to put a job on without saying why, so the only way to find out was to do it. It now says the next bit out loud: Gus texts whoever is on it, and what they text back moves the job. The offer to watch that happen on your own job arrives a minute later, so it reads as the thing you were just told about rather than as a notice turning up on its own.
On the first screen, and it is not a sales call or an account manager. Whoever answers is whoever wrote the thing you are looking at. Fifteen minutes because anybody running a trade who has half an hour spare is not busy enough to need this.
Once, and only after you have watched your crew answer a text and the board move — before that it is a survey from something that has not done anything for you yet. One question: what is the biggest admin headache in the business right now. You answer it in the same box you say everything else in, so it reaches Drizzy as a thing he can act on rather than a form that gets read next week.
It had grown to fifty five entries, which on a phone was about thirty screens of scrolling to find out whether anything happened last week. Every day but the most recent is folded now, so what you land on is six dates and how many changes each one holds, and you open the one you care about. Nothing was removed and nothing moved to another page — it is all still here, one tap down.
The last one of these covered the front page, and the front page is one page out of eighty eight. Everywhere else — what it costs, the articles, this list, the pages written for your trade in your city — still had a footer whose links were twenty pixels tall and icons you had to aim at. On a phone that footer is the only thing joining the site together, so they were the most used links on the page and the hardest to press. All of them are a thumb now, and the footer looks exactly as it did: the links grew into the gaps that were already between them.
Forty four things on the front page were smaller than a fingertip. That is not the sort of thing anybody reports — you aim again, or you get the one next to it, or you put the phone down and mean to come back. All of them are a thumb wide now, with room around them so the wrong one is not touching the right one. The page got shorter in the same pass, from twelve screens to eight, and nothing was taken out to do it — it had been a desktop page folded up small, and now it is laid out for the thing you are holding.
It used to be a desktop page folded up small, so the first thing you met on a phone was the top third of something bigger and a scrollbar telling you there were twelve screens under it. Now the first screen is exactly one screen: the faces, what this is, what it costs to try, and the button pinned where your thumb already is. Whoever wants the rest taps Learn more and lands on the crew mid-conversation, which is the part worth reading anyway. Nothing was taken off the page and there is no second page to keep in step — it is the same page, laid out for the thing you are holding.
Three emails during the first week, and which one you get depends on where you actually are. Nothing on the board yet, and it is about putting a job on. Jobs but nobody to send them to, and it is about names and mobiles. Both of those sorted but the two have never met, and it is about putting somebody on a job so you can watch the thing work. If you are getting on with it you hear none of them, because being told to add your crew on the morning you added six is a product that has not looked. Each one goes once, and every one of them can be replied to.
It rounded down, so eleven hours left and thirty five hours left both said "1 day left". The first of those is nearly wrong, on the day it matters most. It reads days and hours now, drops to hours alone on the last day, and to minutes right at the end rather than sitting on zero while you can still use it.
When one of your crew answers a job by text and the board moves without you, or a quote you priced reaches a customer, Drizzy says what that costs a month. Once. Never again, never during the run-through where you are playing both parts, and never if you have already put a card in. There is no wall anywhere and nothing stops working: you have seven days either way. It seemed more honest to ask at the point you can see what you would be paying for than to interrupt you before then.
Three lines above the footer now: your card never reaches us because Revolut takes the payment directly, we do not sell your data to anybody, and if you ask us to delete it we will, apart from the payment records the tax office requires. All three were already on the privacy page. They are just no longer three clicks away from the point where you are deciding whether to hand over your customer list.
Both are open to anybody on the internet, and the contact one goes straight to a person rather than a queue. There is a Cloudflare check on each now, which for almost everybody is a box that ticks itself while you are still typing. If it ever fails to load, it lets you through rather than standing in your way: being unable to sign up is a worse problem than the one it is there to solve.
The code that stood in front of the product is gone. Before it came off, every path that involves money or a phone was run for real on a live account: a job texted to a real mobile and answered, a signup done cold by somebody who had not seen it, and a subscription taken out and cancelled on a real card. Nine things were wrong and all nine are fixed. None of them had shown up in seven hundred automated tests, which is roughly the point.
Signing up used to take you from grey and black type on paper to black bubble wrap with the logo in red neon, which you rubbed away with your finger to get in. Nice on its own and jarring one click after deciding to trust somebody. It says the same sentence in the same voice now, and adds the faces, since they are the thing you are being handed.
If you cancelled while the free days were still running, the email said you would not be charged again and then nothing at all about whether the product still worked. So you were left to guess whether you had just switched it off. It now says which day it runs to, and says it the right way round: a trial has not been paid for, so it does not pretend you paid for it. Nothing changes about what actually happens, which was always that you keep it until the time you have runs out.
A text cannot carry a photo, so there has to be a link, and that link was something you had to remember to send them. That is back to front. The person with the photos on their phone is already texting Drizzy, because that is how they got the job. Now they can just say so. "Got some photos of the meter box, how do I send them" comes back with their own link and which job it will land on, and you get told it happened rather than asked to do something about it. Same link every time, so they can save it. The button on their page still works if you would rather push it to somebody who has not asked.
Signing up used to drop you on an empty board with a crew and nothing for any of them to do. There is one screen now, with one thing on it, at the point you are most willing to do one more: put a job on. It knows your trade because you just said. Skipping it is a proper link and not a greyed afterthought, and the ask comes back as the first thing on your board either way. Your first job also gets different words back, because on your first one you do not yet know that the point of the board is a text landing on somebody phone. After that you do, so we stop saying it.
You could get all the way through signing up without one, and then be told on your first screen to go and add it. That is the wrong way round: everything past the chat window runs on text, so an account we cannot text is a chat window and none of the rest. It is asked for once, at signup, and checked for being a mobile that can actually take a text rather than merely for being filled in. A landline passes any is-it-there check and then fails silently later, at the moment a job was meant to reach somebody.
Your own lived at the bottom of Settings under your ABN. One of your crew lived on their own page, which nothing suggested you could open. So the one screen showing who is reachable was the one screen where you could not fix whether they are. Every number on your team is editable where you are already looking at it. A number heard over a compressor is the thing most worth correcting on the spot, because get it wrong and they simply never hear from you.
It had a business name, a first name and a phone number sitting in the boxes as examples, and a placeholder that looks like an answer gets read as one. Worse, the trade was set to Plumber before you touched it, so a tiler who left it alone became a plumber, and the trade decides which examples Drizzy offers you all week. It asks now instead of guessing, and will not go until you have picked.
A job used to arrive with the date on the first line, which is the line the phone shows on the lock screen. Nobody reads a text standing on a roof, they glance at it, and a job from a number they have not saved is a job from a stranger. The first line is now your business name, so the notification itself says who is asking. Paid for by taking your name back out of the sign-off at the bottom, which was saying it twice on something charged by the character.
You are on the crew already, so you can text Drizzy from a roof. Adding yourself again as one of the people who goes to jobs is an ordinary thing to do, and it put your number on two rows of one business. We read that as the same person being on two different crews, refused to guess which, and dropped every text you sent without a word back. It is one person on one crew and it is treated that way now. Being on two different businesses is still refused, because guessing there would put one boss job on another boss board.
When you ask to see what your crew gets, it picks a job off your board to send you. It was picking the oldest one with a date on it, so the text could open with "Yesterday 7am start", which is true and reads like something that has lost track of the week. It now picks the soonest job still to come, and only reaches back to one that has been if there is nothing ahead. Once it has gone, it also tells you what to text back, since nothing on the phone says a reply is wanted.
It was sent the moment you signed up and then forgotten about. If the mail provider was having a bad morning, that was it: no queue, no second go, and nothing written down to say it had not arrived. It is recorded now, the same as every other message we send, and anything that did not get through is picked up and sent again within a day or so.
The summary of what Drizzy has been up to goes out partway through the trial. It was working out who was still on one from the plan alone, which stays set to trial after you subscribe, so somebody who had already put a card in was in line to be told they had three days to decide. It uses the same test as the trial warning now, and the two are held together by a test so they cannot drift apart again.
A job you typed on the run sheet used to land in silence. It appeared in a list and nothing said a word, which is a strange way for something with a crew in it to behave. Gus now says what he has got, who is on it and that he will text them, and then he actually looks at it. If there is no address he asks where it is. If the address has no number on it he says so and asks for one, which is the mistake that costs somebody their morning. If nobody is on it he asks who is going, and if it is all there he asks whether anything needs taking. One question, never a list, because a form that answers back with four things wrong is just a form with extra steps.
It used to be third, and hidden until you had added your crew, on the reasoning that a job with nobody on it cannot be sent anywhere. True, and the wrong way round for somebody who has just walked in. Work is what you already have; a list of names and mobiles is something you have to go and find. Now it is the first thing on the list and it takes you straight into the form rather than to a page with a button on it.
Seeing a job land on a phone and the board move on its own was one of the setup tasks, which made it read like another chore and meant it vanished the moment the list did. It now sits just above where you type to Drizzy, from the moment you have a job worth sending until you have watched it once. Same offer, somewhere it survives.
Most of what he does is work that stops arriving. A text you did not write, a question from one of your blokes that never got as far as you, a hazard somebody wrote down without being chased for it. None of that taps you on the shoulder, so it is easy to have a good week and not notice you had one. Partway through the trial he now sends one short email with the count of what he did, while there are still a few days left to go and try the half of it you have not touched. Numbers only, all of them checkable in the app, and nothing about how much time you saved because that would be made up. If he did nothing for you that week, he sends nothing, because a list of noughts is not a newsletter.
The part that is worth having is a job going out to somebody, them answering it in their own words, and the run changing without you doing anything. If you are on your own, or you have not put your people in yet, you never get to see it. So now you can be both ends of it once. Put a job on and Drizzy offers to text it to your own mobile, exactly as whoever was on it would get it. Answer that text however you talk, "all done", "running late", "cant get in", and watch the board move from the other screen. It is a run-through and it says so: the job goes back the way it was afterwards, so nothing you were not expecting sticks.
When you texted Drizzy from a job, or one of your crew replied and he passed the news on, that conversation was being filed in a place the app had no way of opening. You would get the reply on your phone and then find nothing about it in the app. It goes into your actual conversation with him now, where you can scroll back through it.
The first time anybody goes to a new address we ask them to have a look round and text back anything unsafe, and we keep it against the place so the next person is told. A plain "on my way now" was being kept as if it were something they had found. Replies that are only saying where somebody is are left off the address now. Anything that could actually be a hazard, including "cant get in, dog in the yard", is still written down.
City pages for architects, each one carrying something that is true there and not one border over. Sydney: the competitive design process under clause 6.21, what running one actually costs, and the ten per cent of extra height or floor space it buys. Brisbane: RiskSMART decisions in ten business days, and the catch that the application has to be lodged by a council-accredited consultant. Canberra: no council at all, with the Territory Planning Authority deciding under the Planning Act 2023. Every figure on those pages is sourced to a government page and dated.
Not on the tools, and running the same shape of business as everybody else here: a small team, work that arrives as a name and a date, money that goes out in stages and comes back late, and a day spent talking to the trades below them. Both are now pickable at signup and the product knows their words. A DA, an RFI, contract admin for one; a site measure, a finishes schedule, lead times for the other.
The three suggestions Drizzy offers when you first open him came from a list covering twelve trades. There are thirty seven, so a tiler, a cabinetmaker or a scaffolder was shown a plumber hot water swap on the screen where you work out what this is. Now every trade gets its own, in its own words, and one of the three is always a question, because asking is the part nothing else does and it was never once shown.
Tell Drizzy to remember something and he already did, and already told you what he saved. Now there is a link on that reply straight to your knowledge base, so you can see it landed rather than take his word for it. Worth doing once; after that you stop checking.
Until today the only emails this product sent were your login link and the quotes and invoices you send customers. Nothing about your own account, no welcome, no receipt, and no warning before a free trial turned into a bill. Now there are five: a hello when you sign up, a heads up two days before the trial ends with the date and the amount and how to cancel, a note if your card is declined that opens by telling you nothing has switched off, and a plain confirmation when you cancel. Deliberately not a receipt for every payment, your tax invoices are on the Billing screen whenever you want them, and nobody needs another email to file. Short ones. Reply to any of them and a person reads it.
The number you give us so Drizzy can text you was being printed on every quote and invoice that went out to your customers. Those are two different things and this app says so on the screen where you type them in, an office line is what a customer rings, the mobile is how we reach you, and then it used the wrong one. Quotes and invoices now show your business phone, and fall back to your mobile only if you have not set one. Put a business phone in and your mobile comes off them.
While you are on the free trial you can have five people on the team. Going past that now asks you to move to Business Pro first, and it says so when you press the plus rather than after you have typed somebody in. Everyone you already have stays exactly where they are, this only stops new ones being added. Worth being upfront that this is a limit that did not exist yesterday.
Until today an error on our side was a line in a log nobody reads unless they already suspect a problem, so the first person to know was whoever it happened to. Faults now report themselves, including the ones on the schedule that nothing is waiting on. We also count which screens get used and where people get stuck, so the parts that do not work can be found without waiting for somebody to complain. That is done by PostHog, in the European Union, and the privacy policy names them along with what they are and are not sent, not your customers, not your quotes, not your photos, and nothing your crew texts.
Safety could only fill up after somebody was sent to a new address and texted back what they found there. Useful, and it left every other business looking at an empty page. Now you can put in what your crew hold. White Card, high risk work licence, trade licence, first aid, and the rest, and Gus tells you sixty days before one lapses, rather than the morning somebody is turned away at a gate. Put the number and the date in once. Tickets that do not expire, the White Card among them, are never nagged about.
Until now the trial ended and there was nothing you could do about it except email us. Business Pro is $199 a month, GST included, for you and five people, and $39 a month for anyone past that. Your card goes on Revolut’s own page rather than ours, so we never see it. Nothing is charged during the seven days, and cancelling leaves everything working until the month you have paid for runs out.
Billing now lists what has actually been charged, the date, what it was for and whether it went through, and every line has an invoice on it. A proper tax invoice, with our ABN and the GST broken out, not a receipt that says a number. If you claim the GST back on your software, this is the document that lets you.
A bricklayer opening the knowledge base was being asked where they fill gas bottles, and shown a supplier on a street we had made up. Both wrong, and the second kind of wrong matters, because whatever goes in there is what Drizzy repeats to your crew. The suggestions are now the ones your trade would actually have, bricks and mortar mix for a bricklayer, certificates and points for a sparky, and none of them names a place. You fill in the only part we could not know.
Two cards: the plan you are on, and the one you would move to. It used to be a card doing arithmetic about your team, which told you nothing you could not already see. Cancelling is still there, at the bottom, in plain words rather than sitting next to the amount you pay.
A bathroom reno, a shop fitout, six units of second fix, none of that is a day’s work, and until now every one of those jobs sat on the board on its own with nothing tying them together. Start a project and the jobs, the quote, the invoices and the photos all sit under one name. Penny works out what it was priced at, what it cost you and what it is actually making, so you can see a six week job is going backwards while there is still time to do something about it. Day to day call outs do not need one and never get one.
Nobody fills in a site audit. The first time somebody is sent to an address they now get one line on the end of their job text asking them to have a look round and text back anything unsafe. What they send is kept against the address rather than the job, so when a different bloke turns up there in November, he is told about the meter box before he gets out of the ute. There is a Safety tab in Settings showing everything found, what was done about it, and who actually answers when they are asked.
Test and tag every three months. Toolbox meeting Friday morning. Checking the first aid kits. Turn one on in Settings, or tell Drizzy about anything else and he will write it properly before it goes anywhere. Anything headed for the crew, you hear about the day before it goes out, so you can add "bring the long ladder" to that one send without changing the reminder itself.
Everything you had ever said was one thread, so last month was somewhere in the middle of it and finding it meant scrolling and hoping. You can start a new conversation now and each one names itself off what you talked about, "Hot water changeover pricing", "Benny lateness warnings". They sit under whoever you were talking to in the side menu. It also makes the answers better: they read the last few messages before replying, and now those are the ones about the thing you are asking about.
Wanting a number off Penny in the middle of sorting tomorrow’s run used to mean going somewhere else and coming back. There is a line above the box now saying who you are asking. Leave it and Drizzy takes it and passes it on; point it at Penny and Penny answers, in the same conversation, with everything already said still behind her.
The run sheet shows today and tomorrow, which is right for getting through a day and useless for working out what is coming. There is a diary beside it now: dates down the page, work hanging off them, scroll forward for what is booked and back through everything you have done. Search it for a customer, a street or what the job was, and adding a word narrows it, "hot water" finds two, "hot water patel" finds the one you meant.
Something your apprentice mentioned six months ago is only worth having if you can find it again, and nobody scrolls a year of texts. There is a search box on every crew page now. It starts on the person whose page you are on, and one press widens it to everybody, for the times you remember what was said and not who said it.
Forgetting a line was the only thing you could do to anything in the Knowledge Base, so correcting one word of a supplier’s address meant retyping the whole thing. You can now edit any of them in place, which matters most for the ones Drizzy worked out himself, those are usually nearly right, and nobody was going to retype one to fix a street name. The suggestions stay on screen as you go rather than disappearing after the first one.
All four now have somewhere to live in Settings, and they go on the quotes and invoices your customers open. The business phone is deliberately separate from your mobile: an office line, a diverted landline or the second phone that lives in the ute is what a customer rings, while your mobile stays the number Drizzy reaches you on.
The green Sent pill beside a message to your crew was being shown for every outcome except one. A text the carrier rejected, a dead number, no credit, somebody who had opted out, looked exactly like one that arrived. That is the app telling you your bloke has his job when he does not, on the very screen you would open to check. Each one now says what actually happened: Sent, Held, Refused or Failed, with the reason when you hover it. Every message also shows the time it was sent.
A job put in for the third of September was showing "Today" in its day menu on the run sheet. The list of days only knew about this week, so anything past it quietly fell back to the first option. Two jobs on a test board were sitting there insisting they were on today. They show their own day now.
It only listed days that already had work on them, and sorted them by the words rather than the dates, so "Fri 11 Sep" came before "Monday" and "last Tuesday" sat on the end looking like something still to come. Worse, a day with nothing on it did not exist, so there was no way to look at Saturday or to check that Thursday had been cleared. It runs a full week from today now, weekends included, every day with its date on it.
Tapping a job on a crew member’s bar used to take you to the run sheet and leave you to find it again. It opens the job itself now, over whatever screen you were on, and closing it puts you back where you were.
Every group in the side menu, the office, your projects, your team, now collapses, and it remembers what you folded. The agents keep their place at the top no matter how much else you have on, so the thing you reach for without looking does not move under you.
Seven days, no card. Delete him if he is useless.