Houston, TX · Working across Texas
We build the software that gets a tag from the field into your billing without anyone retyping it, and checks it against the contract before it goes out. Custom, for Texas industrial and specialty trade contractors, and built to be used by a crew at 6am.
Flagged Material rate is 18% above the schedule in the governing contract. Held for review before it reaches the GC, not after they short-pay it.
The leak
They are right. Across trade and industrial contractors, the gap between finishing work and collecting for it is measured in weeks, and almost all of it is document handling. Here is where it goes.
Paper rides around for days
Call it a T&M tag, a field ticket or an extra work order. Work finishes Tuesday. The paper reaches the office Friday, gets keyed Monday, bills Wednesday. Industry research puts the full cycle from work performed to authorized change order at nearly seven weeks.
Billed work becomes bad debt
Seventy-seven percent of specialty contractors have written off change order work as bad debt. Work that was performed, billed, and never recovered. Not disputed on the merits. Lost on documentation.
Rates drift from the contract
The governing agreement says one number. The tag says another. Nobody catches it until the customer does, and by then it is a short-pay you will spend a month arguing about.
Everything is re-keyed by hand
Somebody in the office retypes what the field already wrote down. Twice, if it also has to land in the accounting system and the customer’s portal.
You already bought software for this
The average contractor runs 6.3 disconnected platforms and 92% say they would rather have one. Around seventy percent of construction ERP implementations fail outright. The tools exist. They are not where the work happens.
You have almost certainly bought software for this already. The crew routed around it inside a two weeks, because it was built for the office and handed to the field.
What we build
We start with field tickets because the money is easiest to see there. The rest of this list is the same problem in different clothing, and we build all of it.
T&M tags and change orders
Capture the tag where the work happened, with signature and photographs. Line items priced against the contract, submitted the same day, and tracked until somebody approves it.
Field tickets to invoice
Handwritten and photographed tickets become structured line items, checked against the governing agreement, and queued for one-screen approval instead of retyping.
The layer between your systems
Your accounting system, your customer’s portal, the field app somebody bought in 2021, and the spreadsheet that actually runs the business. We build the connective tissue nobody sells, because it is different in every building.
Bid, RFQ and submittal drafting
A 180-page package lands Thursday and pricing is due Monday. We build the tool that reads it, finds what changed since the last one, and drafts from your own prior work.
Contract and compliance review
Rate schedules, insurance limits, indemnity terms and certified payroll requirements pulled out of executed agreements, so nobody reads a contract to answer one question.
How to engage us
A working call, not a discovery call. You describe one process. We tell you where the money is going, whether software can reach it, and what it would take. Most people who book this do not become clients, which is the point. It is how you find out cheaply.
One workflow, mapped and costed. You end the week holding a working prototype running on your own documents, the arithmetic behind what the process costs you today, and a fixed quote to build it.
The production tool, deployed into your cloud tenant on your API keys. Fixed price, billed against milestones, and covered by a 90 day defect warranty from handover. Your data never leaves your environment and there is no seat license waiting for you next year.
Monitoring, model and vendor API changes absorbed before they reach you, defect fixes, and a quarterly accuracy report. This is what we recommend for most companies. It works out to about a fifth of the build a year, which is the normal rate for keeping software working.
Everything above, plus a named engineer, an agreed allowance for changes, monthly accuracy review, and new work as your process moves. Worth it while the workflow is still moving. Most companies do not need it, and we will say so.
Most engagements stop after the Audit if the arithmetic does not support a build. That is a real outcome, not a sales formality. You keep the prototype and the analysis either way.
Why us
Built for people wearing gloves
Forty-seven percent of contractors say the hardest part of new technology is getting anyone to use it, ahead of cost and ahead of integration. Software gets abandoned when it is built for the office and handed to the field. We design for the person on site, on the phone they carry, with the signal they actually have.
It fits what you already run
We are not asking you to replace your accounting system, rip out a platform, or run a seventh login. We build the layer that connects what is already in the building. That is work no product company can sell you, because it differs in every building.
We build. We do not advise.
There is no deck at the end of a Thrive engagement. There is software your team logs into. Strategy work is cheap to produce and easy to ignore; working tools are neither.
Your cloud, your keys, your code
Everything runs inside your own AWS, Azure or Google tenant, billed to your accounts. You own the source outright. No seat licenses, no revenue share, nothing to renegotiate in two years.
Fixed price, fixed scope
You get a number before we start and it does not move. Hourly billing rewards the wrong things, and you have been on the wrong end of it before.
What we will not claim
Thrive Development is a working software firm. We have shipped production systems and full applications for years. We have not yet published a named contractor case study, so you will not find one invented here. When there is one, it will have a company on it that you can phone.
The four engagements on our work page are marked representative, which means the workflow is real and the numbers are modeled. So do not take them as proof. Take this instead: inside the Audit week we build a working prototype on your own documents, before you commit to anything larger. That is harder to fake than a testimonial.
Working with us
Questions about insurance, security or contracting go straight to contact@thrivedevelopment.io. We reply to everything within one business day, including the enquiries we are not the right firm for.