No new app to learn, no evening admin pile. Your books live in the chat you already use — here’s a real week with SubReady.
Published August 2026 · 7 min read
Every bookkeeping tool promises to be easy. Then it asks you to download an app, learn its screens, and remember to open it. SubReady starts from a different place: you already have WhatsApp open all day — so that’s where your books live. The web app at app.subready.co.uk and the mobile app are there when you want the full picture, but the daily work happens in chat.
You buy £86 of timber and fixings. At the till, you photograph the receipt and send it to SubReady on WhatsApp. Seconds later: supplier read, amount read, categorised as Materials, booked. That’s the entire workflow — recording receipts.
£15 cash for parking, no slip. You type “paid £15 cash for parking”. SubReady drafts the expense and shows you what it understood; you reply YES to confirm (or NO to bin it — and if you say something else entirely, it answers you and the draft waits patiently). Typed a wrong figure? “Make it £18” fixes it. Nothing is ever booked silently — typed expenses & drafts.
Job done for a contractor. You send: “Invoice Thameside, labour 5000 materials 2000”. SubReady builds the invoice with labour and materials itemised — which matters under CIS, because deductions apply to labour only. Domestic job instead? “Invoice Mrs Hughes £850 for the bathroom, due in 14 days.” Pricing first? Send it as a quote — it stays out of your books until you reply CONVERT (quotes).
Your contractor sends the monthly payment & deduction statement. You photograph it, send it, and SubReady records the contractor, tax month, gross pay and CIS deducted. Over the year that pile of slips becomes the deduction total on your return — the number that drives your refund.
Because SubReady holds your records, you can just ask, in normal words:
Answers come back with your actual figures — and for anything that depends on your personal tax position, it gives the general rule and points you to your accountant rather than playing adviser.
Once a month you download a statement PDF from your banking app and send it over. SubReady reads every line, matches transactions to invoices and expenses already logged (so nothing counts twice), auto-categorises the rest, and parks card spends it hasn’t seen on a statement yet in “awaiting match”. One thing it will never do: connect to your bank. No bank logins, ever — PDFs only, by design (security & your data).
Everything you send feeds a live tax estimate (what to set aside each week), the Annual Return (income, expenses by category, mileage allowance, CIS deducted), and — if you’re in MTD — the four quarterly updates, filed with a typed SUBMIT confirmation and archived under Submitted returns. Your accountant can get read-only access, with your approval, instead of a January shoebox.
No — plenty of users live almost entirely in WhatsApp and open the web app a handful of times a year for the Annual Return. The apps are there for the visual jobs: browsing records, drilling into figures, reviewing quarters before filing.
Reply and say so — “it read the amount wrong, make it £64” — and the entry is corrected. Anything ambiguous gets flagged and asked about rather than guessed; no figure is invented, ever.
No — CIS and non-CIS subcontractors, drivers and couriers, and landlords, in any combination. One person can run trade income and rental properties side by side, each kept separate for tax. It isn’t for limited companies — SubReady is for the self-employed, and says so honestly.
No — they get read-only access (with your approval) or a clean export pack. Most accountants are simply pleased the records exist.
The best bookkeeping system is the one you actually use on a Tuesday in the rain. Message START and see for yourself.
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14-day free trial · no cardSimple bookkeeping for subcontractors and the self-employed — send it on WhatsApp and your records stay organised. CIS supported.
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