Opinion Software/App Design - Basic Construction Timesheets

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NT.Thunder

NT.Thunder

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Anyone have any experience in building an App? I'm looking for a very basic day-works sheet application, preferably Android to run on tablets that can capture basic project costing information on a daily basis. I haven't been able to find anything suitable and what I want I think is very basic.

Looking for something compatible to the building & construction industry with the following functionality;
  • Project & client information (basic date ie project description, ID, location, contact details
  • Employee name/labour classification and work duration (start/finish times, hours cumulative)
  • materials used
  • Plant & equipment used
  • client signature/approval
Needs to be simple for tradesman to use with the ability to separate data each day but report cumulative on completion for invoicing. Would be great to have compatibility into MYOB but at this stage not a necessity.

There are a few software programs about but they are a little complex for what I want as I'm already running another program and don't need to duplicate things. I'm really lacking the day to day project cost capture.

Anyone have any experience on this sort of thing, costs to develop an app or know of something already in use. Any of you gooses make any money of this I'll be pissed also :)
 

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NT.Thunder said:
Thanks TradeDraft

Magpie Girl What are your thoughts on this?

I might actually be better going to an online based system over an IOS/Android app on advice from a couple of others.
Click to expand...
Although I have created an exceptionally wonderful App NT I didn't do the actual programming.
That's not my area of expertise.
My experience is they are extremely expensive to make, and difficult to promote and sell:)

I could suggest a couple of guys to speak to, although someone on here might be able to help in a more direct way.
 
NT.Thunder said:
Anyone have any experience in building an App? I'm looking for a very basic day-works sheet application, preferably Android to run on tablets that can capture basic project costing information on a daily basis. I haven't been able to find anything suitable and what I want I think is very basic.

Looking for something compatible to the building & construction industry with the following functionality;
  • Project & client information (basic date ie project description, ID, location, contact details
  • Employee name/labour classification and work duration (start/finish times, hours cumulative)
  • materials used
  • Plant & equipment used
  • client signature/approval
Needs to be simple for tradesman to use with the ability to separate data each day but report cumulative on completion for invoicing. Would be great to have compatibility into MYOB but at this stage not a necessity.

There are a few software programs about but they are a little complex for what I want as I'm already running another program and don't need to duplicate things. I'm really lacking the day to day project cost capture.

Anyone have any experience on this sort of thing, costs to develop an app or know of something already in use. Any of you gooses make any money of this I'll be pissed also :)
Click to expand...
I am a programmer in SAP, a tad bigger but same problems. For a friend of mine, I am doing technical support for a Mobile Apps into SAP.(ISEC7) so I got some street cred :)
You could also go hybrid. Instead of an dedicated app, have a webpage that can also be rendered on a mobile device.
Webpages can be loaded anywhere, anytime.
Good thing about that is you don't have to worry to much about people with an Iphone . Apps you have to put on the market place or distribute somehow.
But going back a steps. The kind of fields are not that interesting.
With the App, how do you want to collect the data? App is just the client, where do you want the data to be sent too? You got your own server or does it have to be sent to an email address?
A lot of those fields you mention should be coming out of a dropdown. When it comes to data entry, technicians are lazy and don't want to think too much about that. That normalises the input and speeds up the process for them too. That immediately begs the question, updates of those lookups you will get new project codes, materials, etc etc. And you don't want to pay another programmer to code that .
If you do want to enter free text, have you thought about validation? Project codes that doesn't exist, date notation where you can't figure out whether it is DD/MM or MM/DD. All sort of things.
For all that you are doing, why not send them a nicely formatted XLS sheet that they can print out. People can fill it on the tablet and on the PC.Have the dropdowns sourced from some data ranges on invisible tabs . Maintenance should be easy,anyone can do XLS. Apart from those ramblings, for development costs have a look at freelancer.com. You can post your requirements there, people can bid on it. Sniff around and see what kind of projects go around and what the bids are.
Apps are usually more complicated then you think to get it right. Especially if you are not familiar with software development.
 
lol just read the year it was posted originally, ah well

What you're asking for sounds simple but most software requests do.

There are a fair few software packages that do what you want but most come with hefty licensing iirc.

What you can do is put together a quality set of images of what you want each screen to look like and what data you want to capture (use an SQL type proper database at the backend) then go to o-desk or something similar and pay some Russian bugger all to write the app for you. If you get lucky and get a decent programmer.

My work write android and iOS apps integrated with our SAAS systems and we integrate with a multitude of accounting packages including MYOB classic and MYOB whatever they are calling their "online" version now. The internals of MYOB are horrendous by the way. One of our products could be made to work but it is really more of a sales and stock management system and only online and iOS at the moment. We do have other projects that would fit this nearly perfectly but it is most likely many months if not years away from completion and will be focused on govt contractors.

I do backend server side SQL stuff and level 2/3 support for our software not the writing (despite the boss asking, no programming for me thanks) so I can't do it for you myself but I can try and answer any questions you might have. Feel free to PM me.
 
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