Running your business from your phone

Between one client and the next there are four or five minutes. Too short to start anything, long enough to clear something. Most owners spend them scrolling, because the actual work lives on a desktop in the back room and the back room is not where you are standing.

The question is not whether to run your business from your phone. You already do, in a scrappy way, every time you check a message at the basin. The question is which jobs belong there and which ones get quietly worse when you do them on a small screen.

What a phone is genuinely good at

The five minute jobs. Every one of these takes under a minute and every one of them is worse if it waits until the evening.

• Seeing who is next and how long they are booked for
• Taking a payment from someone standing in front of you
• Answering a message while the answer is still in your head
• Rebooking a client before they walk out of the door
• Dropping a walk-in into a gap you can see
• Marking someone as arrived, or as a no show, at the moment it happens

The common thread is that the information you need is small and the decision is immediate. You are not weighing anything up. You are recording something that just happened, or acting on something in front of you.

Do these on the phone and the evening admin pile stops existing, which is a bigger win than it sounds. Most of what makes end of day paperwork miserable is that you are reconstructing the day from memory.

What a phone is quietly bad at

Anything with a wide table in it. A rota for six people across a fortnight. A price list overhaul. A VAT return. A bulk import. Reading a report properly rather than glancing at the headline number.

It is not that the screen cannot display them. It is that you make worse decisions when you can only see a slice at a time. You approve a rota without noticing that Thursday is thin, or you nudge four prices and miss that the fifth is now cheaper than the one below it. The mistake is invisible because the thing that would have shown it to you was off screen.

The standing up test

If the job can be finished standing up, it belongs on the phone. If you would want to sit down and make a cup of tea first, it belongs on a desktop.

It is a crude rule and it is right most of the time. Sitting down is what you do when a job needs comparing, and comparing is what small screens are bad at.

Notifications are the part everyone gets wrong

A phone that buzzes for everything trains you to ignore it, and then it buzzes for the one thing that mattered and you ignore that too.

The test for any notification is whether you would do something differently in the next hour. Not whether the information is interesting. Whether it changes what you do next.

• A new booking for tomorrow morning, yes
• A cancellation inside forty eight hours, yes, because that gap is fillable
• A cancellation three weeks out, no, it can wait for the morning
• A payment landing, almost never, unless you are chasing that specific one
• Anything with the word report in it, no

Turn the rest off. You are not missing them, you are reading them at a time you chose.

Taking the money on the phone itself

Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android turn the handset you already own into a card terminal. No reader to charge, no reader to lose, no reader to forget on a mobile job.

This changes more for some trades than others. If you work at an address that is not yours, it removes the worst part of the job, which is asking someone to find their card details while you stand in their kitchen. If you have a counter and a terminal already, it is a useful backup rather than a replacement.

Before you rely on it

Four things worth sorting on a quiet afternoon rather than on the morning you need them.

1. 1Sign in once, properly, on a device that is actually yours. A shared tablet behind the counter is not a personal device and should not be treated as one.
2. 2Set up two factor authentication and put the recovery codes somewhere that is not the phone. Codes stored on the device they unlock are not a backup.
3. 3Know what happens if you lose it. You should be able to sign that device out from somewhere else, and you should know that before it is lying in a taxi.
4. 4Check what your staff can see on their own phones. Most people give staff app access without ever looking at it from the staff side, and are surprised by what is visible.

None of this is exciting and all of it is ten minutes.

What we built

The Youzse app does the five minute jobs and deliberately does not try to be the desktop. Diary, payments, messages, clients, taking a card on the handset. The wide table work stays on a proper screen where you can see all of it.

It is free with any Youzse account, it is on Google Play now and the iPhone version is on the way. If you want it on your phone without typing anything, open the download page on a desktop and scan the code with your camera.

The habit that makes it work

Pick one job and move only that job to the phone for a fortnight. Rebooking is the usual best first choice, because it happens while the client is still standing there and it is the one most often lost to the evening pile.

Once that is automatic, add the next one. Trying to move everything at once means the first awkward moment sends you back to the desktop for all of it, and the habit never forms.