I’ll go first. I’m building a system to have AI dig through years of my old supplier and labour invoices and back-calculate what my work actually costs — real unit rates pulled from jobs I’ve already done, not gut feel and a sharp pencil. Tested it on a few invoices so far and it works. Pulled the labour hours, tied them to the right cost codes, spit out a rate. Now the job is scaling it across the whole pile. The thing is, every contractor already has this data. It’s just buried in years of PDFs nobody ever opens again. Mining it turns estimating from guessing into pricing off your own history. Early days, but even those first few invoices had me realizing how much I’ve been leaving on the table. What are you building? Doesn’t have to be finished — what’s the project that’s got you going “if I can pull this off…”?

I've working as a Contract Administrator and Estimator for the last 2 years for a tier 2 concrete subcontractor. Let's connect if you are in the same industry.

I’ve been curious as to what project management software we are all using in this group? We were running Contractor Foreman from 2024- Oct 31 2025 when we switched to JobTread. So far been very impressed with JobTread!

Been heads down building out our full back-office automation stack at Ferguson Brothers and figured I'd share what's actually running (and what's still in progress). The three streams I'm working on: Stream 1 — Field time cards → productivity metrics Crew submits time cards in the field → routes into Notion → mapped against our cost code unit table → surfaces productivity rates by trade/task. Goal is to know our actual labour productivity so I can estimate from real numbers, not guesswork. Stream 2 — Billable receipts → job costing Any receipt that belongs on a job goes through a shared Google Drive folder structure (one folder per job) → automatically routed into JobTread as a cost → tagged and coded → shows up in the budget instantly. No more manual entry at end of week. Stream 3 — Overhead receipts → QBO direct Company expenses (materials, tools, subs that aren't job-specific) bypass JobTread and go straight to QuickBooks. Keeps the books clean without cluttering job records. The backbone of all three is Claude + JobTread MCP — Claude has live read/write access to JobTread so I can query job data, build estimates, review budgets, and push records without switching screens. Still building but the architecture is pretty much locked. Happy to go deeper on any of it. What are you building? (written with the help, guidance and tutelage of Claude).

Honest question for the group across all sectors — residential, commercial, industrial: How do you actually get your leads- p.s. yes this was written with the help of AI! I run a high-end residential Carpentry and aspiring GC outfit based out of North Vancouver (BC), and almost everything for us comes through referrals — past clients, GC’s, realtors, architects, the occasional sub who passes a name along. It works, but it’s unpredictable. Some weeks the phone won’t stop, then it goes quiet and there’s not much I can do to turn it back on. Curious what’s actually working for people. Not sure if there’s a voting function but, at least tell me the story behind it in the comments and we can dive deeper! What’s your #1 lead source? • Word of mouth / referrals • Repeat & commercial clients • Online (website, content, social) • Paid ads (Google, Meta) • Referral partnerships with trades/contractors • Other What I really want to know is whether your pipeline is steady or feast-or-famine like mine. If someone’s figured out the steady part, tell me how you did it. Cheers!