Your trade

DeskOps is for service businesses — the ones that go to the customer, or the customer comes to them, and get paid per job, per visit or per month. Seventy trades are recognised by name: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, landscaping and lawn care, tree service, fencing, concrete, painting, flooring, handyman, general contracting, gutters, garage doors, pressure washing, cleaning of every kind, junk removal, moving, pest control, pool service, irrigation, septic, snow removal, restoration, locksmith, solar, appliance repair, auto repair and mobile mechanics, detailing, towing, trucking, salons and barbers, pet grooming, photography, catering, tutoring, bookkeeping and tax prep, home inspection, real estate, short-term rental hosting, gyms, and more. A business that is none of these picks Other and gets everything except the trade-specific tools.

Four things follow the trade. The words: the Jobs board is named for what you call the work — appointments for a groomer, jobs for a roofer — and quotes and invoices offer the contract types your trade uses, with a lien notice only where you can actually file one. The unit: a job is measured in squares for roofing, linear feet for fencing, hours for a service call, so pricing and margin by type make sense. The categories: expense categories are ordered so the ones your trade uses most sit first, and the Business Health score judges your expense ratio against your trade's norm rather than a universal one. The tools: Des's Tools list shows the forms for your trade — two for most, eleven for fencing. Changing the industry later changes all four; nothing you recorded is touched.