I have watched a lot of general contractors win work. The good ones are good in the room. They walk the property with the owner, look at what is actually there, ask the two questions nobody else asked, and leave with a handshake and a start date. That part they are built for.
Then the second job starts, and it is the one nobody got into contracting for.
The second job
The estimate gets written on the hood of the truck, from notes and memory, and typed up that night. It goes out as an attachment, and then it sits, because the client is not sure how to say yes to a PDF. A week of phone tag later, the job is on.
Now the crew is working, and the client has one question, every day, in some form: how is it going over there? So the contractor calls the foreman. The foreman texts back three photos. The contractor forwards two of them to the client with "Looking good, more tomorrow." Multiply that by every client, every day, for the length of the job.
At the end, the invoice gets built from the estimate and a memory of which deposit was paid when, then typed one more time into QuickBooks. Nobody is quite sure which photos went to the client and which did not.
None of it is hard. All of it is constant, and it lands on the one person who also has to go find the next job. I decided that was the problem worth solving, and it is why we built SquareKeeper Works the way we did.
Getting the project going
I decided the quote had to be something you can send from the driveway.
So you write it on your phone, line by line, before you pull away from the walk-through. You send it, and the client reviews it and accepts it online with a typed signature. No printing, no attachment sitting in a drafts folder, no chasing a signature across three text threads. The project is started while the conversation is still warm.
Where it gets good: your crew's day, as it happens
This is the part I care about most.
Your crew joins Works with a code you give them. No accounts to create, no passwords to reset, and we never charge per person, on any plan. At the site, they take photos in the app and add a caption when there is something to say. It works with no signal, so a basement or a framed-up second floor does not slow anyone down; the photos upload when the phone finds a connection. Every photo is logged with the date, the time and who took it. The checklist your crew checks off lives in the same app, so the punch list is not on a legal pad in the truck.
All of it lands in one place, sorted by job. From the next site over, or from the truck, you see the day's work the way the crew saw it. You know how the job is going before the client asks.
And then to the client, without retyping a word
We made the report build itself from those photos and captions, with your logo on it. Pick the kind you need, Job Start, Progress or Completion, read it over, add a line if you want, and send it. The client gets a clean PDF by email and a live link that stays up as long as your account does. Send a Progress report every week and the client has the whole job, in order, without asking for any of it.
A client who gets Thursday's photos on Thursday does not text you Friday morning. That is the whole trick. The updates the client wanted were always there, in your crew's phones. Works carries them the rest of the way.
Why this is really about the relationship
Client relationships go bad in the silence. Not because the work was bad, but because for days at a time the client could not see it, and had to decide on their own whether to worry.
Works fills the silence with the work itself. The client sees what your crew saw, dated, with your name on it. If anyone later asks what was done and when, the answer is already on the client's page and on yours. And the conversation at the end of the job is about the next one, not about what happened in week three.
English and Spanish, on the same job
Plenty of the crews I know work in Spanish while the client reads in English, or the other way around, so I decided Works had to run in both languages from day one. Each person on the crew uses the app in their own. The report goes out in English or Spanish, whichever you choose for that client. The caption gets written the way the crew talks and read the way the client reads.
From the accepted quote to the money
On your Works dashboard, the accepted quote becomes the invoice. Bill a deposit up front and the balance when the work is done, with a due date on every invoice. You record each payment as it comes in and send a reminder if one runs late, and the PDF is stamped PAID once it is settled. If your books are in QuickBooks Online, Works syncs your clients, invoices and payments with them, so nothing gets typed twice.
Affordable on purpose
We made it affordable (see the pricing here) so that more contractors would have access, whether you are a one-person company or have a crew behind you. I did not want the price to be the reason the second job keeps getting done by hand.
The point
We built Works so the second job gets smaller and the client relationship gets better, at the same time, from the same photos. If you are a general contractor who would rather be on the site than in the inbox, start free and run your next job in it.