Story
Built by the trade, not for the trade.
This system did not start in a product meeting. It grew up inside a working union subcontractor over fifty years — and we rebuilt it, penny-exact, so subs like it can run on it too.
A contractor first, a software shop by accident.
The contractor behind this system — a 90-year-old union wall-and-ceiling contractor in Southern California — has been in the trade since 1932. Ninety years of union wall-and-ceiling work: prevailing-wage jobs, apprentice ratios, retention held for years, change orders argued line by line. Everything the software later had to handle, it handled first with a pencil and a payroll clerk.
It wrote its own payroll ERP — before that was a category.
In 1975 the contractor built its first in-house payroll system, and from then on ran the business on software it owned. Not a package it configured — software written around how union specialty work actually gets billed and paid.
That is the difference the whole product turns on. Union fringe, garnishment balances, certified-payroll reports and burdened job cost were not features bolted on for a market. They were the reason the software existed.
Fifty years of iteration on real jobs.
Software that runs a real contractor gets corrected by reality every week. Fifty years of pay runs, audits, GC disputes and DLSE requests wore the sharp edges off it.
By the time we rebuilt it, it was carrying roughly 500 paychecks a week, $40M in receivables, $11M in retention and more than 3,300 jobs — through the full union and public-works compliance grind, on every one.
Modern web — proven penny-exact before anyone switched.
The original author was heading for retirement and the system was desktop-bound. We rebuilt it as a modern web application — works on a phone in the field, on a browser in the office.
The rule for the rebuild was simple: it had to match the old books to the penny before it replaced them. We ran the new system in parallel against fifty years of history and reconciled the numbers until they were identical. Nobody switched on a promise.
The team that did the rebuild — now productizing it.
We are the people who rebuilt that system and reconciled it against the old books. We are now turning it into a product other union specialty subcontractors can run on, and onboarding a small number of founding customers to shape it.
“Built for the trade” is a marketing claim anyone can make. “Built by the trade” means the compliance depth was paid for in real audits before it was ever sold — and that is the part you cannot fake into a demo.
See what fifty years of iteration looks like.
A walkthrough runs on your jobs, your trades and your payroll — so you can judge the depth against your own operation, not a script.
45 minutes on your real workflows — not a slide deck.