Do your own admin, hire a bookkeeper, or buy software?

Short answer: they solve different problems, so the comparison only works once you separate your admin into the bits that need doing in the moment and the bits that can wait a month. Software is good at the first. A bookkeeper is good at the second. Doing it all yourself is cheapest in money and most expensive in the thing you cannot buy more of.

Split the work first

Trade admin is two jobs wearing one coat.

Capture happens as the work happens: writing the quote while you are standing in the kitchen, logging the miles, keeping the receipt, invoicing on completion, chasing what is unpaid. It is time-sensitive, low-skill and high-frequency, and the cost of doing it late is lost work and lost money.

Accounting happens afterwards: categorising, reconciling, VAT, the return. It is lower-frequency, genuinely skilled, and the cost of doing it badly is a different kind of expensive.

Almost every argument about this subject is two people comparing different halves. Once you split them, the three options sort themselves.

What each option is actually good for

Doing it yourself. Costs nothing in cash and everything in evenings. Works fine at low volume. Degrades badly as job count rises, and the first thing to slip is always capture — quotes go out late, receipts vanish — because capture competes directly with being on site.

A bookkeeper. Excellent at the accounting half and worth real money there. They can also chase invoices if you ask. What they cannot do is write your quote while you are in the customer’s hallway, and they cannot stop you losing the receipt. Bookkeepers work from what you give them, so if your capture is a mess you are paying a skilled person to tidy a shoebox.

Software. Good at capture, at repetition, and at never forgetting. Bad at judgement — it will not tell you whether a job was priced wrong or whether a customer is about to become a problem. It also has a habit of becoming an unused subscription if the capture does not happen where you actually are, which is the subject of the van-seat test.

Put plainly: software and a bookkeeper are not really competitors. Software makes the bookkeeper cheaper to employ, because tidy inputs take less of their time.

A method for comparing them

Do this with your own figures.

Step one: measure a fortnight. Keep a scrap of paper in the van. Every time you do admin, note what it was and roughly how long. Quoting, invoicing, chasing, receipts, mileage, the Sunday catch-up. Two weeks, honestly recorded.

Step two: price your hour. Not your charge-out rate. The real figure, which is what an hour of your available time is worth once you account for the work you could have been doing or the rest you needed. There is a method in what an hour of your time actually costs.

Step three: split your fortnight into capture and accounting. Use the definitions above. Total the hours in each column.

Step four: cost the three routes against those two columns. DIY is hours times your hourly figure, in both columns. A bookkeeper is their quoted fee against the accounting column, plus whatever capture time remains yours. Software is its annual cost against the capture column, plus the honest admission that you will still spend some time on it. Get the bookkeeper’s fee from a bookkeeper and the software price from the vendor’s own current pricing page — neither number is worth guessing.

Step five: add the invisible column. Late quotes you lost. Invoices that went out weeks after completion. Expenses you never claimed because the receipt died in the footwell. These are frequently larger than everything else on the page and they only improve with better capture.

What usually comes out

At low volume, DIY wins and you should stop reading. In the middle — five or more jobs a week, admin bleeding into evenings — the capture column is usually big enough that software pays for itself on the invisible column alone, before you count any hours. At the top end most people end up with both: software for capture, a human for the accounting and the judgement.

And it is genuinely fine to conclude that nothing needs changing. If your system works, leave it. Not everyone should be adopting something new.

If the capture column is the problem

GraftG is built for exactly that half: quotes, invoices, job tracking, mileage, receipts and a diary, all over WhatsApp, with no app to install. It is in beta and honest about it. There are 21 Founding Tradies places — twelve months free on the Pro plan, no card, then half price for life — and normal pricing is at graftg.co.uk/pricing.

Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.