Software for utility and underground construction.

Easement runs the office side of a job and puts field tools in the crew’s pocket, and it’s built around flexibility. Every feature turns on or off, so a company runs the parts it needs and switches off the rest. The crew opens the app, sees the day’s work, records what they built, and measures what they installed, with or without a signal. The office lays out the work, watches where it stands, and pulls the report an inspector asks for. It was designed and built by someone who owns a utility contracting business that’s been doing utility work since 1976.

The two halves

The office runs on a dashboard on a computer and can be accessed through a phone’s browser. It holds a company’s jobs in one place, the projects and the people on them, the schedule, and the paperwork each job produces. A manager builds the work, hands it to a crew, and reads what comes back.

The field runs on a phone app downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. A crew sees the day’s work, takes the required photos, records what they finished, and measures what they built. It keeps working when the signal drops, which is most of the day on a real site, and it catches up the moment coverage comes back.

Built into everything

A few things aren’t features you turn on. They’re just how the app works.

It works with no signal. The field app records photos, tasks and measurements underground and syncs the moment coverage returns. Nothing waits on a bar of service.

Every crew screen is in English and Spanish. The person using the phone picks their language. The office reads the same records either way.

Photos ride on the work.A task can require its before and after photos, the crew shoots them in the app, and they file themselves under the job and work task for easy identification. The office sees the whole gallery and can download a project’s photos in one zip. Photos taken in the app come off the crew’s phone once they upload, so a phone doesn’t fill up with job site photos.

You decide who can do what. The owner admin builds user types with a plain checklist of authorities, so an estimator sees money and a crew member never does. You name the user types and set up teams named whatever you call them, like Service Department, Construction Crew, or Drivers. The app gets set up however you already operate, and you use the terms your company is already accustomed to using.

You turn on the parts you use and switch the rest off, so the app only shows what your company actually does. The list below is everything it can do. Most companies run a slice of it.

How we build it, and how it’s usually built

Most job-site software is built by people who have never done the work, and it shows.

Everything it does

The work you do

The kinds of work a company actually performs.

Paving and pours.Record a concrete, asphalt or gravel area in the field, group the cuts into truck loads, give each pour its day, and mark it poured. A pour becomes its own task the day it’s scheduled.

Manhole takeoffs. Record the pipe connections, drops and depths at a structure, and the app draws the to-scale build sheet the precast supplier builds from. No more marking up a paper diagram by hand.

Material ordering. The sizes measured in the field, rings and lids, inflow protectors, grade rings, add up on their own into what to order.

Locate tickets.File a locate ticket against work, and the app reminds you before the dig date and again before it expires. Releasing a batch of work warns you if a ticket is missing or expired first. The dates are then stored on the work task so the crew doing the excavation knows when it’s clear to dig. This app does not request locate tickets. It simply has a reminder that can be turned off.

Recurring work. Set a schedule and the app makes the tasks on its own, every Monday, every other week, or monthly, and drops them on the right crew.

Route planner and map pins.Put a day’s jobs in driving order for each crew, and drop, move, rename and note the map pins for a job. Download a job’s pins to a spreadsheet or a map file and load them back in.

Deliveries and pickups.Put a delivery or a pickup on the calendar, give it a driver, and mark it received. A customer signs for an outgoing delivery on the driver’s phone, and the ticket emails itself.

What crews send in

The office lists for what a crew files from a phone.

Requests and problems. A crew asks for material or reports something broken from their phone, with photos. The office marks it ordered, fulfilled or resolved.

Property damage.A crew files damage they did to somebody’s property, a fence, a sprinkler line, a driveway, with photos and a map pin, so it’s on record the day it happens.

Plan changes from the field.A crew reports the plan doesn’t match the ground. The office approves it, denies it, or cancels the task, ticks it onto the customer’s report, and, on a priced job, turns it into a change order.

Observation reports. The sewer inflow-and-infiltration and improper-utility filings, given to the people who fill them out.

Safety inspections. The daily excavation inspection, the confined-space entry record, and the Job Safety Analysis with crew signatures, filled out on the phone.

Job threads. A discussion thread on any job or filing, so a question and its answer stay with the record instead of getting lost in a text message.

People, gear and materials

Who works, what they run, and what they use.

Crews and teams. Name a team, add the people on it, name a lead, and hand work to the whole team at once.

Timesheets and payroll. Read the pay period day by day, fix a punch, tag a clock-in to a job, approve the period, and download the payroll files for Gusto or QuickBooks. The crew clocks in and out from the phone.

Equipment list.The machines the company owns, the filter and part numbers each one takes, what’s been done to each, and the service reminders set on them.

Equipment inspections.Send the full inspection checklist to whoever runs the machine. A “no” answer files an equipment problem with its photo automatically.

Materials and inventory.List the materials you track, name where stock is kept, count what’s on hand, and set running-low reminders. Finishing work that uses material draws it down on its own.

Money

Pricing, invoicing, and the sheets a customer or a city is billed from. None of this ever reaches a crew phone.

Estimates and pricing. Bid a job line by line and award it onto the schedule. Cost rates and assemblies build every price. Job Cost shows what a job was estimated to cost against what it has actually cost.

Billing.Invoice a job from what the field installed. The page shows what was estimated, what’s installed, what’s been billed to date, and what’s left to bill, and records each payment as it comes in.

Quantity tracker for jobs.How much of each bid line was installed in a period, times the contract’s unit price, the sheet a government pay estimate is keyed from. The app does the arithmetic. A person signs it.

Documents you send out

The paperwork a company produces for a customer, an engineer, or a file.

Record sheets and inspector reports.A finished task turns into a printed work record, and the daily or weekly customer report emails itself to the people on the list. An inspector report never carries a crew member’s name.

Submittals.Attach the material spec pages an engineer requires to the kind of work they apply to, once, and send a job’s whole set to the engineer in one go. Winning the next job that uses those specs costs no submittal work at all.

Safety documents.Attach your own SDS and JSA sheets to the kind of work they apply to, reachable from the task on the crew’s phone.

Project sharing.An engineer sends a copy of a project’s locations and specs to a contractor, who builds their own work tasks on it. No money crosses the channel in either direction. A contractor can ask the engineer a question and the answer comes back on the record.

Contact

Manifold, LLC
13499 S 49th W Ave, Sapulpa, OK 74066
support@manifold-apps.com