I have spent a lot of years around tradespeople. Electricians, HVAC techs, plumbers, the crews that keep a commercial property running. The best of them have one thing in common: they like the work. Give them a panel to rebuild or a rooftop unit that quit on the hottest day of the year and they are happy.
What they do not like is what happens after the truck is packed.
What the paperwork actually looked like
Here is a job the way I watched it happen, over and over.
The tech takes photos on his phone, because the client will want to see what he found. He texts a few of them to the office, with a line or two about what he did. The office forwards the texts to an email thread, where the client has already asked twice for an update. Somebody opens Microsoft Word, pastes in the photos, types up what the tech texted, and tries to make it look like a report. Then the whole thing gets retyped one more time into a QuickBooks invoice.
Four tools, three people, the same information typed three times, and a client who still is not sure what got done. The photos that mattered are somewhere in a text thread on a phone that will be replaced next year.
None of this is anyone's fault. Every one of those tools is fine at its own job. The problem is that nothing connects them, so the connecting gets done by hand, usually at night, by the person who would rather be doing anything else.
There needed to be a better way. I looked for one built for a small crew instead of a software department and did not find it. I decided we would build it ourselves. That is why we built SquareKeeper Works.
What Works does instead
I decided early that the tech's job had to end with the photo. Everything after that is on us.
So Works starts where the job starts: on the phone, at the site. Your crew takes photos in the app, on Android or iPhone, and adds a caption if there is something to say. It works with no signal, so a basement or a rooftop does not slow anyone down; the photos upload when the phone finds a connection. Every photo is logged with the date and time it was taken and who took it.
That is the whole job for the tech. We made the report build itself from the photos and captions, with your logo on it. You read it over, add a line if you want, and send it. The client gets a clean PDF by email and a link to a page of their own, where the report stays as long as your account does.
The crew joins with a code you give them. No accounts to create, no passwords to reset. And I decided from the start that we would never charge per person. On any plan.
English and Spanish, both directions
A lot of the crews I know work in Spanish and bill in English, or the other way around, so I decided Works had to run in both languages from day one. Each person on the crew uses it in theirs. The report goes out to the client in English or Spanish, whichever you choose for them. The tech writes the caption the way he talks; the client reads it the way she reads.
From the quote to the money
The paperwork does not end with the report, so we did not stop there either.
You can write a quote on the phone, send it, and the client accepts it online. From your Works dashboard, an accepted quote becomes an invoice. Bill a deposit up front and the balance when the job is done, with a due date on every invoice. You record each payment as it comes in and send a reminder when one is late, and the PDF is stamped PAID once it is settled. If you keep your books in QuickBooks Online, Works syncs your clients, invoices and payments with it, so the last retyping step goes away too.
Affordable on purpose
We made it affordable (see the pricing here) so that more people would have access, whether you are a one-person company or have a crew behind you. I did not want the price to be the reason a good tech keeps texting photos to the office.
The point
We did not build Works to give tradespeople another thing to learn. We built it so the paperwork takes care of itself and they can get back to the part they signed up for. If that sounds like your crew, start free and send your first report this week.