For UK gardeners
Built for gardeners. Compliant invoices in 30 seconds.
Voice-to-invoice for UK sole-trader gardeners and landscapers. Weekly maintenance rounds, one-off hedge cuts, seasonal border planting — captured in the language you use. Materials tracked separately from labour. MTD ITSA records built as you go.
What you say
“Weekly maintenance at Fern Cottage — two hours, mowed the lawn, trimmed the front hedge, weeded the borders. One bag of compost, half a bag of slug pellets. £55.”
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 gardener who finishes a job at 5pm covered in dust and just wants to get paid.
01
Weekly and fortnightly rounds mean 30+ visits a month across 10-15 customers — and every one needs invoicing. If you leave them for the end of the month, half a Sunday goes to typing up visits from memory.
02
Materials vary wildly by season: compost and mulch in spring, weedkiller in summer, leaf sacks in autumn. Rolled into a ‘materials’ lump sum on the invoice, customers question every one; itemised properly, they don’t.
03
MTD ITSA is coming for anyone earning over £50k self-employed, then £30k in 2027, then £20k in 2028 — catches most full-time gardeners with a full round. Almost no gardener we’ve talked to has heard of the deadline.
Got an HMRC question?
Ask HMRC is a free, grounded-in-gov.uk assistant that knows what matters to gardeners — MTD ITSA, expense categorisation, and record-keeping for a maintenance round. Five questions a day, no signup, no card.
Try this one
“I'm a self-employed gardener with a weekly round and a few one-offs — do I need to worry about MTD?”
What it does
Three things. Built for outdoor service work.
No bloat, no “multi-entity reporting”.
Voice-to-invoice for weekly rounds
Describe the visit in the words you’d use to yourself — the address, the hours, what got done, the materials used, the price. In 30 seconds, an invoice is on its way to the customer. No end-of-month admin catch-up.
For weekly and fortnightly customers, set up a recurring template once and Honest Invoices auto-generates each invoice on the schedule (weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or quarterly). Held as a draft for review by default so you catch any anomalies before send; auto-send is one tick when you’re confident.
Materials tracked properly — no lump-sum arguments
Compost, mulch, slug pellets, weedkiller, plants, leaf sacks — every line captured separately on the invoice. Customers see what they paid for and don’t bounce back three days later asking “what was the £15 materials line?”.
For planting jobs, itemise each plant / group of plants on the invoice line. Turns a £180 “plants” line into ten distinct entries the customer can see and value.
MTD ITSA quarterly records built as you go
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is live now for sole traders over £50k. April 2027 catches £30k; April 2028 catches £20k — nearly every full-time gardener with a solid round.
Every voice invoice is captured as a digital record in the MTD-required format from day one. When production HMRC credentials clear (sandbox-tested at 12/12 pass and in review with HMRC’s SDS team), quarterly submissions go live inside the app. Try the MTD wave calculator to check when you’re in.
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 gardenerswho don’t want to spend their evenings doing admin. £15/month. Locked. No price hikes, ever.
FAQ
FAQ for gardeners.
I do the same weekly round — do I have to enter each visit as a new invoice from scratch?
No. Set up a recurring template for that customer once — Honest Invoices auto-generates the invoice on schedule. Held as a draft for review by default; auto-send is available when you’re ready.
Can I handle a one-off big job (say a re-landscape) alongside my weekly rounds?
Yes — big jobs get quoted as milestones (deposit on order, first payment on ground preparation, balance on planting complete). Weekly rounds stay as their own client relationship. Both live in the same account.
Do I need to worry about CIS?
No — the Construction Industry Scheme covers construction subcontract work only. Garden maintenance, planting, hedge-cutting and general landscaping aren’t in scope. If you’re a groundworks contractor doing paths, foundations, or hard landscaping for a building firm, that’s a different conversation and CIS may apply.
What about materials I buy in bulk (mulch, compost)?
Add the bulk purchase as an expense when you buy it, and apportion it to specific customer invoices as you use it. That way your MTD digital records show the full expense trail without over-billing any one customer.
Some customers pay cash, some pay by bank transfer. Does it matter?
No — both are recorded the same way. Mark the invoice as paid when payment lands (cash or transfer). MTD digital records don’t care about the payment method, just that the record exists.
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.