A site work company outgrows its spreadsheets

A dozen sheets and no one true list

Each sheet made sense when someone made it. Then the company grew. Now the office spends the first hour of the day asking which sheet is the latest.

• Two people edit two copies of the job list, and the changes never meet.
• The equipment list says a machine is in the yard. It’s been on a job for a week.
• The crew list is out of date, so the call goes to the wrong person.
• Every Friday, someone copies hours from one sheet into another for payroll.

The crews never open the sheets at all. They get a text, or they call the office and wait.

Half an hour a day, times six

Nobody in the office would call it a job, but it adds up. The count below is an example for an office of six, not a measured result, so put in your own numbers.

Picture 6 people in the office, each spending 30 minutes a day on the sheets. They hunt for the latest one, fix a copy or type the same thing twice. That’s 15 hours a week, almost two full workdays, spent keeping sheets in step.

Why off the shelf wasn’t enough

Standard Krew Point covers most of their day: the calendar, clocking in, payroll, trucks, stock and checklists. But this company tracks things most companies don’t.

• A utility locate ticket for every dig, with the date it runs out.
• Machine hours, not just miles, for the excavators and the loader.
• Loads hauled off each job, by truck.
• A safety checklist the crew lead signs off before anyone digs.

With a regular app, all of that would stay in a side sheet, and side sheets are how they got here. So they chose a custom build.

A build around how they work

A custom build starts with everything Krew Point does today. Then we build what the company needs: its own fields on each job, its own checklists, steps and approvals, and the reports the owner wants to print or download.

The company also gets a dedicated specialist, one person who knows their setup. When the owner wants to track something new, the specialist builds it in. New features and updates come through that person too, along with help with the office app and the crew app. Support covers the Krew Point system, not their own website.

Their crews get their own app in the App Store and Google Play, with the company’s name, logo and colors. It’s part of the build, not the point of it.

Moving in is part of the job

The biggest worry was the move. Twelve sheets, sixty people and a yard of machines don’t move themselves. So we do it with them.

• Their systems: we bring the jobs, the lists and the paper forms over from the sheets.
• Their equipment: every truck, trailer and machine, with its service dates.
• Their people: the crew list and who sees what, so crews never see prices or pay.
• Their training: short guides for the office and the crew, and time with each crew lead.

When a crew needs someone, they find the right person in the company phone list and tap to call or text. Anyone can hide their own number.

One list, the same on every phone

There is one job list, and it’s the one the crews see on their phones. Machine hours, locate tickets and loads live on the job they belong to. Hours come in from the phones, so Friday is approve, lock and download the payroll file.

When the owner wants loads hauled off by job, or machine hours for the month, it’s a report to print or download, not an afternoon of copying cells.

The old sheets get saved in a folder, just in case. A month later, nobody has opened them.