Sole trader software that quotes, books and invoices in one place
You are the business, so the tool has to do the parts of the business you did not sign up for. One login carries the quote, the booking, the job, the tax invoice and the client it all belongs to, from the phone in your pocket.
A free plan rather than a free trial, no card needed. 14-day trial on the paid tiers if you want one.
Key takeaways
5- The Free plan is permanent rather than a trial: 10 invoices and 5 quotes a month, 250 contacts and 1 booking page, with no card on file.
- GST calculation and ABN validation are on every plan, Free included, so a tax invoice is a tax invoice from the first one.
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- Full accounting, bank feeds and the P&L, GST and BAS reports start at Starter, $29/mo. They are not on the Free plan, and neither are online card payments or automatic payment reminders.
- Free runs as a progressive web app on the phone; the native iOS app starts at Starter. There is no native Android app, so on Android the web app is the way in.
- 1 public booking page on Free means clients can book you around the work instead of ringing while you are under a sink.
What is sole trader software?
Sole trader software is one system that runs a business with exactly one person in it: quoting the work, booking it in, tracking it, issuing an Australian tax invoice with your ABN and the right GST treatment, and keeping the client record all of that hangs off. It is defined by scope rather than by size. The point is that a single operator does not need a stack of five subscriptions to run what is, from the outside, an ordinary business.
It is worth separating it from the thing it gets confused with. Bookkeeping tools solve the ledger: what came in, what went out, what the ATO is owed. That is a real job and OneBookPlus does it, but it is one job out of six, and it starts after the work is already won. If the ledger is genuinely what you are shopping for, accounting software for sole traders is the page written for that, and it goes into far more depth on BAS, PAYG instalments and the deduction side than this page does.
This page is about the other five jobs, and about the order they happen in. A quote goes out, a client says yes, the yes becomes a job or a booking, the job becomes an invoice, the invoice becomes money, and the money lands in a set of books that already knows what it was for. Sole trader software is judged on whether that chain holds together without you retyping anything at each link, because you are the only person available to do the retyping.
Three things that change the day you go solo
Nobody starts a business because they wanted to do the admin. These are the three parts of it that arrive uninvited, and they are the three this page is about.
Getting paid stops being someone else's job
On wages the money arrived whether you chased it or not. On your own ABN, an invoice that sits unopened for three weeks is your rent. The fix is not a reminder in your head, it is a quote the client accepts online, an invoice raised off that same quote without retyping it, and a record that tells you which ones are still outstanding.
You have to be able to prove the GST
Every tax invoice needs your ABN, the right GST treatment for where your turnover actually sits, and the words on it that the ATO expects. Doing that by hand in a word processor is fine for the first five invoices and a liability by the fiftieth. GST calculation and ABN validation are on every plan here, Free included, so the document is right the first time.
The books cannot be a second subscription forever
Most solo operators end up paying for a quoting app, a booking link and a bookkeeping package that do not talk to each other, then paying again in time to keep the three in sync. Here the quote, the job, the booking and the invoice are one record, and the ledger sits under the same login when you are ready for it.
What you get for nothing
The Free plan is a plan, not a countdown. It does not expire, it does not ask for a card, and it is a reasonable permanent home for a solo operator under the GST threshold. Here is the honest edge of it, drawn straight from the plan comparison on the OneBookPlus pricing page.
GST invoices with ABN validation
10 invoices and 5 quotes a month, each one a proper Australian tax invoice with GST calculated line by line and your ABN validated rather than typed and hoped for.
250 contacts
Every client, their jobs, their quotes and their invoice history in one place instead of across a phone, an inbox and a notebook. The deals pipeline is a Starter feature; the contact list itself is not.
A booking page with automated reminders
1 public booking page so clients pick a time that suits both of you, with automated reminders going out before the appointment. No back-and-forth texting and no unanswered calls while you are on the tools.
The whole thing on your phone
Free installs as a progressive web app, so it lives on the home screen and works like an app without an app store. Quote in the driveway, invoice before you have packed up.
And what starts at Starter
Everything below is genuinely not on the Free plan. Listing it here rather than burying it is deliberate: the four items are the usual reasons a sole trader moves up, and knowing that before you sign up is worth more than a longer free-plan list.
Online payments
A Pay Now button on the invoice so clients pay by card instead of promising to do the transfer tonight.
Recurring invoices and payment reminders
The invoice chases itself on a schedule you set, which is the single biggest difference between a solo business that gets paid in a fortnight and one that gets paid in two months.
Full accounting with P&L, GST and BAS reports
Chart of accounts, general ledger, balance sheet and cash flow, plus the P&L, GST and BAS reports you need once you are registered.
Bank feeds and the iOS app
Transactions sync in automatically instead of being typed off a statement, and the iPhone app replaces the web app on the home screen.
The day you register for GST
Australian sole traders register for GST once turnover reaches $75,000 in a twelve-month period, and plenty register earlier because their clients expect it. From that day your invoices carry 10% GST, they have to be formatted as tax invoices, and you owe the ATO a Business Activity Statement each quarter. Nothing about the work changes. Everything about the paperwork does.
In OneBookPlus you set your registration status once and every document after it follows. Before registration, invoices go out with no GST line and without tax-invoice wording that does not apply to you; after it, GST calculates line by line at 10%, your validated ABN sits on the document, and the totals are held in a form the quarterly reporting can actually use. It also flags the case where your invoice settings and your registration status disagree, which is the mistake that quietly charges clients GST you are not entitled to collect.
The honest part: the reporting half of that is a paid feature. Full accounting, bank feeds and the P&L, GST and BAS reports start at Starter, $29/mo, and are not on the Free plan. So the realistic reading of this page is that Free is the right home while you are under the threshold and invoicing by hand, and the month you register for GST, want card payments, or want the invoice to chase itself, is the month Starter starts paying for itself. That transition is worth naming rather than implying.
One person, one system
The reason a solo business ends up with five tabs open is that the quote lives in one tool, the calendar in another and the invoice in a third, so the same client details get typed three times and the third one is wrong. Here the chain is one record. A quote goes out with your logo, ABN and terms on it; the client accepts it online from their phone with no login or printer; acceptance drafts the job or the booking with the priced scope carried across; and the accepted quote converts to an invoice with the line items, quantities, discounts and GST intact.
Nothing in that chain asks you to re-key anything, which matters more when you are one person than at any other size, because there is no one to catch the transcription error. The detail on each half lives on its own page: quoting software that converts to an invoice covers online acceptance, view tracking and follow-ups, and invoicing software for sole traders covers the tax invoice itself. If you would rather see the booking side, the online booking and scheduling module is what sits behind your public booking page.
None of this assumes you will stay solo. When the first hire happens, the same account grows seats and roles rather than making you migrate, which is the argument software for small teams makes in detail. Nothing has to be rebuilt, because it is the same product with a different plan on it.
Quoting from the phone, before you leave the driveway
Most sole trader quotes are lost to delay rather than to price. The client asks three people, one of them sends a number that night, and the other two are still meaning to write something up on Sunday. So the quoting tool has to work where the quoting happens, which is standing next to the job with your phone in your hand. On the Free plan that is the web app installed on your home screen: open the client, add the line items, check the GST, send. The client gets a link they can open and accept on their own phone, no login and no printer, and you find out when they have viewed it rather than wondering.
The pricing itself is the part no software can do for you, but it can stop you guessing. If you charge by the hour and the number was inherited from your last job rather than worked out, the free hourly rate calculator is a sensible half hour, and tradies pricing whole jobs can sanity check a figure with the tradie quote calculator. Neither needs an account.
Why Free is the honest place to start
We suggest starting on Free even if you already suspect you will outgrow it, because the limits are real numbers rather than bait. 10 invoices and 5 quotes a month is a workable ceiling for a business that is new, part-time or seasonal, and under the GST registration threshold there is no BAS forcing you into paid reporting yet. What Free will not do is also stated plainly on this page: no card payments, no automatic reminders, no bank feeds, no P&L or BAS reports. If you hit one of those walls in month two, that is not a failure of the plan, it is the business telling you it can carry $29/mo.
Two habits are worth building in the free months regardless. Check what a price means after GST with the GST calculator, and put something aside for tax as you go. The sole trader tax calculator gives you a first estimate to work from; it is general information rather than advice, but it beats finding out in July.
Sole traders we already write for
A one-person photography business and a one-person plumbing business share the admin and share almost nothing else. Each page below is written in that trade's own words, jobs and compliance.
Freelancers and sole traders
Invoicing, quoting and client management for one-person businesses, GST-ready when you cross the threshold.
Tradies
Quote, schedule, invoice and get paid from the job site.
Photographers
Bookings with deposits, contracts and e-sign, GST invoicing and payments.
Consultants
Proposals and quotes, retainer and project billing, time tracking and GST invoicing.
Private tutors
Recurring weekly sessions, session-pack billing, parent reminders and progress notes.
Mobile mechanics
On-site jobs, vehicle and VIN records, GST invoicing and service-due reminders.
Not on the list? Browse every industry page, or start with the general setup and tell us your trade during signup.
See it before you set anything up
The live demo is a working account with quotes, invoices and jobs already in it. Click around, then decide whether it fits your week.
Australian Owned
Built in Melbourne, AU
GST Compliant
ATO-ready from day one
Encrypted & Isolated
TLS in transit, AES-256 at rest, tenant isolation at the database layer, read the security page
Free Plan Available
No credit card needed
One person, one login, no card
Send your first quote today and see the invoice come out the other end of it. Move up a plan the month it earns its keep, not before.
Also worth a look: solutions by business size, or the sole trader tax calculator.
Last reviewed and updated: by Bishal Shrestha
Running a one-person business on OneBookPlus
Do I need an ABN before I can send my first invoice?
In practice yes, if you are running a business rather than doing a one-off favour. Without an ABN on the invoice, a business client is generally required to withhold tax from your payment at the top rate, so you get paid less and have to claim it back later. An ABN is free to apply for through the Australian Business Register and usually issues the same day. OneBookPlus validates the ABN you enter against the register rather than just accepting the digits, and prints it on every invoice and quote automatically, so the document is compliant from the first one.
What changes once I cross the GST registration threshold?
Two things: your invoices start carrying 10% GST, and you start lodging a BAS. In OneBookPlus you flip your GST registration status in settings and every invoice from that point calculates GST line by line and formats as a tax invoice; before that, invoices go out without a GST line and without wording that does not apply. The reporting side is the honest caveat. P&L, GST and BAS reports are a Starter feature at $29/mo, not a Free one, so the point where you register for GST is usually the point where the free plan stops being the right fit.
Can I run the entire business from my phone as a one person operation?
That is the design. On the Free plan OneBookPlus installs as a progressive web app: it sits on your home screen, opens like an app, and gives you quotes, invoices, contacts, your booking page and the job list without an app store. From Starter you also get the native iOS app. There is no native Android app, and we would rather say that plainly than let you find out after signing up; on Android the web app is the way in, and it does the same jobs.
How many invoices does the free plan allow each month?
10 invoices and 5 quotes per month, alongside 250 contacts, 1 booking page and up to 5 active jobs. The counter resets each month and the plan does not expire, so a quiet operator can sit on it indefinitely without a card on file. Starter at $29/mo lifts invoices and quotes to unlimited, and that is usually what people upgrade for first, along with taking card payments.
About the author
Bishal Shrestha
Founder & CEO, OneBookPlus
Bishal spent a decade running digital projects for Australian small businesses before founding OneBookPlus. OneBookPlus is built and supported from Melbourne for Australian small businesses, and the sole trader is the size it was designed around first: one person, one login, and a free plan that does not expire, carrying quotes, bookings, GST tax invoices and the client record on a single account.
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