It’s twenty past eight. The van’s on the drive, tea’s gone cold, and you’re on the sofa with the laptop, writing up a boiler swap quote you promised on Tuesday. Then two invoices. Then a reply to a letting agency about a CP12 date. Then a text to a customer who still hasn’t paid for the powerflush. Nobody pays you for this hour, and most nights there’s another one behind it.
The second shift
Most engineers can tell you to the quarter-hour how long a service takes. Very few can tell you how long the paperwork around it takes, because it never arrives as one job. It’s five minutes in the merchant queue answering a text, ten in a layby sending a price, forty after tea, an hour on Sunday getting straight for Monday.
That’s why guessing doesn’t work. Ask yourself how much admin you do and you’ll give a number that feels right. Write it down for a week and you’ll have a number that is right. They are rarely the same, and the gap between them is usually where the evenings went.
Run the audit for one week
Pick a normal week, not the week before Christmas. Open a note on your phone and keep it open. Every time you do something that isn’t the work itself or driving to it, add a line: what it was and roughly how many minutes. Don’t tidy, don’t change how you work. Just write it down.
On Sunday, sort the lines into these blocks. They cover nearly everything a gas or plumbing business does off the tools:
Then add up each block. Here’s what a finished one might look like. It’s an illustrative week, not a benchmark: yours will be different, and that difference is the point.
Admin never arrives as a job. It arrives as ten minutes, forty times a week, mostly after tea.
What each block is worth
Not every hour of admin is wasted. Some of it is the business. To sort the useful from the dead weight, you need one number: what an hour of your time is worth.
Take last month’s labour income (leave parts out) and divide it by the hours you actually spent on the tools. That’s your real hourly rate. Say it comes out at £55. Then nine hours of admin a week is the best part of £500 of your time, every week, before you count what it does to your evenings. Use your own figures; the sum takes two minutes.
Now look at each block and ask what it earns back:
Quotes and chasing are where money is won or lost. A quote that goes out the same day stands a better chance than one that goes out next week, and a quote that’s never followed up is work you priced for nothing. See what to do when a quote goes quiet.
Invoices and chasing payment are your cash. An invoice left on the laptop for a week is a week you’re lending the customer money. If some customers are businesses, such as letting agencies or commercial clients, the government’s late payment guidance explains when a bill is legally late and the statutory interest you can claim (8% plus the Bank of England base rate). It doesn’t apply to homeowners, so for them, clear terms on the invoice do the work.
Records are non-negotiable. HMRC says self-employed people must keep business records for at least five years after the 31 January deadline for that tax year, so you can’t drop them. You can stop doing them twice. If you write readings on a pad and type them up at night, that’s the block to attack.
Booking and reminders are mostly typing the same thing again and again. They matter, but they hold almost no judgement, which makes them the easiest to hand off.
Batch it, drop it or hand it off
Go through your week line by line and give every block one of four labels. Be honest about which is which.
Keep it. The parts that need you: pricing a job, deciding which call goes first, the technical content of any record. That’s your trade showing up in the paperwork, and nobody should take it off you.
Batch it. Supplier orders, invoices and quote follow-ups get easier when you do them all at once. Two fixed slots a week, say Tuesday and Friday at five, beat thirty interruptions. Tell regular merchants and landlords when you do orders and replies, and most will work to it.
Drop it. Every week has something that doesn’t need doing: retyping notes into a second system, sending a long quote where a short one would do, writing a fresh message when a saved one says the same thing. If you do something by hand more than three times a week, write a template and stop.
Hand it off. Whatever’s left with no judgement in it. That might be a relative doing invoices on a Thursday, a bookkeeper, your job software’s reminders, or a tool that drafts things for you to check. The test is simple: could someone else do it from a clear rule, with you checking the result? If yes, it shouldn’t be you at nine at night. Writing that rule down is half the job; see write your rules down first.
Annual service and landlord check reminders are a good place to start, because the dates are known a year ahead. See service reminders that actually get booked.
Why this matters more from April
If you’re a sole trader, the admin is about to get more regular. Under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000 in 2024–25 should already have started from 6 April 2026. The threshold drops to over £30,000 from April 2027 and over £20,000 from April 2028. Qualifying income is your turnover from self-employment and property before expenses, not your profit. That means keeping digital records and sending HMRC quarterly updates. Check where you stand on gov.uk or with your accountant.
Records kept as you go make the quarterly update a short job. A shoebox of receipts sorted every three months makes it a lost weekend, four times a year.
This is the part of the week Datify is built for. It drafts quotes and invoices from the job details it already has, sends them to you on WhatsApp to check, and can tell you who still owes you from Xero. Nothing goes to a customer until you approve it, unless you’ve set a rule that allows it. There’s a 14-day free trial, then it’s £37 a month. See how quotes and invoices work. But run the audit first. It’s free and it will tell you whether you need anything at all.
For one week, write down every bit of admin and how long it took. Sort it into quotes, invoices, chasing, booking, records, supplies and reminders. Work out your real hourly rate and price the week. Then keep the parts that need your judgement, batch the orders and invoices into two fixed slots, drop anything you retype, and hand off whatever could be done from a clear rule.
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