The crew app
The crew app that keeps working when the signal does not.
Your crew opens their day on their own phones: the route, the stop they are on, the notes for it, the checklist, and done. It works offline by design, because a back yard behind a treeline is not an edge case in this trade.
$297/month, per company, unlimited users, no per-seat pricing. Month to month. Cancel anytime. No setup fee.
The real software on a phone, recorded against a demo landscaping company. Every figure on screen is theirs and the company is fictitious.
Most crew software fails the same way: it assumes a connection.
Field apps are built and tested in offices, where the signal is five bars and the wifi is behind it. The crew uses it in a river bottom, behind a house, under trees, in a metal building, forty minutes outside town. When the app needs the network to show the next stop, it shows a spinner, and the crew goes back to the group text.
That is the whole reason much of this trade is still run off a group text. Not that the crew will not use software, but that they tried and it did not work where the work is.
Offline is the default, not a recovery mode.
The crew app holds the day. It shows the route, the stop, the notes and the checklist with no connection at all, and takes what they mark done. When the phone finds signal again it syncs, and the office sees it.
Nobody has to know they are offline and nobody has to do anything differently when they are. That is the test: a crew should not have to think about the network to use the thing that tells them where to go.
One screen per stop, because that is how the day is actually worked.
The crew is not browsing a dashboard. They are at a house, doing a thing, and then driving to the next one. The app gives them the stop they are on: the address, the scope, what the customer asked for last time, the checklist, and a way to mark it done.
What they mark done is the same record the office is looking at, so the day closes as it happens rather than being reported at five o’clock by somebody reconstructing it from memory.
And the owner can run it from the truck.
You can create a client, write a quote, start a job or send an invoice from your phone, and you get pushed the moment a quote is approved. The office is not a place any more, which matters most on the days you never get back to it.
There is nothing to clock into. Platy does not track time and nothing in it clocks a crew in or out, so the app asks the crew for the one thing it needs, which is whether the work is done.
What the crew gets.
Shipped, and recorded above against a demo company.
- The day’s route on their own phone, one stop at a time
- The notes and the checklist for the stop they are on
- Offline by design, syncing when the signal comes back
- The same day the office is looking at, updated as it happens
- Nothing to clock into and no timesheet to fill in
- Unlimited users, so the whole crew is on it at no extra cost
Questions owners ask
What happens with no signal?
Does every crew member need a paid seat?
Does it track hours or clock them in?
Do they need a company phone?
What does the office see while the crew is working?
The rest of the same system
Platy is one system, so none of these is a separate product or a separate bill. They are the other jobs the same software is doing while it does this one.
Scheduling and routing
Book the visit, assign the crew, and the day orders itself into a loop the truck can drive.
Client relations
The customer record is the work, plus texting and a login of their own.
The whole system
What it looks like when quoting, the schedule, the crew, invoicing and the books are one piece of software.
Put one crew on it for a week.
One crew, one route, five days. If it survives a week of real back yards, it will survive the rest of them.