Leeds start-up Yepic has launched a photo-based app for UK tradespeople following a ‘multi-million’ pound investment from Labora, the parent company of City Electrical Factors.
Now available in app stores Yepic, ‘The App for tradespeople,’ gives electricians, plumbers, builders, decorators and joiners a unique new way to record and manage their jobs using photos taken on their smartphones.
Yepic is the brainchild of its CEO and former electrical contractor, Sam Overment, plus a tech and design team he has brought together with investment backing from Labora. The app launched in May this year on mobile and desktop, and Overment seems pleased with its progress to date: “Yepic is so easy to get started – all you need is a phone number and the app downloaded,” he said. “When you take a photo on your phone, the app captures the exact location and creates a ‘job’ in the app. You can add a caption like a customer’s name and include notes and tasks to help manage the job, while choosing to have every visit you make and every photo you take automatically added using GPS, accurately recording addresses, eliminating time-consuming manual data entry.”
Automatically finding all job photos on your phone, Yepic allows users to quickly sort and categorise thousands of images into job albums, tracking hours spent at each job, capturing precise arrival and departure times.
“Every tradesperson has the problem of needing to record their work movements and jobs with many relying on their memory alone, adding stress to their workday,” said Overment. “Customers, employers, tutors can challenge how long you are at a job, so having a detailed log of every visit, every hour and a visual record is really helpful, especially when you don’t have to do anything to create it other than take a photo.”
The Yepic app is free and has so far been downloaded by more than 13,000 tradespeople with a target of 50,000 downloads by the end of the year in what is one of the UK’s largest sectors by employment, including 800,000 self-employed tradespeople among the 2.5 million people employed across the country’s construction trades industry.
Yepic’s paid version, priced at £14.99 a month or £149.99 a year, adds additional functionality and advanced features that include job sharing, videos, timesheets and job reports.
Overment, who has a career as a time-served electrician in East Yorkshire behind him, added: “I know first-hand how much time and energy can go into capturing all your work movements to calculate hours spent on a job for invoices or hours worked for timesheets, let alone completing the work.
“We really care about tradespeople and appreciate the demands of their unique situations, supporting everything they want to achieve, liaising and enabling a flow of discussion and information while creating better solutions for all of them.”
