Is there a market for bespoke trade apps?

[PlumbingLondon]

Hi All,

Last year, whilst working for a plumbing firm, we managed our team and office with a web and mobile app. Rather than use anything off the shelf, I built my own system using with an app building software. Think Wix/Wordpress but for apps and a lot more complicated. This worked out a lot cheaper than the ready made options available and crucially it could be customised at will to suit our needs. A little breakdown of how it worked;

Scheduling

• Diary management for jobs and internal meetings
• Scheduled jobs created a draft invoice with all known details
• All diary entries linked to invoices for traceability

Invoicing

• Sub-contractor invoiced the customer on site; using a form to select the rate and hours + logging material receipts
• Different invoices are produced depending on wether the firm the customer is in the trade or a normal home owner, taking into account VAT and CIS respectively
• Material markups are calculated based on standard rate and can also be over ridden
• Submitting an invoice triggers email to customer with attached invoices. A second invoice between the sub-contractor and our company is simulatenously logged
• Automatically push to bookkeeping software e.g. quickbooks
• All calcs are done by the app including pay for engineer, CIS breakdown, profit per job etc.
• Subcontractors can view their pay for a given job as well as download the internal invoices for their own accounting needs.

Expenses

• Internal expenses and sub-contractor expenses can be logged with photos
• Report shows status of claims. Completed claims can be downloaded by subcontractor for their own company records.

Out of Hours

• Team can show if there are on call for a given night or weekend
• After hours employees or virtual reception service accesses app to manage jobs and send engineers to site.

Other features that were discussed;

• Inventory management for van stock
• Holiday requests with approvals

I've deployed similar systems for other non-trade business but I think it would be a really great model for other trade firms. It doesnt have to look like the flow above; the whole point is that it's bespoke. I've seen the apps other teams are using and they seem to have a lot of limitations as they try to be a one size fits all. Plus you are at the mercy of the app provider if something goes wrong.

Look forward to your feedback.

 

[99jools]

We are just a couple of engineers so way too small to commission bespoke software. I have been looking at commercially available tools and finding they are not a good fit for our working practices so have been looking at developing something to meet our (way more modest) requirements. My (rather rusty) experience is is building desktop/server based systems and what is needed in this case is something cloud/app based as we have no facility for running and supporting our own server. Would be very interested in any advice re the tools you used.

 

[PlumbingLondon]

We are just a couple of engineers so way too small to commission bespoke software. I have been looking at commercially available tools and finding they are not a good fit for our working practices so have been looking at developing something to meet our (way more modest) requirements. My (rather rusty) experience is is building desktop/server based systems and what is needed in this case is something cloud/app based as we have no facility for running and supporting our own server. Would be very interested in any advice re the tools you used.

What limitations are you finding with the off the shelf products you've looked at?

 

[WC1]

I've had similar program written for a business I was involved with some time ago (not plumbing) we thought of selling it on but the number of potential customers was too small to make it worthwhile but if you can make it work its very much "money for old rope". Good luck.