Why We Built It

Why I Built TradeGOAT the Way I Did

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

I've already told the story of why TradeGOAT exists. The short version is that my wife Robin was doing the elevator company's books at the kitchen table after the kids went to bed, and I wanted her nights back. That piece is on this blog, and I won't tell it twice.

This one is about the choices that came after. Once I decided to build it, every screen had to answer to the way my own company actually runs. Here are the decisions that came out of that, and the reason behind each one.

It starts from the proposal I already had

I'd been sending the same proposal for years, and my customers knew it. I didn't want a tool that made me rebuild it inside somebody else's boxes before it would do anything for me. So TradeGOAT reads the Word or PDF proposal you already send, marks the spots that change from job to job, and leaves the rest in your words. The first thing you do in it is hand it something you've already got.

The price locks when the customer signs

At my company, a signed proposal is a promise going both directions. Once a customer has agreed to a number, I don't want anybody in my office able to quietly change it, including me on a bad day. So when a customer signs in TradeGOAT, the job is created and the sold price on it is locked.

The crew's hours come in with a location on them

I wanted to stop getting hours on scraps of paper at the end of the week. In TradeGOAT the crew clocks in and out from their phones, and every punch carries a location stamp. The week arrives in the office as a timecard per person with anything odd flagged, so the office asks about the few that need a question and approves the rest.

Payroll gets hours, never wages

When the payroll person needs the week, they export it, and the export carries hours only. Nobody's pay rate goes out in that file. The person running payroll doesn't need it to do the job, and I'd rather it didn't travel.

The field and the office look at the same job

My techs and my office used to find out about each other's work by phone. Now a tech opens the ticket on the job from his phone, writes up the work, and finishes it right there, and it posts to the job where the office sees it. A receipt from the supply house goes on that same job with a photo and an amount.

It tells me whether the job paid

This is the one I built the whole thing for. The scorecard puts the hours I quoted next to the hours the crew actually clocked, priced at my own rates. I don't have to wait months and dig through a spreadsheet to learn whether a job made money, because the answer is sitting on the job.

None of these were features I picked off a list. Each one is a place where my own company was costing me a night or a phone call, and I wanted it gone. If you run a shop that bids work and sends people out to do it, the same decisions are in there for you at thetradegoat.com.