Tuesday's booked. Wednesday looks open. You've got three calls to return about new work, two jobs from last week that aren't fully paid, and a property in the south end of town that you said you'd get to "sometime next week" three weeks ago. The client hasn't called again yet, but they will.
Running a one-person trade operation without a structured job list means carrying the schedule in your head and hoping nothing falls through before you can write it down. It works until it doesn't.
The Four Fields You Need Before Every Job
Customer, Contact, Location, and Date scheduled are the four fields that answer the morning question: where am I going, whose job is it, and how do I reach them if I'm running late?
Contact is the phone link — it connects to the device's contact list directly. When you're twenty minutes out and need to confirm access, one tap. Location is the address, not just the suburb. Two customers in the same street with similar names is a real risk if you're working from memory.
what needs done is the job description field. It sounds obvious, but the detail level matters. "Fix leak" is not a job description. "Isolate and repair burst flexi under kitchen sink, check stopcock operation, turn off and clear water from cabinet" is a job description you can quote against, order parts for, and hand to another tradesperson without a phone call. The field is free text for a reason — some jobs are two sentences, some are ten.
The Status Field Is the Whole Point
Status is where the job list becomes a workflow tool rather than a note. The field separates scheduled from in-progress from completed — and filtered by Status, the list shows you exactly what's overdue, what's active, and what's done.
For a sole trader operating in a jurisdiction where invoicing is tied to job completion, the Status field is also the billing trigger. Filter for Status = Completed and no invoice issued, and you have your end-of-week billing queue.
Completed by captures the actual completion date — separate from Date scheduled because jobs rarely complete on the day they were booked. The gap between those two fields, across a year of records, tells you something about your booking accuracy and whether your quoted lead times match reality.
cost is the job value. Not a detailed breakdown — just the number that goes on the invoice. Combined with Status = Completed and sorted by date, it's a revenue timeline. Filtered by month, it's a rough cash flow picture.
The notes field and the Jobs to do text field handle everything that doesn't fit the structured fields: access codes, materials needed, follow-up required, what the customer said about the previous repair attempt. It's the context that makes the job make sense when you open the record three weeks after booking it.