Built for the realities of Builders.

Four jobs at once is the normal week

A building firm with eight on the books is rarely running one job. It is running an extension in its third week, a bathroom that finishes Friday, a survey on Tuesday and a quote that needs pricing by the weekend, with different crews, different subbies and different payment stages on each. The whole plan usually lives in one head, and that head also has to drive somewhere.

Crews and sites sit together on one rota. Who is where this week is a screen rather than three phone calls, and when Monday moves, everything that depends on Monday moves with it in front of you instead of behind you.

The record follows the work. Photographs, notes and signatures are held against the job, so the stage sign-off, the covered-up detail and the thing the customer later swears was never discussed are all in one place. On a build, that is worth more the longer the job runs.

The subbie coin flip

Every builder carries a private ranking of who actually turns up. It is usually accurate and it is entirely in the memory of one person, which means it cannot be handed to anyone else and it quietly forgives whoever was most recently charming.

Every worker carries a reliability record built from jobs accepted, completed and missed. You see the pattern rather than remember it, and you decide what to do about it. Nothing is automatic and nobody is dismissed by a number: it is a record you now have instead of an impression you used to carry.

It also settles a conversation that otherwise never happens. A subbie who believes they get the worst of the work can see the same record you can, which is a far better footing than the two of you disagreeing from memory.

Deposits, which your customers already expect

Building is one of the few trades where a deposit is not a new idea to the customer. Nobody starts an extension without money up front, and every homeowner who has had work done knows it. That makes this the easiest trade on the whole site to introduce card deposits into, because you are formalising a habit rather than inventing one.

The deposit is taken at the moment of booking, straight into your own Stripe account. No platform wallet, no waiting for a payout, no per-lead fee. For the smaller work that fills the gaps between the big jobs, the survey, the small repair, the day of snagging, it is the difference between a booking and a maybe.

For the large jobs, the deposit at booking is the first stage, not the whole arrangement. Your staged payments continue exactly as your contract sets them out.

The paperwork, said honestly

Building work drags a long paper trail behind it: site inductions, cards and tickets, the electrical or gas element notified by whoever is competent to notify it, and photographs of everything that later gets plastered over.

OptiTech Automation keeps the job records, the photographs and the dates around that work, and it reminds you before dated documents lapse. It does not notify Building Control and it does not issue a certificate. Those stay with the competent person and the body that has always done them, exactly as now, and any system that suggests otherwise is selling you something it cannot deliver.

One flat price

OptiTech Automation starts at £199 a month plus a one-off £129 on the Start-up Stage, covering up to five workers. Standard is £599 a month plus a one-off £249 for up to fifteen, and Growth is £1,749 a month plus a one-off £999 for up to thirty. Flat within your stage: not per user, not per lead, not per site. Take on four labourers for a summer and the bill does not move until you change stage.

There is no contract. Cancel any month with 30 days notice and take your data with you as CSV.

Who this is not for

The honest note, and for builders it is a real one. This is not project management software. There is no critical path, no dependency chain and no programme chart. If your firm prices and runs work from a programme, and the question you need answered every morning is which task is blocking which, you need a different tool and you should keep using it.

What this does is the other half: the bookings, the crews on the rota, the deposits, the job records and the invoices that follow. Plenty of building firms run a programme for the big builds and nothing at all for everything else, and it is the everything else that leaks. If that is your week, this is built for it.

And if you are a sole trader with a paper diary, two long jobs a year and no plan to hire, a monthly bill will not earn its keep yet. Come back when the first employee starts.