IT for trades businesses and the construction sector

In the trades, half the business does not work where the IT sits. Two or three people handle quotes, invoices and appointments in the office; outside there are fitters with a phone, a tablet and a connection that on some days simply is not there. The technology has to serve both sides — in a way that does not have anyone retyping everything in the evening.

What is different from an office

• Devices get dropped, get wet and sit in a van all summer. A device that cannot survive a building site is not a saving but a recurring cost.
• There are places with no signal. Time tracking, measurements and photos have to work offline and sync later by themselves — otherwise people go back to paper.
• In radio terms a workshop is the opposite of an office: metal racking, machines, thick walls, roller doors. Two extra repeaters usually make it worse, not better.
• Photo documentation is evidence. A picture of the shell decides a variation claim in a dispute — and for that it has to be findable and dated.
• Staff change and work seasonally. Creating an account must take ten minutes, disabling one likewise — and both must be doable by someone other than the owner.

What we take on in a trades business

• Office workstations and servers: setup, updates, user accounts, printers, backups
• Mobile devices: setup, management, remote wipe on loss, separation of private and business use
• Network and Wi-Fi for workshop, store and hall — measured rather than guessed
• Connecting trade software, time tracking and measurement tools to the office environment
• An orderly filing structure for photo records, measurements and site documents
• A joiner and leaver process the office can run without us

Trade software and the link to the office

Whether you work with an industry package for measurement and costing or with spreadsheets: the interesting point is where data from outside reaches the office. That is exactly where duplicate entry appears — hours on slips of paper, photos on private phones, delivery notes in the glove box. We look at those handovers and close them before discussing new software. Frequently no software is missing, only a working connection and a clear filing structure.

The most expensive failure in the trades

Not the server outage but the quiet data loss: a phone goes missing, and a week of photos with it. A fitter leaves, and nobody can get into his account. A laptop is stolen, unencrypted, with customer addresses on it. These are not IT disasters but everyday events — and all three can be solved beforehand: device management, encryption, a leaver process. The €490 IT security check walks through exactly these points and ends with a sorted list.

What it costs

Ongoing support costs from €29 per workstation and month, a managed server from €89 per month, monitored backups from €49 per month. Setting up network and Wi-Fi for a workshop or hall starts at €890; a newly configured workstation costs €190. Ad-hoc help is billed at €95 per hour, on-site work at €120 per hour plus travel. Guide prices, net plus VAT.

Guide prices, net plus VAT. As of: September 2026 · All prices at a glance

Frequently asked questions