Guide

How Bufera works.

Five screens, and the name at the top of the one you are on is the way to the other four. This is the whole app.

Today

The screen it opens on. It answers the question a phone gets picked up at seven in the morning to ask, in the order you need it: what you have to take with you before you leave, what you have booked, and what you have written down today.

A job on it opens the job. You can tick it off, start the clock running on it, or tap the client's initials to go straight to them — each of those is a full-height target, because the phone is usually being held in one hand.

The Buffer

The Buffer is where things go before you have decided what they are. A supplier calls while you are on a roof; you type six words into the box at the top of Today and carry on. No category, no due date, no client to pick.

Later, at a desk or in a van, you turn those notes into tasks, or tick them off, or delete them — the Buffer is the pile you triage. Everyone in your workspace sees notes as they land, and gets a notification when someone adds one.

Assets

Everyone and everything you deal with. People is one address book rather than separate lists — being a client or being on the team is a tag, so the same person can be both, and nobody is ever filed somewhere you cannot find them.

The same screen holds Money and as many named collections as your business needs — how you do the recurring parts of the work, what you have been paid, what you have lent and what you are owed.

Tasks

Tasks are filed into categories you make yourself. Due carries the overdue count and opens everything dated across every category, oldest first, so what you are behind on is never hidden inside a folder.

Assign one to a person and it stays with them: open that person and you see everything outstanding for them, along with their notes and appointments.

Calendar

Day, week and month views. Swipe left and right to move through time, tap an empty hour to book it. A block is as long as the job is, so a three-hour clean and a ten-minute phone call do not draw the same box, and two jobs at once sit side by side. A round that repeats every week or every second week is booked once and written out six months ahead.

Tapping a job opens its own page: when it is and who it is with, the hours it was booked for against the hours it took, who went, what it was quoted and what has been paid, the photos from it and the thread about it.

Working with a team

A workspace is shared. Invite someone and they see the same people, tasks, calendar and Buffer as you. Notifications go to everyone except the person who wrote the note, so nobody is told about their own typing.

You can belong to more than one workspace — a business and a side project, say — and switch between them from the menu on the screen's title. They stay completely separate.

Undo

Deleting anything can be undone from the arrow at the bottom of the screen, including several deletions in a row. It survives closing the app.

Working offline

Once installed, Bufera opens and works without a signal. Basements, lifts and rural sites are the normal case, not the exception.

Something not covered here?

Write to hello@bufera.app.