The kitchen job is at week three of a quoted two. The tiler cannot start until the plasterer finishes, the plasterer is waiting on a delivery, and the customer has just asked — reasonably — what the extra socket and the moved radiator are going to cost, because neither was in the original quote and both were agreed verbally on site. You know roughly what has been spent. Roughly is not a number you can put in an email.
ProTakip is job and project management software for renovation, repair and fit-out businesses. It runs on Android and iOS, works offline, and the first three months are free. It is built for firms running several jobs at once with a small crew and no office behind them.
Every job on one board, from quote to handover
Each project in ProTakip is a job with a customer, an address, an agreed scope and a price, moving through four stages: to start, in progress, ready and completed. Running five jobs at once, the board tells you at a glance which are live, which are waiting, and which are finished but not yet paid.
Larger projects break into stages that are each their own job — strip out, first fix, plaster, second fix, snagging — so progress is visible rather than asserted. That structure is also what lets you tie stage payments to something the customer can see, which is the single most useful thing you can do for your cash flow.
Because the crew opens and closes work on their phones, start and finish times come from site rather than from the plan. Comparing the two across a few jobs is how you find out which parts of your quoting are consistently optimistic.
Estimating, and the variations that eat the margin
Renovation work is not lost on the original quote. It is lost on the twelve small things agreed on site that nobody wrote down. An extra socket, a moved radiator, a different tile, two more days of skip hire.
ProTakip lets you build estimates from your own price list — per square metre, per unit, hourly, or fixed for a defined package — with extra services defined once and added to a job when they come up. Adding the variation to the job at the moment it is agreed, in front of the customer, changes the conversation completely: it becomes a price they saw, not a surprise at the end.
Photographs and notes on the job carry the rest: what was behind the wall, what condition the floor was in before you started, what the customer asked for and when. Our guide to building a price list covers structuring rates so that variations are quick to price rather than a negotiation each time.
Materials, deliveries and the site
Materials and expenses go against the job as they are bought, which is the only way to know what a project actually cost you rather than what you assumed. The till record tracks income and expenses by period and by staff member, so materials spend on one job stops disappearing into a general pile of receipts.
Job receipts and site paperwork print to a Bluetooth thermal printer, useful when you want a customer to sign off a stage or acknowledge a variation on the day. Paper handed over on site is worth ten emails afterwards.
Crew, subcontractors and who is on which site
Assign work to a person and a vehicle so you know who is where without a round of phone calls. Staff and subcontractors join with an invitation code and get only the permissions you allow — a tiler sees the job he is on, not your margins or your other customers.
Push-to-talk and in-app messaging replace the twenty daily calls between sites and merchants. Everything works offline and syncs later, which matters on a strip-out with no power and thick walls. Where jobs are spread across a region, grouping by area and planning the day geographically saves real time; our scheduling and route planning guide covers the trade-offs.
Keeping the customer calm
Customers living through a renovation are anxious, and anxious customers ring. Most of those calls are asking for information you could have sent. Automatic WhatsApp messages on stage changes, using your own templates, deal with the routine ones — starting Monday, first fix complete, back Thursday for snagging.
Send a photograph at the end of a stage and you have effectively removed the weekly progress call. Our customer notifications guide covers pitching the frequency so it reassures rather than irritates.
On Android, ProTakip shows who is calling before you answer, with their job and outstanding balance on screen, offline. On a site with no data that is the difference between answering confidently and asking who is speaking — see the caller ID guide.
Stage payments and what is still owed
Renovation businesses fail on cash flow far more often than on workmanship. ProTakip records the agreed price, each payment received and the balance outstanding on every job, with the running balance on the customer card and a list of everyone who owes money, oldest first.
Tying payments to completed stages, and having the record to show which stages are done, is what makes those conversations short. Our payment collection and balance tracking guide covers the routine. ProTakip is not accounting software and does not file anything on your behalf — it keeps the trading record so you always know what a job has taken in and what it still owes you.
Snagging and the last ten per cent
The final stretch is where reputations are made and final payments stall. Keeping snagging as its own stage with a written list — item, room, who is fixing it, when — means the job closes properly instead of drifting for a month.
It also means the finished job stays on record. When the same customer calls two years later about a different room, the history, photographs and prices are all still there, which makes the second job much easier to win.
Getting started
Existing customers and job history come across from Excel or another program — see the data migration guide — and the nine criteria we use for judging job management software apply to trades work unchanged. Firms doing their own first and second fix run electrical and plumbing jobs in the same account, heating and air conditioning work sits under HVAC service software, and post-build cleans can be handled with home and office cleaning software.
Frequently asked questions
Can I split a big project into stages?
Yes. Each stage — strip out, first fix, plaster, second fix, snagging — can be its own job under the same customer, so progress is visible and stage payments can be tied to work the customer can actually see rather than to a date.
How do I keep track of variations agreed on site?
Add the extra to the job at the moment it is agreed, priced from your own list, with a note and a photograph if useful. The customer sees the price on the day instead of finding it in the final total, which removes most end-of-job disputes.
Can subcontractors use it without seeing my figures?
Yes. Subcontractors and staff join by invitation code with permissions you set. They can be limited to the jobs assigned to them and the details needed to do the work, with no access to your pricing, margins or other customers.
Can I track materials and expenses per job?
Yes. Materials and expenses are recorded against the job as they are spent, and the till record filters income and expenses by period and by staff member, so you can see what a project actually cost rather than estimating afterwards.
Does it work on site with no internet?
Yes. Jobs, notes, photographs and payments all work offline and sync when the connection returns. Caller ID on Android is offline by design, so an incoming call is still identified on a site with no data.