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Software and costs
Admin scorecard for trades firms: how many office hours a week could AI prepare for you to check, job by job
Enter the hours a week your firm spends on enquiries, quotes, chasing and paperwork to see which jobs AI could prepare and what stays with you.
Office work in a trades firm rarely has a job title. It is done in the van between jobs, at the kitchen table after tea, or by a partner who also keeps the books. Because nobody is employed to do it, nobody has counted it, and a firm that has not counted it cannot tell whether help would be worth paying for. This scorecard does the counting. You enter the hours each office job takes in an ordinary week and it shows which of them a tool could prepare for you to check, which stay with you, and what the difference is worth.
Free tool
Admin scorecard for a trades firm: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job
Works in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this device unless you ask us to email you the result.
The jobs it asks about
Six of the eight jobs are ones where the work is mostly writing from facts you already hold. An enquiry reply asks the questions needed to price the job. A quote is built from your price list and your notes from the visit. The follow-ups go out on day 3 and day 7, which is the rhythm in our quote follow-up template. Invoice chasers carry the statutory interest and fixed fee that the late payment calculator works out. CIS statements take 20% or 30% off the labour and nothing off the materials, as the CIS deduction calculator shows. Booking confirmations repeat the date, the time window and what the customer needs to clear.
How the score is worked out
There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.
Where the line sits
Two jobs stay with a person whatever you buy. The first is the phone: most AI tools sold to trades firms answer calls, and that is a different product from one that writes quotes, so the scorecard keeps the two apart. The second is the price. A tool can lay out a quote from your rates, but what to charge for an awkward loft or a customer who has already changed the job twice is your judgement. There is also one legal point that favours drafting by rule. A quote agreed in the customer's home needs the 14-day cancellation wording, and without it the customer can cancel for up to 12 months and 14 days and owe nothing for work done. A person at nine at night forgets the wording; a template does not.
AI staff and workflows for trades and building firms. Starting with enquiry to quote.See what we would set upA worked example
With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 25.5 hours of office work a week, 17.5 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 13.1 hours a week handed over, 51% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £9,056 a year. The three largest are writing quotes (3.8 of 5 hours), replying to enquiries (3 of 4) and invoices, CIS statements and certificates (2.3 of 3). What stays with a person: answering the phone and pricing on site, 8 hours. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small trades firm; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.
The three readiness questions
The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your trades firm this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.
What to do with the result
Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.
Overlyft sets up AI assistants for trades firms built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to trades firms sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.
Short answers from this page
Can an AI tool run the office side of a trades firm?
Parts of it. Most AI tools sold to UK trades firms answer the phone. Fewer write quotes, chase invoices or keep CIS dates. Overlyft can set up an AI assistant that handles email and website enquiries, quotes and their follow-ups, invoice chasing and paperwork and does not answer calls. Our review of five tools sets out what each covers and costs.
Where this comes from: Arithmetic on the hours entered; the checking share is our stated assumption and can be changed. Rules behind what is drafted: Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, regulations 31 and 36; HMRC Construction Industry Scheme guidance; Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
