I run a commercial metal building company in South Florida. I’ve been erecting steel buildings for 40 years, and for most of those years my office has been wherever I dropped the tailgate.
That part was never the problem. The problem was that the paperwork never worked the way the work did.
The end-of-day fiction
Here’s how jobsite records actually get made at most small construction companies: from memory, after the fact. Timesheets filled in Friday afternoon for a week that’s already a blur. An equipment walk-around that happened — probably — but got pencil whipped at the kitchen table. An incident report started two days after the incident, when the details have already gone soft.
Nobody’s lying. The crew did the work. But a record made from memory is a guess wearing a signature, and every one of us who has run crews knows it. The paperwork isn’t compliance; it’s appeasement — the least effort that will keep the office off your back.
The estimate side was worse, because there the delay costs money you can count. You walk a job, take your notes, drive back, work it up, and send the proposal days later — by which time the customer has walked it with two other guys. A salesman I’ve known for decades says it in four words: time kills all deals.
Building instead of complaining
I’d been writing software for my own company for years — a timesheet app my crews carried on iPhones long before “there’s an app for that” stopped being a joke. It worked because it was built around one idea: the best record is the one made on the spot. Tap it in when it happens, and the guessing disappears.
That idea eventually grew into two apps, built the way I wished somebody else had built them:
CrewKeeper is the daily record of a jobsite. Timesheets that log on-site arrival and departure automatically, equipment inspections, safety meetings, jobsite audits, issue tracking. The crew records it in the moment — tap, tap, done — and the whole organization sees it live. The person in the office doesn’t wait for a PDF; they already have it.
YEStimator is for the visit where the money is decided. You do your time-and-material takeoff standing on the site, and it produces a finished proposal you can hand over before you leave. One visit. No second trip.
Decisions I wasn’t willing to compromise
A few things are built in that I’d want as a customer, so they’re built in for you:
- Your data stays in your iCloud. Tailgate Technology runs no servers. Your timesheets, your estimates, your photos — they live in your own iCloud account and sync to your team through Apple’s infrastructure. We never see them. That’s privacy by architecture, not by promise.
- No tracking your people around town. CrewKeeper notes arrival and departure at the jobsite, inside a small zone around the project pin. Between sites, it isn’t following anyone. Crews deserve that — and trust is worth more than surveillance.
- The crew pays nothing. One subscription covers the whole team. Your guys accept an invitation and go to work.
Tested the only way that counts
These apps didn’t launch out of a demo account. My own crews have been running them on real jobs, every working day, for years — real timesheets, real inspections, real proposals sent from the hood of a truck. When something broke, it broke on my jobs first, and it got fixed by the guy whose company needed it fixed.
That’s the whole pitch, really. This isn’t software built for contractors by people who’ve watched contractors. I am one. I built the tools I needed, and now they’re on the App Store for you.
Your new office has a tailgate.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology