Since the arrival of COVID-19 our team has been dedicated to understanding its impact on tradespeople and trade businesses. We’ve spent a lot of time speaking with our customers, as well as industry experts, to understand what new challenges exist and what can be done to support trade businesses in the future.

With new health & safety protocols being developed and implemented in many countries, the pressure is now on trade business owners to ensure a safe working environment while in many cases also building their cash flow back up.

To help, we’ve released a range of new features to make new health & safety protocols as painless as possible and to help you to speed up your cash flow.

Here’s the rundown of what you need to know.

Sorting and staying on top of your schedule

It’s a given our daily routines have been impacted the last 2 months. Job planning and scheduling is more volatile than ever before. To assist you with this, we’ve built a helpful notification feature so you can quickly handle any scheduling disruptions now, and in the future.

With our updated notifications, you’ll be able to keep your customers in the loop with any relevant adjustments you make to your schedule. For example, when booking an appointment into Tradify you now have the ability to send an email to your customer confirming the appointment time and any health & safety measures they might need to be aware of - like your PPE and hand washing practices. You can also send updates to customers if their appointment is going to be delayed or cancelled - something that could be happening more frequently in these times.

On the other side of your business, we’ve added in the ability to send staff more notifications about job assignments, schedule changes and updates to job information. These alerts will appear on their Tradify app and will help you to improve your internal communications.

Contact-free customer interactions

To help with increased health & safety expectations from customers we’ve added a smart new SMS system into Tradify. This system contains numerous helpful templates so you can keep your customers notified before you arrive, during, and after you’ve finished the job. For example, you could use Tradify’s SMS feature to send your customer a live-traffic ETA as well as confirmation that you have arrived at the job. Doing this can help your client prepare the area of work ahead of time, preventing delay. You can also notify customers when the job is complete so they can return home, for example. Use our SMS templates and watch your customers' peace of mind grow.

Ensuring safety on-site

Most trade businesses around the world now have increased health and safety requirements they need to meet to ensure both staff and customers remain safe. Tradify’s latest template features will help you to plan and check off these requirements without breaking a sweat.

Make use of Tradify’s job templates by adding customised lists of health & safety protocols your staff must follow. Create and store templates that contain lists of the different requirements your business may have. Each list will be available to check off at the beginning and completion of a job. For example, you might want to make templates specific to your company’s overall health & safety plan, equipment cleaning, PPE usage and physical distancing as well as Toolbox talks and incident reporting.

You can also use the templates feature to add your updated COVID-19 Health & Safety policies to any quotes you are submitting from Tradify. Sharing detailed information around the steps you will be taking to mitigate the risk of coronavirus could be the difference between winning and losing a job. To help, we’ve pulled together a template and advice you can follow. Want to learn more about getting the most out of job templates, click here.

Contactless and quick payments

A strong cash flow is essential for all trade businesses. To help speed up your customers payments we’ve added the ability for you to receive online credit card payments through our partnership with trusted payment provider, Stripe. Create a Stripe account and offer your customers a contactless payment option. You can either pass the associated processing fees onto your customer or absorb them yourself - it’s up to you.

Finding yourself spending too much time following up on unpaid invoices? Let us do the work by using our new automated payment reminder system. This feature allows you to send customised follow-up emails to customers who are yet to pay. Set this feature up and spend more time doing the things that matter.

Contact Tracing Report

Contact Tracing are two words we’ve all become familiar with in our fight to reduce the spread of coronavirus. Contact tracing involves health authorities contacting everyone an infected case has come into close contact with while they were infectious. By notifying these people, symptoms can be monitored and the spread of the virus is reduced.

Governments across the world are now requiring adequate contact tracing measures for businesses to operate and trade businesses are not exempt. To help, we’ve launched a Contact Tracing Report in Tradify. This feature lets you produce a report from your timesheets or scheduler for a set time period. The output is a list of dates, times, names, locations and contact details unique to you or your staff. Record your daily interactions with Tradify and you’ll have a Contact Tracing Report on hand, if required. That’s one less thing for you to worry about.

Do I need to pay for these features?
No. All these new features are available to all Tradify customers at no additional charge.