Why I built TradesTimer
A while back I watched a guy at church show his buddy the notebook where he keeps his hours. Every tradesman knows that notebook. I still have my own — pages in old spiral-bounds full of dates, addresses, and hours from my years working for contractors. Paper works. But it takes discipline and focus, and some nights you forget. When you forget, you lose money — not "productivity" money, real invoice money.
I spent years on the tools: cedar fence builds (panel and stick-built), framing, renos — plumbing, electrical, cabinetry, more IKEA kitchens with custom moulding than I can count — roofing, siding, deck building, concrete foundations and footings, drywall and taping, extension builds, and commercial, condo, and high-end residential painting.
Then I ran the back office for an electrical contractor with about ten guys on the road: orders, parts, invoices, and — you guessed it — the time tracking. Same problem at scale. A guy forgets to clock in, and now we're reconstructing his day from memory. Or he clocks into the wrong job. Or the office (me) hadn't set up the PO or job number yet, so his hours had nowhere to land. When I caught it same-day, fine. When I didn't, we ate the hours. And that shop had a full-time person chasing this stuff — most trades have nobody.
TradesTimer is the notebook that writes itself. Your phone already knows when you got to the jobsite and when you left; the app turns that into a timeline you review at invoice time. No timer to remember at 6:45 a.m., no job codes to pick from a dropdown, no office admin needed to clean it up after the fact.
— Ryder, founder