YourTradebase vs Trades Panel vs HiveSuite (2026)

A client rings on a Tuesday wanting a hallway, stairs and landing repainted before a house sale completes in ten days. You need to be in front of them with a proper quote within twenty-four hours or they'll ring the next name on their list. The tool you use to build that quote decides whether you're pulling up a template with labour, materials and prep time already itemised in fifteen minutes, or starting from a blank note on your phone and typing it up properly once you're home.

That tool — the one that turns a site visit into a quote, a quote into a job, and a job into an invoice — is the centre of gravity for a decorating business. Get it right and every enquiry moves fast. Get it wrong and you're either under-quoting because you skipped a step, or losing jobs to the decorator who replied first.

This article compares three UK options built for or well-suited to painting and decorating: YourTradebase, Trades Panel, and HiveSuite.

What a Decorator's Quoting Tool Actually Needs to Do

Before the comparison, the requirements — and they're different from a generic job-management app built for builders or electricians.

Room-by-room, coat-by-coat itemisation. A decorating quote isn't one line for "labour" and one for "materials." It's per room, per surface, with prep time, number of coats and paint grade all affecting the price differently on the same job.

A client-facing acceptance and deposit flow. Because so many decorating enquiries are time-sensitive — a house sale, a new tenant moving in, a pre-Christmas repaint — the client needs to be able to view, query and accept a quote, and pay a deposit, without a phone call or a face-to-face second visit.

Crew scheduling with conflict alerts. Even a two or three-person outfit juggles overlapping jobs. Double-booking a painter across two sites on the same morning is a common, entirely avoidable failure that costs a day's labour and a client's trust.

Time and hours capture per job. Because decorating jobs are short and numerous, knowing exactly how many hours went into each one — not a rough end-of-week guess — is what tells you whether a job type is actually profitable or whether you've been underpricing prep-heavy Victorian properties for two years without noticing.

Xero integration for invoicing. The quote and the job should not live in a different system to your accounts.

YourTradebase: The Decorator-Built Option

YourTradebase was built with trades like decorating specifically in mind, and it shows in the quote structure. Line items break down by room and by task — prep, priming, undercoat, topcoat — with materials and labour costed separately, so a client can see exactly what a "hallway repaint" actually involves rather than a single lump sum.

Client acceptance: Quotes are sent as a link the client opens on their phone, can accept digitally, and can be prompted to pay a deposit against immediately. No printing, no signature by post.

Scheduling: Basic but functional — jobs sit on a calendar view with the assigned decorator visible. It is not built for managing many overlapping crews; a one or two-person outfit will find it sufficient, a five-crew operation will find it thin.

Xero integration: Native. Invoices generated from an accepted quote push through automatically.

Pricing: £29/month with no contract, plus £15/month per additional user. An unlimited free trial runs for 30 days before you're asked for payment details.

Weakness: No native paint-quantity calculation — you still work out litres separately and enter the total materials cost as a line item. It also doesn't handle crew clock-in/clock-out, so hours-per-job data relies on manual entry.

Trades Panel: The Free-Tier Starting Point

Trades Panel offers a genuine free plan with no card required, which makes it the lowest-risk way to move off paper or spreadsheets for a solo decorator or a two-person team just starting to formalise their admin.

Client acceptance: Professional quotes with labour, materials and prep time broken out per line, sent for client approval. Less polished than YourTradebase's client portal, but functional.

Scheduling: This is where Trades Panel is genuinely stronger — a proper scheduling view showing team availability, conflict alerts if you try to double-book a painter, and drag-and-drop reassignment if a job overruns and knocks the next one back a day.

Time capture: Location-verified clock-in and clock-out per job, so hours per job are captured automatically rather than estimated — directly useful for working out whether a job type is actually profitable once you look back over a quarter.

Xero integration: Available, though less deeply native than YourTradebase's — expect a connector-based sync rather than one-click invoice generation.

Pricing: A genuine free tier (5 jobs and 5 quotes, 5 user seats, no card required), then Business at £54.99/month (unlimited jobs and quotes, 10 user seats, invoicing and payments, 100 AI credits) and Pro at £89.99/month (20 seats, priority support, full feature access), both under a 14-day free trial.

Weakness: The free tier is genuinely limited in reporting depth, and the interface is built more for general trades than decorating specifically — you won't get the same granular room-by-room, coat-by-coat quote structure YourTradebase offers out of the box.

HiveSuite: The Option for Multiple Crews

HiveSuite is a UK-native platform covering quoting, scheduling, invoicing, crew management and a customer portal, aimed at contractors running more than one crew rather than a solo operator.

Client acceptance: Full customer portal with quote approval, job status visibility and online payment.

Scheduling: Built for managing multiple teams across multiple jobs simultaneously — this is its clearest advantage over the other two options.

Xero integration: Supported as part of the platform's broader accounting connections.

Pricing: Solo at £34.99/month (1 admin, 2 crew), Small Team at £89.99 (5 admin, 5 crew), Growing Team at £149.99 (10 and 10), Professional at £249.99 (20 admin, unlimited crew), Enterprise at £499.99 (50 admin, unlimited crew).

Weakness: Overkill and overpriced for a solo decorator or a two-person outfit. The tool earns its cost once you're coordinating three or more crews across simultaneous jobs — below that scale, you're paying for capacity you don't use.

The Decision Matrix

• Room/coat-level quote detail: YourTradebase: Strong, purpose-built; Trades Panel: Good; HiveSuite: Moderate

• Client acceptance + deposit: YourTradebase: Native portal; Trades Panel: Functional; HiveSuite: Native portal

• Crew scheduling, conflict alerts: YourTradebase: Basic; Trades Panel: Strong; HiveSuite: Strongest (multi-crew)

• Time/hours capture per job: YourTradebase: Manual; Trades Panel: Automated (clock-in); HiveSuite: Automated

• Xero integration: YourTradebase: Native; Trades Panel: Connector-based; HiveSuite: Supported

• Entry cost (solo): YourTradebase: £29/month; Trades Panel: Free; HiveSuite: £34.99/month

• Best fit: YourTradebase: Solo/two-person, decorating-specific; Trades Panel: Solo starting out, free-tier trial; HiveSuite: 3+ crews, multiple jobs at once

The Recommendation

If you're a solo decorator or a two-person team and want the quote structure built around how decorating actually gets priced, start with YourTradebase. The room-by-room, coat-by-coat itemisation and the client acceptance flow will save you more admin time per quote than the £29/month costs within your first few jobs of the month.

If you're not yet ready to pay for software at all, start with Trades Panel's free tier. The scheduling and time-capture features are genuinely strong for the price of nothing, and you can move to a paid tool once you've proven the habit of using one at all.

If you're running three or more crews across overlapping jobs, move to HiveSuite. The scheduling sophistication is built for exactly that problem, and the other two tools will start to strain once you're coordinating multiple teams in real time.

Setting Up YourTradebase for a Painting and Decorating Business

Because it's the recommended default for the largest share of readers — solo and small-team decorators — here's the setup sequence.

Account and quote template. Build one master quote template with line items for: survey/prep assessment, prep work (filling, sanding, masking), priming (where needed), undercoat, topcoat (per room, per surface), and materials. Set your day rate and materials margin once, so every new quote pulls from the same baseline rather than being rebuilt from scratch.

Deposit rule. Configure the client portal to request a deposit — commonly a third to half of the total — at the point of quote acceptance, before the job is scheduled. This is the single change that stops decorators financing materials out of their own pocket before a job even starts.

Xero connection. Link YourTradebase to Xero so that an accepted quote generates a draft invoice automatically, and the completion invoice triggers when you mark the job finished. Set your Xero bank rules to match incoming GoCardless or Stripe payments against the correct job reference.

CIS flag. If any of your work is subcontracted through a main contractor on a site job rather than invoiced directly to a homeowner, flag those jobs separately from day one — CIS deductions apply to the site work and not to your direct domestic clients, and mixing the two in your accounts creates a genuine headache at year end.

Trade account linkage. Note your Dulux Decorator Centre (or Crown/Leyland Trade) account number against your business profile so that materials receipts captured by Dext can be matched to the correct job code, giving you real job-costed material spend rather than an estimate.

What This Setup Costs

• YourTradebase (1 user): Monthly Cost: £29

• Xero Ignite: Monthly Cost: £16

• Dext: Monthly Cost: £24

• GoCardless: Monthly Cost: Pay-per-transaction (1-2%)

• Total fixed monthly: Monthly Cost: £69

Against that: if quoting, invoicing and chasing payment currently costs you even five hours a week at a conservative £25/hour opportunity cost, that's £500 a month in time — the software pays for itself several times over before it changes a single thing about how you paint.

Related guides: If you found this useful, see our guide on How to Stop Chasing Payment as a UK Painter and Decorator: Automated Invoicing, Deposits and Direct Debit (2026) and How to Automate a UK Painting and Decorating Business: The Complete Software Stack for Solo Decorators and Small Teams (2026).

Which of these three are you using now, or are you still quoting from a phone note and typing it up properly when you get home? What's your current deposit split, and does it actually cover your materials before you've spent a penny of your own money?