On a roofing or scaffolding job the photos are not just for the gallery. They are evidence: the state of the roof before you started, the fixings, the sign-off, the ground left tidy. They protect you when a client disputes the work or an insurer asks what was done. The problem is where they live, which is on five different phones belonging to five different people.

That arrangement works fine until it does not. A client rings asking for the pictures of last March's job, and the lad who took them has changed his phone, cracked the screen, or left the firm. The evidence that would have settled the matter in a minute is now on a device in a drawer, or gone entirely. In most of the small trades we check, there is no single place the photos reliably end up.

There is a data angle too, which is easy to miss. Site photos often catch things that are not yours to lose: a neighbour's property, a car number plate, sometimes a person. A phone full of job photos left on a wall or lost off scaffolding is a small pile of other people's data walking off with it, and no way to wipe it.

The fix is to get photos off the individual phones and into one shared place automatically. Turn on backup so every site photo lands in the business account without anyone having to remember, and organise it by job so “last March” is a search, not an archaeology dig. That single change turns a scatter of phones into a proper record.

While you are at it, make the phones themselves survivable. A passcode, encryption on by default, and the ability to wipe a lost handset remotely means a phone off the scaffold is an inconvenience, not a breach. The kit is already in everyone's pocket. It just needs turning on.