Live client system · S J Construction

The site knows. The office finds out three weeks later.

Material arrives short, labour is counted on a phone, and the only record of either is a photograph in a group chat. We build the ledger that closes the gap between what the site did and what the office can prove.

Why this sector

Construction operations fail at the handover points — truck to storekeeper, storekeeper to office, office to client invoice. Every one of those handovers is a place where a number changes and nobody notices. It is also the sector where a single mis-counted delivery is worth more than a month of software.

What it does

Mechanics, not features — each one is a number that either ties out or announces that it does not.

01

Delivery note versus counted

Two quantities on every delivery: what the supplier claimed and what was counted off the truck. The value is computed on the counted number, never the claim. On the live system this caught a cement delivery billed at 200 bags where 194 arrived — six bags, 3% of the load, that would otherwise have been paid for.

02

No silent zeros

The office sets rates, not the site — so a supervisor’s delivery arrives with the rate blank. Rather than valuing it at nought, the system falls back to the catalogue rate and raises a visible flag until someone confirms it.

03

Labour counted by trade

Masons, labourers and everyone else counted per day per site, each costed at its own rate. One row per day, not one row per worker — the difference between a form a supervisor fills in and one he ignores.

04

Contract position, not just cost

Material spend and labour cost roll up against the contract value, so the margin left on a job and the money still owed by the client are on the same screen as the progress photographs.

Live — this is the real system, not a screenshot

Put a number in that does not add up, and watch it get caught.

1 · The supervisor’s delivery form

The supervisor’s delivery form

This is a live Airtable view, not a screenshot. It loads from airtable.com, and Airtable sets its own cookies when it does. Nothing is requested until you press the button.

Open it on airtable.com instead

The live form, pinned in the group chat they already use. Nothing to install, no account needed.

2 · The ledger it writes to

The ledger it writes to

This is a live Airtable view, not a screenshot. It loads from airtable.com, and Airtable sets its own cookies when it does. Nothing is requested until you press the button.

Open it on airtable.com instead

Public sandbox on sample records — break it freely. Variance and amount are computed live.

What we sell here

In the order it matters. We do not lead with the word "automation" — it is the most crowded and worst-paid label on the board, and it describes the least valuable part of the job.

What we are not claiming

One client, named, contactable. We are not claiming a portfolio of construction firms — we are claiming this system, running, with the numbers above reproducible in it.

The other three

Tell us what your operation actually does.

Not what you want the software to do — what your team does today, and where the numbers stop being trustworthy. That conversation is free, and it usually decides whether Airtable is the right answer at all.

Last updated