For construction and trades
Software for construction and trades businesses
A building job is a chain of handovers, and most of what goes wrong happens in the gaps between them. The quote that took a week, the variation nobody wrote down, the customer who has not been told anything for a fortnight.
How these businesses run
Work arrives as enquiries that need pricing before anybody knows whether they are worth having, and the pricing depends on measurements, materials and who is available.
A job then runs across people who are rarely in the same place: an estimator, whoever is on site, a supplier, a client who wants to know when. The office is where the information is supposed to meet, and usually where it stops.
Money follows stages rather than a single invoice, so deposits, variations and retentions all have to be tracked against a job that is still moving.
Where it usually goes wrong
- Quotes take days because the numbers live in somebody's head and a spreadsheet
- Two estimators price the same job differently and both can defend it
- A variation is agreed on site, remembered by one person, and invoiced by nobody
- The customer rings for an update and somebody has to ring the site to find out
- Photographs of finished work sit on phones instead of against the job
- The diary is a whiteboard, and the whiteboard is not in the van
What we can build for this
What we can build for this kind of business, built around the way the work actually runs.
- Estimating that produces the same number twice, from rules you control
- Quotes out the same day, with follow up that happens whether or not anybody remembers
- A job record that holds the quote, the variations, the photographs and the paperwork
- Scheduling that shows who is where, and survives being looked at on a phone
- A customer portal with the job status and the next date, so the update call stops
- Site friendly capture: photographs and notes that upload when the signal comes back
- Deposits, stage payments and reminders, tied to the job rather than to an inbox
- Certificates, sign offs and documents stored against the job, not emailed around
- A dashboard that says what is live, what is late and what is unpriced
How a project would work
We start with one job, followed end to end as it really happens, including the parts that only work because somebody rings somebody. Construction software usually fails because it was designed for the process on paper rather than the one in the van.
Then the narrowest useful piece goes live: usually quoting, because it is the part that costs the most time and is the easiest to measure afterwards.
See it working
A short film of one of our own demonstrations, recorded from the running software. Every company in it is invented, and the link opens the real thing.
Brackenhall Property Services · Construction and property maintenance
Every variation priced, sent, answered and captured, and a job that cannot be released for invoicing while there is a hole in the record.
Vantor · Architecture and design studios
A portfolio given room to breathe, with proof of delivery rather than visual intent alone, and a process a client can follow to handover.
What that usually means building
Tell us how your business actually runs
We build around the way the work already happens rather than fitting a business to software that was written for somebody else. Describe the part that costs you the most time and we will tell you what we would build and roughly what it would cost.