How it works
Five steps. The first two cost you nothing, and you can stop after either one without a conversation about it.
Most of what goes wrong in a software project goes wrong before anybody writes anything, because the person building it never saw how the company actually runs. So that is where this starts, and it stays there longer than you would expect.
Twenty-five questions about how your company runs, scored across eight areas, with the arithmetic shown. No email wall and nothing to unlock — the contact page at the end is optional. You get your results on screen whether or not you ever speak to us, and it is yours to keep either way.
Straight up: this is a sales call. We go through how you actually run, job by job. By the end you will have seen what a system for your company would look like — your name on it, your workflow, your own jobs on the screen — and you will know what it costs.
A written report on your operation, built out of the numbers you gave us on the call, and next to it a proposal: the shape of the system, shown on screens that already exist rather than described in the abstract, and what it would cost to build and to run.
Both are free and both are yours to keep. If the answer is that you should not spend the money this year, the report still tells you where the operation is leaking, and you can act on that with us or without us.
It starts with a specification: the jobs you run, the fields you actually use, the numbers you need out the other end. That document is what gets built from, and it is the reason the result is your system rather than a template with your logo on it.
Then it gets built, on your own domain. Before anything depends on it we run it next to what you have now, on real jobs, and fix what the first real week turns up — because the first real week always turns up something. Only after that does it become the thing the company runs on.
Three to six weeks is the usual range, from a signed specification to a system your company is working in. What moves it is scope: how many of the parts only your company has, and how much of your existing data has to come across. Your proposal commits to actual dates against your actual scope — the range is what to plan around until you have one.
A monthly plan that covers hosting, backups, security updates and a stated number of changes a month. You will want the changes: nobody knows exactly how they want a system to work until they have used the first version through a busy month.
Every build comes with a standing call. What you need gets scoped and sized on that call, and what your plan covers goes out in the next release.
Sized, not estimated. A change is small, medium or large depending on what has to move in the system — whether it needs a new screen, whether it changes what the system stores — rather than on how many hours somebody says it will take. All three are defined on the pricing page, with the test for each and real examples, so you can work out which one you are asking for before you ask.
The question everybody asks first
Nobody wants to hear a confident answer to this, because a confident answer means the person giving it has not looked. What comes out of AccuLynx or JobNimbus or CompanyCam varies enormously, and the only way to know what yours holds is to open it. So that happens early, and before you are asked to commit to anything.
Before the proposal, not after. Every one of those systems will produce a file. What is in it is the whole question, and it is a question with your name on it rather than a general one we can answer in advance.
What comes across clean — customers, jobs, addresses, invoices. What comes across partially — photos that arrive without knowing which job they belong to, notes that arrive without an author. And what does not come across at all, because the export simply leaves it out. Every system leaves something out.
Including the third one. If your 2019 photos are not coming, you read that before you sign rather than finding it in month two. It is the least pleasant paragraph in the document and the one most worth writing.
Through the week the new system runs alongside it on real jobs. Do not cancel the old subscription before then. It costs one more month and it removes the only genuinely frightening part of switching — that you press go and your history is gone.
The honest part
After the evaluation, with your score and nothing else. After the sixty minutes, with the written report and no obligation. Both of those are real endings, not a funnel with a polite face on it — a roofing company that is running fine on what it has does not need us, and finding that out in fifteen minutes is a better outcome for both of us than finding it out in month three.
A conversation about how your company runs, with no proposal attached to it. You can stop after it, and most of what you work out is yours either way.
Step one on this page is the evaluation, and it is the one to start with. Book the call instead if you would rather skip to the conversation.