The card for people on the tools.

The gap between quoting and being called back

Most trades do not lose work at the quote. They lose it in the three weeks afterwards, when the customer has decided to go ahead, cannot remember which of the three people who came round was the one they liked, and rings whichever number they can actually find. Often that is the one still stuck to the fridge from a leaflet drop.

A card only helps if it survives that gap, and paper mostly does not. It goes in a pocket, through a wash, or into the drawer with the takeaway menus. When it does survive, there is a decent chance the number on it has changed since it was printed. Trades change numbers less often than they change vans. But they change company names, go limited, drop a landline and add a second mobile constantly — and every one of those makes a printed card quietly wrong.

What happens on the doorstep

You hold the card out and they hold their phone near it. Your page opens with your mobile, your WhatsApp, your reviews and a quote link — about a second, nothing installed. If their phone will not tap, and some work phones will not, they point the camera at the printed QR and land in the same place.

A tap does not need a clean finger. You are not pressing anything and you are not touching their phone, which matters more than it sounds when you have just come out from under a sink. And the chip needs no power and no signal — on a site with no bars the tap still works, and their phone opens the page when the signal returns.

The part paper cannot do at all: they can send their own name and number back to you from that same page, in two taps, with no app and no account. A doorstep conversation becomes a lead sitting in your dashboard instead of a name you half remember. How contact-back works.

One number to change, however many cards are out there

The reason this holds up is that your number is not written on the card. The chip carries a code, and we hold what that code opens — so when something changes you edit it once in a browser and every card you have ever handed over points at the new details. Including the one in a customer's van from two years ago, which is exactly the customer worth keeping.

A cheap NFC card does not do this. The web address is written onto the chip itself, so fixing it means having every card physically back in your hand. What happens when you change your number sets out the difference properly.

Cards for the crew, and what happens when somebody leaves

If there is more than one of you, the problem is not printing cards — it is that within a year one of the lads has last year's logo and another has ordered his own in a different colour. Set the brand once — logo, colours, card material — and everybody you invite gets a card and profile built from it, adding only their own name, role and mobile. You can lock it so it cannot be overridden.

When somebody moves on, their card stops representing you: point it at another profile or switch it off from the dashboard. You never need the card back, which is just as well. How several people sit under one account.

What it costs

£24 for plastic, £35 for bamboo, £59 for metal, paid once and posted free in the UK, or £95 for a five-card team pack. The profile, the QR, the contact-back form and the tap counting are free whether you buy a card or not, and there is no subscription — no monthly fee to forget about and no tier where the useful part turns up later.

Set a profile up for nothing and share it by QR on this week's jobs before you order anything. Full pricing, or how the cards work.