For UK decorators
Built for decorators. Compliant invoices in 30 seconds.
Voice-to-invoice for UK sole-trader painters and decorators. Per-m² pricing captured properly, materials-per-room tracked as you go, and CIS labour/materials split automatic when you're subcontracted to a main contractor. Built around the fact that a decorating job is priced by area — not by hour.
What you say
“Two-coat emulsion on the Wilsons' lounge and hallway, twenty-eight square metres total. Half a day on prep — filling and sanding — half a day painting. Two litres of eggshell for the woodwork, five of matt for the walls. £320 all in.”
What Honest Invoices does in 30 seconds
- · Extracts time, materials and costs from the words you used
- · Builds a compliant UK invoice with sequential numbering, VAT (if registered), and your payment terms
- · Stores the digital record for MTD ITSA quarterly submission
- · Emails the PDF to your client when you tap send
£15/month, locked · 14-day free trial · no card required
The reality
The pain you actually have.
Generic accounting software is built for accountants. This is built for a decorator who finishes a job at 5pm covered in dust and just wants to get paid.
01
Decorating is priced by area, but most invoicing apps only understand hours. You end up either quoting per-day and losing on scope creep, or converting m² to hours in your head and forgetting the extra prep.
02
Materials add up fast — six litres of premium emulsion, brushes, sandpaper, filler, dust sheets — and get billed generic at the end because nobody wrote them down as they went.
03
When you're subbing to a main contractor on a bigger job, CIS gets deducted from the whole invoice unless labour and materials are split cleanly. That's the £180 of paint you paid for at Brewers, gone to HMRC.
Got an HMRC question?
Ask HMRC is a free, grounded-in-gov.uk assistant that knows what matters to decorators — CIS, trade registration fees, VAT rules and the rest. Five questions a day, no signup, no card.
Try this one
“I'm a self-employed decorator earning around £45,000 — do I need to worry about MTD?”
What it does
Three things. Built for trades.
No bloat, no “multi-entity reporting”.
Voice-to-invoice for the way you actually work
Describe the rooms, the square metres, the coats, the finish, the materials. In the language you use to yourself. Honest Invoices extracts the time, the paint spec, the customer name, and builds a UK-compliant invoice with per-line breakdown.
Prep time, painting time, materials-per-room — all separated on the invoice so the client can see exactly what they paid for. No lump-sum “paint the house” line.
CIS labour/materials split for subcontract work
When you’re invoicing a main contractor on a bigger site, CIS deducts 20% (or 30%) from the labour figure. Materials should be exempt — but only if they’re shown as a separate line on the invoice.
Every job-based invoice you send auto-splits the labour and materials, applies the deduction at the right rate for that contractor’s CIS status, and keeps a year-to-date deduction total ready for Self Assessment. That’s the £180 at Brewers, in your bank account.
MTD ITSA quarterly records built as you go
Full-time decorators cross £50k pretty quickly — a couple of exterior refreshes on Victorian terraces and you’re there. MTD ITSA is live from April 2026 for that income band, dropping to £30k in April 2027 and £20k in April 2028.
Every voice invoice is captured as a digital record in the MTD-required format from day one. When production HMRC credentials clear (we’re sandbox-tested at 12/12 pass and in review with the HMRC SDS team), quarterly submissions go live inside the app. Until then, the records are already correct.
From the founder
Built end-to-end against HMRC’s APIs.
Honest Invoices is built and run by Vix Hawley. The MTD ITSA integration was built by hand — OAuth, fraud-prevention headers, the full Self-Employment Business and BSAS APIs. It took months. The full HMRC sandbox journey passes 16 out of 16 steps with proof on file.
Most accounting platforms are built for accountants. This one is built for decoratorswho don’t want to spend their evenings doing admin. £15/month. Locked. No price hikes, ever.
FAQ
FAQ for decorators.
Can I quote per m² and have the invoice show it that way?
Yes. Speak the square metres and rate as you record — “forty square metres of two-coat emulsion at £8 per square metre” — and the invoice line breaks it out for the client. No conversion to hours needed.
What about materials I bought last week but only used today?
Add materials to the job as separate entries whenever you spend on them. When you invoice, they roll into the materials line automatically. Nothing to reconcile at the end.
I do a mix of domestic and commercial work. Does CIS only kick in for the commercial side?
CIS applies to subcontract construction work for a contractor business— domestic clients aren’t “contractors” in HMRC’s sense, so no CIS. Mark each client’s type inside the app; commercial clients trigger the CIS labour/materials split automatically, domestic ones don’t.
See the free CIS calculator to work through a specific invoice.
Do you handle VAT if I'm VAT-registered?
Yes. Toggle VAT on the invoice, set your registration number in settings, and Honest Invoices applies 20% VAT on the labour and materials figures. The invoice shows both net and gross totals per HMRC’s VAT invoice requirements.
I'm mostly single-visit domestic jobs, not big sites. Is this too much for me?
No. The whole point is that a two-hour touch-up on a homeowner’s hallway takes 30 seconds to invoice. Voice, done, PDF emailed. You use less of it, not more.
Talk to a person
Not a chatbot.
If you’ve got a question about whether Honest Invoices fits your trade — call, text, or email. You’ll reach the founder, not a queue.
Ready to stop typing invoices?
14 days free. No card required. £15/month after that — locked, forever.