The Setup

This takes ten minutes. You do it once. After that, every estimate, change order, and invoice you generate with AI already knows your trade, your rates, your service area, and your state’s rules. No re-entering your license number. No re-explaining your payment terms. No starting from scratch every time you open a new conversation.

One conversation builds your business profile. You save it. You paste it in whenever you need a document. That profile is the foundation — the single piece of information that makes every other prompt in this system work.

Here is the setup.

Choose your platform

You need one AI tool on your phone. As of March 2026, three platforms handle document generation from a phone:

Claude is the recommendation for English speakers. It is the only platform where you can generate a downloadable business document — Word, Excel, PDF — from your phone without paying. Claude also offers Projects (free, up to five) where you can upload your business profile so it persists across conversations. The limitation: voice mode is English-only.

ChatGPT has the broadest language support — over 50 languages for voice. Advanced Voice Mode requires the Plus subscription ($20/month) for meaningful daily use. File creation requires the paid tier.

Gemini offers the best free voice experience through Gemini Live — free on Android, conversations continue with the screen locked, and it supports 45+ languages. Downloadable document generation requires the $19.99/month Google AI Pro subscription.

The language-dependent recommendation: if you speak primarily English, Claude gives you the most complete free workflow. If you speak primarily Spanish or work on bilingual job sites, Gemini or ChatGPT may be more practical for voice input, even with their document limitations.

Download whichever one fits. Then lock it down before you enter anything.

Step zero: lock down the platform

Before you type a word about your business, turn off training data. Every major AI platform has used free-tier conversations to train future models at various points. Opt-out mechanisms exist on all of them. This takes less than five minutes. Do it once.

Claude:

• Open Settings → Privacy
• Set “Improve Claude” to off
• Your conversations will not be used for model training

ChatGPT:

• Open Settings → Data Controls
• Set “Improve the model for everyone” to off
• Note: opting out is not retroactive — anything you entered before toggling off may already be in the training pipeline

Gemini:

• Open Settings → Gemini Apps Activity
• Toggle off — but be aware this also erases your conversation history. There is no way to keep history while opting out on Gemini

On all platforms: do not enter Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers. Use a strong, unique password with two-factor authentication. A compromised account exposes everything you have entered.

The research on AI memory security is worth knowing. MINJA (NeurIPS 2025) — peer-reviewed — demonstrated that AI memory features can be manipulated, achieving a 98.2% injection success rate across multiple models. Stored business data could theoretically be altered by a malicious input in another conversation. The architectural recommendation is clear: store your business profile in a local document — a text file, a note on your phone — and paste it into each new session. Trade convenience for security.

That is why Step 1 ends with saving your profile locally, not storing it in the AI.

Build your business profile

Open a new conversation on your chosen platform. Copy the entire prompt below and paste it in. The AI will ask you five rounds of questions, two to three at a time. Answer them. When it has everything, it will generate your formatted business profile.

The prompt is designed around two principles from prompt engineering research. First, constraint-based instructions outperform persona-based ones across all major language models — a finding from PromptHub’s analysis of 2,410+ questions across four LLM families. The prompt does not say “you are a helpful assistant who loves trades.” It says “ask 2-3 questions at a time. Do not guess. Do not offer advice.” Those constraints produce consistent results regardless of which platform you use. Second, the structure follows the conductor-expert pattern described by Suzgun & Kalai (ICLR 2025) — one prompt orchestrates the conversation through a sequence of focused rounds rather than trying to extract everything in a single open-ended request.

The five rounds take most people under ten minutes. You are answering questions about your own business — trade, rates, service area, terms. Nothing you need to look up. Nothing you need to decide. You already know all of this.

What the profile looks like

Here is the profile generated from a test run — a solo residential plumber in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, tested on Claude.

Every field carries forward. When you paste this profile into the estimate prompt in Session 2, the AI uses it — your hourly rate shows up in the line items, your license number goes in the header, your state triggers the right compliance provisions. You do not re-enter any of it. That is the chain reaction: one conversation teaches the AI your business, and every document after that is customized.

The profile also tells the AI what it does not know. There is no field for “how to price a water heater replacement” or “what materials to use.” The AI generates the document structure. You provide the trade knowledge. That separation is by design.

Save the profile

Copy everything between the ===== BUSINESS PROFILE ===== lines — including the lines themselves — and save it somewhere you can access from your phone.

Three options, in order of reliability:

1. Phone notes app. Create a note called “Business Profile” or whatever you will actually find again. Paste the profile.
2. Text file. Save it as a .txt file on your phone or in cloud storage.
3. Email it to yourself. Subject line: “Business Profile.” You can search for it later.

Do not store it in the AI’s memory. The security research is clear on this: per-session data with training opt-out is retained only temporarily for abuse monitoring. Data stored in AI memory persists indefinitely and remains vulnerable. Paste it in when you need it. Delete the conversation when you are done.

Level Up: make it persistent

The paste-every-time workflow works. But if you want the AI to remember your profile across conversations without you pasting it each time, all three platforms offer a way to do that — as of March 2026.

Claude Projects (free, up to 5):

1. Open Claude on your phone or desktop
2. Tap Projects → New Project
3. Name it something like “Business Docs”
4. Add your business profile as project knowledge — paste it directly or upload a text file
5. Every conversation you start inside that project already has your profile. No pasting.

ChatGPT Custom GPT (Plus plan, $20/month):

1. Open ChatGPT → Explore GPTs → Create
2. Give it a name and instructions (the system prompt from any session)
3. Upload your business profile as a knowledge file
4. Each conversation with this Custom GPT starts with your profile loaded

Gemini Gem (AI Pro plan, $19.99/month):

1. Open Gemini → Gems → Create
2. Add your profile as context
3. Conversations within the Gem carry your business information

Claude’s free-tier Projects are the only option here that costs nothing. The others require paid subscriptions. If you are on a free tier, the paste-every-time workflow is reliable and secure. The profile is short enough to paste in ten seconds.

Free tiers change. Claude expanded dramatically in February 2026 — Projects, file creation, and Artifacts all moved from paid to free. ChatGPT introduced ads on its free tier the same month. Gemini’s API rate limits were cut 50-80% in December 2025. Build your workflow on durable capabilities — text generation and conversation — not on features that could be paywalled next quarter.

Test it: generate a quick estimate

Your profile is saved. Before you close this session, verify the chain works. Open a new conversation (or use your Claude Project) and try this:

Paste your business profile, then type:

I need an estimate for a customer. John Martinez, 4521 Oak Lane, Arlington TX. He needs his kitchen faucet replaced — standard single-handle, I’m supplying a Moen Adler. About an hour of labor. Include removing the old faucet and cleanup.

The AI should generate a formatted estimate that pulls your hourly rate, your business name, your license number, and your standard terms from the profile. The line items should reflect the job you described.

Check three things:

1. Does the math add up? Multiply the labor hours by your rate. Add the material cost plus your markup. Verify the total. The AI does not calculate — it predicts what a calculation might look like. Your phone calculator is the verification tool.
2. Does it use your actual information? Your business name, not a placeholder. Your rate, not a guess. Your license number, not a made-up one.
3. Does it include anything you did not say? The prompt is designed to prevent the AI from adding information you did not provide. If it invents a warranty term or a payment clause you do not use, that is a problem to fix before you send anything to a customer.

If the estimate looks right, the chain works. Every subsequent session in this series — the estimate prompt, the change order prompt, the invoice prompt, the dispute folder — builds on this same profile. You do this setup once.

What you built

You have a business profile that encodes your trade, your rates, your service area, your license, your terms, and your insurance status in a format that AI can use to generate customized documents. You built it in one conversation. It is saved on your phone, not in a platform you do not control.

The prompts in Sessions 2 through 5 are designed around this profile. When you paste it into the estimate prompt, the AI generates an estimate with your business name in the header and your state’s required disclosures at the bottom. When you paste it into the change order prompt on a job site, the AI produces a change order with your license number, your rate, and the six elements that courts look for. The profile does the heavy lifting. You describe the job. The AI drafts the document. You check the numbers and send it.

State-specific compliance rules — written contract thresholds, down payment caps, change order requirements, cancellation periods — are encoded in the prompts for California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. If you work in another state, the system defaults to the most restrictive common standard, which protects you everywhere. But verify your state’s specific requirements. The system generates documentation that complies with known rules. It does not replace legal advice.

Session 2 is the estimate — the first document most tradespeople generate on every job. You describe the work in your own words, the AI drafts a professional estimate with scope boundaries and protective language, and you review it before sending. Same profile. Same chain.

The setup is done. Get back to your craft.