What TradeGOAT Does

One Job, All the Way Around: What TradeGOAT Does

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

When somebody asks me what TradeGOAT does, the honest answer takes a minute, because it isn't one thing. It's one job, followed the whole way from the first number to the last dollar. The easiest way to explain it is to walk a job around it, the way one actually runs at my elevator company.

You price it

It starts with a number, and the number gets built the same way every time. You add up what the job really costs you — the material, the labor, and the overhead for the days that job ties up your company — and then you take one margin on top of that. Because the overhead is in the cost before the margin comes off, the profit you see on the screen is profit you actually keep.

Your rates are your own. You set what a kind of work is worth and how long it takes at your shop, and the bid prices off that instead of off somebody's idea of an industry average.

You send it, and they sign it

The proposal goes out on your own document. You hand TradeGOAT the proposal you already send, it becomes your template, and your scope language and your payment terms come along with it.

When the customer signs, two things happen. The job is born, carrying the real moment they accepted it. And the price locks — once a customer has signed, nobody can quietly change what they agreed to.

You run the work

Now the job is the place everything about that work lands. The tech opens the ticket on his phone, writes up what he did, and finishes it on the spot, and the office sees it post without a phone call. The crew clocks in and out from their phones with a location stamp on every punch, and the week arrives as timecards the office can look at and approve. Somebody buys a part, photographs the receipt, types the amount, and it goes on that job.

None of that is a second app to buy. It's the same account the office is signed into, and the phone side installs to the home screen.

You bill it

Your payment terms turn into the actual billing schedule in real dollars, split the way your document splits them. If your terms say thirty percent at signing, that dollar amount is sitting there on the job.

Those draws live on the job page, in Money & draws, and you work them right where you read them. Each one carries its label, its due date, its invoice number and a status in plain English, and the page tells you whether the schedule still adds up to the contract. On a signed job the priced fields are locked, and it says so on the screen rather than letting you find out later.

You find out what it made

The last stop is the one I built this for. The scorecard puts the hours you quoted next to the hours your crew actually clocked, priced at your own rates, so you learn whether the job paid the way you thought it would.

That's the whole trip. The number you priced, the paper they signed, the work your people did and the money it made are all on the same job, and you can look at any of it without opening anything else. You can see it for yourself at thetradegoat.com.