Every step of the paper process leaks
Most maintenance businesses that still run on paper know exactly what it costs them. The sheet goes out with the engineer, gets filled in on site, and travels back to the office at the end of the week — or does not. Then someone types it into Excel.
Each step loses something:
- Handwriting is ambiguous, and the person who wrote it is on another job by the time anyone tries to read it
- Sheets get lost, and with them the record that the work was done
- The office works from old information, several days behind what is actually happening in the field
- Queries arrive late. By the time someone asks what happened on a job, the engineer has moved on and has to remember it
None of this is anybody being careless. The process makes the right thing slow, so the right thing happens late.
Why the office side was never the hard part
Putting job records into a database is not difficult. Plenty of products will do it, and if one of them fits the way your engineers work, use it — we would rather tell you that than build you a copy.
The hard part is the other end. Engineers work in plant rooms, basements and lift shafts, where a phone signal is a hope rather than a fact. An app that needs a connection to save a job sheet will lose job sheets. And an app that asks an engineer with dirty hands to fill in twelve fields on a phone will get the paper version back within a month.
What we build
An installable, mobile-first web app. Engineers add it to their phone home screen: no app store, no managed devices, no rollout project. The constraints drive the design rather than the other way round:
- It works on a bad connection or none, keeps the job sheet on the phone, and reconciles with the office when the signal comes back
- It is usable one-handed, on a phone, by someone who wants to get back to the job — short, sensible inputs rather than a form to wade through
- It produces a record the office can rely on without anyone re-keying it
The office gets what it never had with paper: what was done, when, by whom, and what state the job is in — while the engineer is still on site rather than at the end of the week.
From there the rest of the process can follow. Completed jobs can flow into reporting, invoicing or client updates rather than being copied across by hand; process automation covers that side. If the Excel file the sheets end up in has become a system in its own right, replacing it is often part of the same project.
The evidence
For a field maintenance operation, a job sheet app replaced the paper and Excel process. It is live and in daily use, with 906 commits between June and August 2026.
To be straight about it: this one was not a solo build. We were the lead contributor rather than the only one, with around 400 of those commits ours. The parts we owned were the offline behaviour and the data model underneath it — the bits that decide whether an app like this survives contact with a basement.
Job sheets rarely stand alone: the rest of the work tends to live in the office, in estimating, scheduling and project management. The construction page covers that side.
Price and ownership
Fixed price, off a scope agreed in writing before anything is built. Engagements start from £4,000, and most first builds of a real business system land between £8,000 and £15,000. A deposit is taken before work starts, and payments follow milestones.
The code, hosting and accounts are set up in your name as the work goes. If you later want someone else to maintain it, they can, without asking us.
The engineering is done by one senior engineer, who scopes it, writes it and deploys it. If you need an on-call rota covering the field around the clock, that is not us, and you will hear that on the first call.
If your engineers still hand in paper, get in touch and tell us how a job sheet moves through the business today.