We can only work about seven months of the year. Does the cost make sense across twelve?
Only if it is scoped for a seasonal business, which means a build paid for once rather than a subscription running through a dead January. We aim to deliver over the winter, go live before the first job, and price it so it comes out of one season’s work. A contractor should not be paying a monthly fee in February for something last used in November.
Our tickets end up in a truck door pocket. How do you actually get them out of there?
By making the capture take three seconds at the point the ticket exists. A photograph as the truck tips, nothing to log into, no end-of-day ritual. If it costs a driver more than that he will not do it, and any system that depends on him doing it later has already failed. What happens after the photograph is our problem, not his.
Certified payroll is the thing that holds up our money. Can you fix that?
It is one of the clearer wins we see in this trade. Hours captured against the right job and classification as they happen means the weekly report is assembled rather than reconstructed, and the checks catch a wrong rate or a ratio problem before submission instead of after a rejection. The certification itself stays with a named person in your company. We build the checks; we do not sign anything.
Who owns the job costing and the ticket history if we stop using you?
You do, in ordinary files, on request, at no charge and with no clause making it awkward. Your true cost per yard is the most commercially sensitive thing your business has and it would be indefensible for a supplier to sit on it. That goes in writing before any money changes hands, and none of it is used to train anything.
Where is the AI in this, and where is it really just recording things properly?
Mostly the second, and we would rather tell you that than dress it up. The AI part is real but narrow: reading weights and mix codes off a photographed ticket, and learning cycle times from what actually happened. Deciding how many trucks to send, whether a variation is claimable, or whether a machine goes back on the job is human judgement and stays that way. If the honest answer for you is a well-designed capture app and nothing clever, that is what you will be quoted.
Our crews are not office people and half of them will resent this.
They will if it costs them time, and they will be right. The rule we work to is that nobody on a crew types anything they are not already typing. A photograph, a tap to clock on, a fault logged from the seat — that is the whole ask. Everything else happens in the office. If a system requires training a crew, we have designed it for the wrong people.
A lot of our work comes from counties and the state. Does that change how you build?
It raises the bar on the record rather than the software. Public contracts mean somebody will look at what you filed, when, and whether it matches the hours worked, so we build with retention, timestamps and superseded versions kept rather than overwritten. It also means we scope tightly and price to a figure, because a contractor’s margin on public work does not leave room for an open-ended project.
What would you tell us not to bother with?
Anything that duplicates what your accounting package already does. Plenty of small contractors here already have software that handles invoicing and payroll perfectly well, and buying a second system to do the same job is how a business ends up keying everything twice. We connect to what works and build only the missing piece, and if the missing piece turns out to be small we would rather do a small job well than talk you into a big one.