Stop giving away the “while you’re at it” work.
You quoted the job. You did the extras. You forgot to bill them. Tydra is a voice-first variation log — tap, dictate, done. We turn the voice memo into a billable line item, ready for Xero or a customer-facing PDF at invoice time.
No card to start · Works with or without Xero · Made in New Zealand
“Added an extra GPO above the bench, agreed with Sarah. About an hour, $40 in parts.”
- Job
- 42 Marine Pde — kitchen refit
- Customer
- Sarah Henderson
- Item
- Additional GPO above benchtop
- Labour
- 1 hr @ $95 — $95.00
- Parts
- 1 × GPO + plate — $40.00
A look at the app
Built for a Tuesday afternoon on the tools.
Here’s how capture works, screen by screen. The native iOS app is in development; the PWA runs on Android and desktop today.
Who it’s for
Whatever you wear on the job, Tydra fits.
Whether you’re a one-man-band sparkie or running a five-truck crew, Tydra is built around the way variations actually happen — between jobs, in the van, hands dirty, no time to type.
Sparkies
Extra GPOs. Light fittings the customer pointed at on the way out. RCBOs swapped because of code. The bits that don't make the original quote are usually the bits that make the job profitable.
Built for sparkies →Plumbers
“While you're under there, can you look at the laundry tap?” Extra fittings, bonus drainage, the second toilet flange you didn't quote for. Capture it before you've crawled back out of the cupboard.
Built for plumbers →Builders & renovators
Variations on fixed-price jobs are where margin gets eaten. Document every change in writing — voice memo now, signed-off line item later — and you've got the paper trail if it's ever disputed.
Built for builders & renovators →The leak nobody invoices for
The work gets done. The bill doesn’t always follow.
Variations are one of the most common sources of unrecovered revenue — and of payment disputes — in construction. Here’s what the research shows.
Industry estimate of project revenue lost to uncaptured variations and out-of-scope work on service jobs.1
Of service businesses successfully bill for every out-of-scope request. The rest write it off, forget, or never get around to it.2
Illustrative example: ten small “no-charge” changes on one job at $450 each. That's how variation leakage adds up — a few hundred dollars at a time.3
These are broad industry figures, not a claim about your business. The point holds at any scale: it’s a capture problem, not a quoting problem. See sources →
How it works
Three taps. One variation. No paper.
Tap and talk
Open the app, hit the record button. Talk like you're telling your bookkeeper: “Added a second smoke alarm in the hallway, agreed with Marcus, half an hour and forty bucks of parts.” Stop.
AI structures it
Whisper transcribes the audio. Claude turns it into a line item — description, who agreed, labour, parts, total — and matches the job from your recent list or your Xero contacts. Add a photo if you want proof.
Ready at invoice time
When the job's done, every variation is waiting. Push them to Xero as a draft invoice, or generate a customer-facing PDF with timestamps, agreement notes and photos. You decide what gets billed.
Built for the van, not the desk
Capture in the moment, not three weeks later.
The problem with variations isn’t that tradies don’t want to bill them. It’s that there’s no friction-free way to write them down the moment they happen — when your hands are dirty, the customer’s walked off, and your phone’s still in the van.
- One-tap capture — open, record, done. The lowest-friction way to get it down.
- Siri Shortcut — “Hey Siri, log a variation,” hands-free. (coming with the iOS app)
- Friday review prompt — “Anything you forgot on the Henderson job?” before you invoice.
“Added a downlight in the pantry, customer signed off on it, call it half an hour and $60 parts.”
- Item
- Downlight in pantry
- Labour
- 0.5 hr @ $95 — $47.50
- Parts
- Downlight + cable — $60.00
An example capture
A casual dictation, before and after.
Here’s the kind of thing you’d mumble into your phone on the drive home — no structure, no tidy pricing — and what Tydra makes of it. This is an illustrative example, not a recorded customer.
“Yeah so just finished up at the Patel job out in Hobsonville, the kitchen reno. Anita asked if I could throw in an extra double GPO behind where the new fridge is going — the one she’s getting next week is wider and the existing point won’t line up. Took about an hour and a half, had to chase out the gib, run a bit of TPS off the existing circuit, fit a PDL Iconic in white to match. Charge her hour and a half labour, GPO was about thirty bucks, plus a metre of cable, call it forty bucks materials. One-fifty plus GST for the lot. She’s good for it, just add it to the final invoice.”
90 seconds, recorded on the drive home. No structure, no firm pricing — just how a tradie talks.
- Customer
- Anita Patel
- Job
- Hobsonville — kitchen reno
- Variation
- Extra double GPO behind new fridge
- Reason
- New fridge wider; old point won't line up
- Agreed
- Anita (customer)
- Labour
- 90 min @ $50/hr — $75.00
- Parts
- PDL Iconic GPO + 1 m TPS — $70.00
Where Tydra sits
Notebooks lose. Job-management software is overkill. We’re the bit in between.
| Capability | Notebook / memory | Tradify / ServiceM8 | Tydra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Captures variations on site | If you remember | Type it into the app | Voice, ~10 sec |
| Works with hands dirty | No | No | Yes |
| AI structures into line items | No | No | Yes |
| Matches customer automatically | No | Manual | From Xero / recent |
| Pushes to Xero draft invoice | No | Yes | Yes |
| Customer-facing PDF report | No | Yes | Yes, one tap |
| Photo evidence per variation | Camera-roll mess | Yes | Yes |
| Replaces your job-management tool | — | — | No — it pairs with it |
Tools like Tradify (from about $49/user a month) and ServiceM8 (free up to a small monthly job count, paid tiers above) do full job management — quoting, scheduling, the lot. Tydra doesn’t replace them. It does the one thing they make you stop and type. Pricing shown is indicative; check each provider for current NZ rates.
Two minutes to your first variation
Sign up, dictate one variation, watch it come back billable.
That’s the whole pitch. If it doesn’t click in the first capture, you’ll know straight away — and you haven’t paid a cent.
No card required to start · About 5 minutes to set up · Cancel anytime.