You wake up and there’s no hot water. A pipe has burst. The air-conditioning has busted. Suddenly you are looking at a large trade bill you were not expecting. This is just one of the reasons 32-year-old Bundaberg plumber Matt Brennan founded the revolutionary Trade Now app, bringing the convenience of ‘pay later finance’ to the trade world.
“Being a tradie myself, I’ve come up with a solution to issues that I’d seen in the industry around tradies not getting paid on time and around the affordability of the work,” Matt said.
“It’s also great for customers as a budgeting tool. Knowing they can pay the work off in instalments means they can get things done, or fixed, much sooner.”
Working on the idea since 2018, the app was officially launched in November 2020 and has been growing in popularity since.
“It’s taking the pay later finance idea and bringing it into the trade industry, which hasn’t been done before. We’ve teamed up with Zip Pay to offer the finance, which means a 24-hour turnaround on payments for tradies,” he said.
For tradesmen, receiving timely payment is a common problem across the industry, according to Matt, with upfront costs of material and labour, and no certainty about when the money will come in.
“It’s a cash flow issue because you can give a seven-day invoice, but that may not be paid for 14 days or even longer,” he said.
“With the Trade Now app, you are not sending these invoices out, waiting and hoping on getting paid on time. And it works well for emergency-style work, when customers may not be expecting a large bill to be coming in.”
The company has been steadily growing for the past two years, first in Bundaberg and now across Australia.
“Our main focus now is to grow the number of users and the business, but we are planning version two of the app which will bring in a quoting system, where finance for a job can be pre-approved and locked away, offering more security for tradespeople. We are also looking at our own lending as well.”