VanlySearch for a Powered Now alternative and you get a list of about nine apps. Read them properly and you notice something. They are all the same shape. Different colours, different price, same deal. You open an app, you type the job in, the app makes the paperwork.
That might be exactly what you want. If it is, this post will tell you plainly to stay put. But before you spend a weekend moving your customer list across, it is worth asking whether the app is the bit that is costing you.
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What Powered Now gets right
Start with the concessions, because they are big ones and anybody telling you otherwise is selling.
Powered Now is British, built for British trades, and it shows in the places that are boring and expensive to get right. It carries a large library of industry forms and certificates, gas and electrical included, with renewal reminders attached. If your week involves a CP12 or an electrical installation certificate, that is not a nice extra. That is the job.
It is HMRC recognised for Making Tax Digital for VAT and for income tax, so the return goes off from the same place the invoice was raised. It handles CIS and the domestic reverse charge, which anyone working under a main contractor will tell you is a special kind of headache. If that part is new to you, we wrote up how the CIS scheme works for tradesmen separately.
Vanly does none of that. No certificates, no VAT submissions, no CIS deductions. If the certificate pad is the thing keeping you up at night, Powered Now is the better tool and we would rather say so now than have you find out in a fortnight.
But look at what that list has in common. Every item on it is paperwork about a job you have already won.
Every alternative on that list is the same shape
Go through the results properly. Nearly all of them are job management apps offered to replace a job management app. Better scheduling, cleaner interface, flatter pricing, a nicer field app. All real improvements. All the same shape.
Which means the honest question is not which app is best. It is what you were trying to fix.
If the answer is a specific broken thing, the interface lags, the sync drops between your phone and the office laptop, you have outgrown it with a third van, then swap. One of those nine will fix it and you will be happier by Friday. We put six of them side by side with prices checked against each vendor's own page in the best job management software for UK trades.
If the answer is vaguer, if it is that you are still doing admin at nine at night and the software has not made that stop, then a different app with the same shape will not touch it. You will do the migration, learn the new menus, and be back at nine at night by October.
The gap is not in the paperwork, it is before it
Here is the bit that took us a while to see.
Everything Powered Now does starts after the job exists. The quote, the certificate, the invoice, the VAT return, all of it sits downstream of a customer who already got hold of you and already said yes. It is very good software for the second half of the job.
The first half is a message on a Wednesday morning.
And look at who Powered Now is built for. Reactive trades. Gas engineers, plumbers, electricians. The trades where a boiler packs in on the coldest morning of the year and the customer messages four people at once. That job does not go to the best engineer. It goes to whoever answers.
So the trade that most needs a proper certificate library is the same trade that loses the most to a slow reply. Those are not two separate problems that happen to share a van. They are the same day. The numbers on reply speed are grim once you sit down with them, and the practical version is in how fast a tradesman should reply to an enquiry.
No job management app answers that message. It cannot. It is sat in an app on your phone, the customer is in WhatsApp, and you are under a floor with your arms in a pipe.
Powered Now and Vanly, box by box
Honest table. Powered Now wins more boxes than we do, and the ones it wins are not small.
| Powered Now | Vanly | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers the customer enquiry | You do, when you get to it | Vanly does, in about 60 seconds, day or night |
| Where the work happens | Its own app, and a desktop | The WhatsApp already open on your phone |
| Quotes | You type them in, after tea | Talk the job out in the van, approve the draft |
| Invoices | You raise them, one at a time | Drafted for you, sent as a batch on your say so |
| Chasing late payers | Reminders you set, chases you write | Written for you, sent once you approve |
| Daily summary | In the reports section, if you go and look | 7:30am, in WhatsApp, before your tea goes cold |
| What you have to learn | An app, and where everything lives in it | How to talk, which you have covered |
| Certificates and compliance forms | Large library, gas and electrical | None |
| Making Tax Digital submissions | Yes, HMRC recognised | No |
| CIS and domestic reverse charge | Yes | No |
| Accounts package sync | Available | Not today |
Read that table twice, because both halves are real.
The bottom four rows are the case for staying exactly where you are, and they are not small ones. The top seven are the case for a different shape entirely. There is no version of this where one column wins the lot, and if you find a comparison page telling you there is, it was written by whoever owns the winning column.
Who should stay exactly where they are
No spin. These are good reasons and there are four of them.
If you issue certificates regularly, stay. Gas Safe, Part P, EICR, minor works. That is the clearest line on the page.
If your VAT return and your invoicing living in one place is what stops you dreading January, stay. Losing that to gain a faster reply is a bad trade.
If you work under main contractors and CIS is a monthly reality, stay.
If you have a team of four and somebody in the office runs the schedule, stay. The app model works properly when someone is paid to be in the app. It stops working when that someone is you, at nine at night, in your socks.
And if your complaint is narrow and mechanical, the lag, the sync dropping, the interface, then almost any of the nine will fix it. That is a swap, not a rethink. This post is about the rethink.
Who should look at a different shape
You are one to three people. You have no office. Your customers already message you on WhatsApp and you already answer them there, badly, between jobs.
You have lost work you know you should have had, because you saw the message at half four and by then they had booked someone else.
Your quotes go out late. Not because you cannot price a job in your head, but because writing it up properly happens after tea, and after tea you are done in.
You have money owed that you have not chased, because chasing feels awkward and you keep meaning to. There is a script for that if you would rather do it yourself, and it works.
If that is the shape of your week, the fix is not a better app. It is not having to open one.
The enquiry gets answered while you are still on the tools. The quote comes off a voice note you record in the van with the engine running. At the end of the week it asks you once whether to send the invoices, and you reply yes. Nothing priced, sent or promised to a customer goes out until you have said so, which is the part that matters when it is your name on the van.
That is what an AI receptionist actually does, including the bits it gets wrong.
What to check before you switch anything
This holds whichever way you go, and it is worth ten minutes.
Get your data out first. Customers, outstanding invoices, job history. Export it and open the file before you cancel anything. Do this even if you are staying. A backup you have actually opened is worth four you have not.
Check the certificate question honestly. Not whether you might issue one. Whether you did, in the last three months. People carry software for a job they stopped doing two years ago.
Count the enquiries you did not reply to this week. Not the ones you lost. The ones still sat there unanswered. That number is the size of the problem the paperwork cannot see.
Check the price on their own site, not on a comparison page. Ours is £39 a month, flat, and you can read that anywhere. Everyone else's tiers move, and the aggregator pages go stale. Two clicks settles it.
Take both trials at once. Nobody tells you to do this and there is nothing stopping you. Run a fortnight with real jobs going through both. You will know by day four.
FAQ
Is there a free Powered Now alternative?
There are free tiers about, and they are usually free because they do one slice of the job, most often the invoicing. That is fine if invoicing is your only problem. It is a poor deal if you end up running three free tools and being the join between them yourself. Count the tools before you count the money.
Does Vanly do gas safety certificates or EICRs?
No. Not today, and we are not going to pretend it is coming next month. If certificates are a weekly job for you, Powered Now handles them properly and that is reason enough on its own to stay. What we can do for that trade is answer the enquiry and get the quote out, which is the part covered in AI for gas engineers.
Can I keep Powered Now and run something alongside it?
Yes, and a fair few people do exactly that for a while. Certificates and the VAT return stay where they are, the customer conversation moves. It is not the tidiest setup in the world, but tidy is not the point. Losing fewer jobs is the point.
Will my customers know they are talking to software?
They are told they are talking to your assistant, and it does not claim to be you. What they notice is a proper answer in a minute rather than a "sorry, mad day" at half six. You set the tone at signup, every message lands in your own WhatsApp as it happens, and you can step in whenever you like.
Is a WhatsApp invoice actually HMRC compliant?
The channel is not what makes an invoice valid, the contents are. As long as it carries what HMRC requires on an invoice, sequential number, your details, the customer's, net, VAT and gross, it counts. Sending the PDF over WhatsApp instead of email changes nothing about that. Filing the VAT return is a separate job, and that one Powered Now does and we do not.
How long does moving actually take?
Getting the customer list across is an afternoon at most. Trusting it is the longer bit, and it should be. Most people read every reply for the first fortnight, correct a few, then stop checking. If a tool asks you to trust it on day one with your customers, be suspicious of it.
The short version
Powered Now is good software, and the certificate and tax side of it is genuinely hard to beat. If that is your week, the honest answer is stay.
The reason to look at a Powered Now alternative is not that the app is bad. It is that the paperwork was never the thing costing you jobs. The message you did not get to until half four was.
If you would rather that one got answered while you were still under the floor, that is the job we do. Try Vanly free for 14 days. No card needed to start.