About Docketlane

Who this is for

Sole traders and microbusinesses who do the work and also run the business. Tradies, cleaners, mobile mechanics, gardeners, photographers, freelancers. One person, sometimes two.

You quote from the ute. You invoice from the couch. You chase the money on a Sunday night, because that is when there is time.

You are not running a finance department.

Why it exists

One run of steps decides whether a small job actually makes money: work out the price, send the quote, get it accepted, send the invoice, get paid.

Most of the time, you are the thing holding those steps together. The price of a job lives half in your head and half in a text message from last winter. The quote gets typed into Notes and sent as a screenshot. The invoice is a spreadsheet you copy and rename. Three clients owe you money and you can only remember two of them.

The usual fixes each cover one step and ignore the rest. A full accounting suite costs money every month and assumes you have a bookkeeper, a chart of accounts and a reason to care about bank feeds. A free invoice template off the internet knows nothing about Australian GST, does not know what a tax invoice has to include, and certainly will not tell you when the words "Tax Invoice" do not belong on the page at all.

Docketlane is built to do the whole run, not one piece of it, and to do it for Australian conditions.

What it does today

Free, in the browser, no account needed:

• An invoice generator and a quote generator, built around what an Australian tax invoice is meant to include
• Seven calculators for the pricing end: GST, hourly rate, job quote, call-out fee, repeat-service pricing, billable hours and invoice due dates
• A tax invoice requirements checker, so you can test an invoice before it goes out
• A payment reminder and quote follow-up writer, for the message you would rather not write again

Drafts stay in your browser. No email address, no trial clock.

With a free account, the steps join up:

• Save clients, invoices and quotes
• A Clients hub with notes, follow-up tasks and activity history
• A Today view of what needs chasing
• Send a quote as a secure link your client accepts or declines online — and an accepted quote converts straight into an invoice, so you are not retyping the same numbers twice
• Record payments against an invoice so you know what is still outstanding

What it deliberately does not do

Two things we will never claim. Docketlane has no approval, endorsement, affiliation or certification from the ATO or anyone else. And nothing here is tax, accounting or legal advice — the tax invoice features are built to reflect published requirements, but your own obligations are your call, and worth a conversation with a registered tax agent if you are unsure.

It is not accounting software and is not trying to become it. No BAS, no payroll, no bank feeds, no lodgement, no general ledger. Those are real jobs, done properly by real accounting software.

It is not an AI quote app either. The calculators use your numbers and arithmetic you can follow and check. Nothing guesses what your work is worth.

Where it is up to right now

Early, and honest about it.

Everything is free at the moment. Paid billing is not switched on. There is no trial ticking down and no card to enter.

The free tools are not a teaser with the working parts removed. Invoice and quote PDFs are client-ready and include only a small Created with Docketlane footer. It sits outside the document totals and payment information, so the document can be sent to a client. Proposed Pro removes that attribution and adds more workspace capacity as paid capabilities pass their release gates.

The calculators, checker, follow-up writer, client records and quote links remain complete. Docketlane attribution is limited to the footer of client-facing Free PDFs and never obscures the user's content.

Where it goes next

The test for anything new is simple: does it help an Australian sole trader move a job from a price in their head to money in their account? If it does, it belongs here. If it turns this into a general accounting suite, it does not.

What is on this page is what exists. Nothing is described here that you cannot go and use right now.

Get in touch

If something is broken, something is missing, or something here does not match what you found when you used it, say so — get in touch or email hello@docketlane.com.au. Early is the point at which that feedback still changes things.

You can also read how your data is stored and separated on the security page.