Long Jobs

Construction Job Tracking Software for a Job That Runs Two Years

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

Some of the work my elevator company does is over in an afternoon. Some of it is a modernization that takes the better part of two years from the day the customer signs to the day the last check comes in. For a long time those were the jobs I trusted my own records on the least. By month fourteen the proposal was in a folder, the billing was in QuickBooks, the tickets were in a stack on the desk, and the hours were on whatever the guys had turned in.

I wanted construction job tracking software that could hold a job that long, so I built it. TradeGOAT keeps a long job on one job page for as long as it runs. A two-year project lives there the same way a three-hour service call does. Here's what is on that page and how each part gets there.

Construction job tracking software that keeps the signed price

The job is created when the customer signs the proposal, and the sold price locks at that moment. Eighteen months later, when somebody in the office needs to know what was agreed to, the answer is on the job, and it's the same number the customer signed. Nobody can quietly change it in between.

The draw schedule, in dollars

My long jobs get paid in draws, and the schedule for them is written into the proposal. TradeGOAT brings those payment terms over in your own wording and turns them into dollar amounts on the job. If your terms say thirty percent at signing, the job shows what thirty percent comes to.

Those draws sit on the job page in a section called Money & draws, on the same page as the signed price. When you open the job in its second year you're looking at the same schedule the customer agreed to, in dollars.

What's been billed and what's been paid

If you keep your books in QuickBooks, TradeGOAT connects to it. It pushes your invoices over, reads the payments back, and shows the job's billing history on the job. QuickBooks stays your books. The job page just shows you what the books say about that one job, so you don't have to go look it up.

Every visit along the way

A job that long takes a lot of trips. Each time a tech is out there, he opens the ticket from the job on his phone, writes up what he did, and finishes it before he leaves. It posts to a section of the job page called From the field. A receipt from the supply house goes on the same job with a photo and the amount.

The crew clocks in and out on their phones, and every punch is stamped with where it was made. By the end, the job page holds the whole run of the work in the order it happened, and none of it had to be turned in. I wrote up what each side sees in The Office and the Field on One Job.

What it made

When the job wraps up, the scorecard puts the hours you quoted next to the hours the crew clocked, priced at your own rates. On a two-year job those hours came in one punch at a time while the work was going on. I used to try to rebuild that number after the fact, and I never trusted what I came up with.

A long job and a short one run the same way in TradeGOAT. The long one just has more on the page. If you'd like to see a job page for yourself, there's a demo you can click through at thetradegoat.com.