Tradesman software for sole traders who would rather be on the tools

HMRC tests qualifying income: total self-employment and property income before expenses, or turnover. It applies from 6 April 2026 over £50,000, 6 April 2027 over £30,000, and 6 April 2028 over £20,000. Each is tested on the return two tax years before; employment income, dividends and pensions do not count.

Possibly. The test is turnover, not profit. A trader turning over £60,000 and taking home £25,000 is over the first threshold, because the £60,000 is the figure being tested.

Digital records of income and expenses all year, four quarterly updates, and a year-end return replacing Self Assessment. The deadlines are 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May, one month and two days after each quarter ends. They are the same with standard or calendar update periods.

No penalty in the 2026 to 2027 tax year, HMRC has said, but the update is still due before the return. After that, each miss adds a point, with a £200 penalty at four points and £200 per later miss. Points under the threshold expire 24 months after their deadline.

My Job Goblin keeps income and expense records organised digitally all year, so that when Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to you the quarterly updates and the final return are straightforward. HMRC publishes its own list of recognised MTD software. Check that list for current recognition status before relying on any product, including this one, for MTD filing.

My Job Goblin handles the day-to-day record keeping. For the filing itself, the year-end summary plus your accountant is a sensible combination. The numbers arrive organised rather than as a pile of receipts.

Yes, and that is the half most job software leaves out. It records the quote and the invoice like anything else, then does the arithmetic on top: revenue per available working day, margin per job against materials and subcontractor cost, quote win rate with the range it could really be, and how long customers take to pay weighted by the size of the invoice. Turnover on its own hides all four. No figure is shown on a sample too small to support it. Where there is too little history the card renders nothing, rather than a number with a caveat underneath it.

It is what a day of your available time earned, rather than what you charged for a day you worked. Take the money received in a period and divide it by the working days that period held, from the working pattern you set. Hotels have measured this for decades as revenue per available room, because a room nobody booked is revenue that can never be recovered. A Tuesday you did not fill is exactly the same thing. My Job Goblin decomposes it the way a hotel does, into your effective day rate multiplied by your utilisation, so you can see which of the two moved.

No, and that is deliberate. There is no benchmarking against other businesses. Trades publish no prices, day rates or availability in any machine-readable form, so a peer comparison in this market is either a very small sample or an invented one. Every figure compares a trader against their own history. A benchmark against a handful of unrepresentative businesses, or against a number nobody can source, is worse than no benchmark at all.

The free tier runs 3 quotes and 3 invoices a month, end to end: build the quote, send the PDF, let the customer approve it in the portal, and invoice it. The AI pricing and description tools, expense tracking, certificate filing and reports are Pro. The HMRC year-end tools are Pro + Tax. The cap is small on purpose. A free tier big enough to run a trade on has to be paid for by the traders who do pay, and they are one-person businesses on a flat £29 a month with no per-seat fee. What the free tier proves is the whole loop rather than the volume: build the quote, send it, let the customer approve it, invoice it.