Tradelynx runs a verified-trades marketplace on the South Coast, and getting into it means passing a verification gate. That gate exists for the marketplace, where a customer is trusting us to put somebody in their home.
Books is not the marketplace, and it should never have been behind the same door.
What changed
Books and the customer book are open to any tradesperson in Great Britain. You do not need to be near Portsmouth or Southampton, you do not need to wait for an application to be reviewed, and you do not need to be routed any work at all. You sign up and you use it.
The reasoning is simple. Your own bookkeeping is your own business. Nothing about recording your income, your expenses, your CIS deductions and your customers requires us to have verified you to anybody, because you are not being introduced to anybody. The verification gate protects customers from strangers in their houses. It has nothing useful to say about whether you can be trusted with your own accounts.
What you get
Income and expenses with receipts attached, CIS deductions recorded as you go rather than reconstructed in January, and a customer book that remembers who you worked for and what you did. It is fifteen pounds a month.
That price is the same wherever you are. There is no regional tier and no founder discount that expires.
Where the South Coast still matters
The marketplace. If you want Tradelynx sending you work, that is the verified trades network and it runs on the South Coast, and you still go through the gate. Everything else the platform does for a tradesperson now works from anywhere in Britain.
We had it the other way round for a while, and it cost us nothing to notice except the tradespeople who tried and were turned away.