Kim Tried… building an app for a small business

One of the reasons I decided to start this blog is that I always find myself learning something new. Sometimes, as with last night, it’s because I need to do something for one of our businesses, and there’s no money in the budget to hire someone. We needed an app. My husband and I own Lone Star General Contractors.

Currently three of our sons are our only employees, but we need a way to track their time and get daily job reports. We were using a weekly timesheet, then realized it didn’t have project information/tasks on it. Another option considered was switching to a Task List, and they could log their hours on it manually, but it seemed it might be too cumbersome – especially if they forget to check separate lists if we’re running multiple jobs. In the end, we decided on a combination daily timesheet integrated with a report. We (when I say we, I mean *I*) began to create the new one in Excel. One of our sons walked into the room, and my husband explained what we were doing, and the push back we received… argh. All three of them have been keeping their time in their phones, and transfer it to paper after the fact. The problem with that is that usually they keep track of which time goes to which job, but they will often forget to note what was being worked on that day.

We began to debate alternatives. My husband suggested using a pdf form. I could do forms for each child, daily, for an entire week, and save it to dropbox. They would then select the day and fill out the sheet for that day. But if they worked on more than one job? We could rely on them to open a form and do a File-Save as (this was nixed quickly, as we already knew they would forget).

Next, I began to do what I do… research! I researched apps out there for construction companies to use. There were a ton of great options, and some even included toolbox talks (my safety consultant’s heart loved that one), and other options that are frequently used by larger construction companies. But we aren’t large. And our budget doesn’t lean into those options, at least not yet. So again, I do what I do… off to Google to learn how difficult it would be to create a simple app for our small business with the forms that we need. There were a ton of options. Many were subscription-based (you’re usually paying for the templates), and there were a few free ones.

After reviewing several, I decided to try JotForms, and I got to work. I used this video to walk me through the basic steps, although honestly, once I got started, I paused the video and just figured it out from there (which is how I normally do things, for better or worse). 😛

Lone Star General Contractors‘ small business app isn’t the prettiest out there, and I know that I’ll be tweaking it often until I get it where I want it. But it’s functional, and it has our branding. Jotform branding is there because I went with the FREE account while I’m testing it. The free account provides full functionality and access to all of their templates, but there are some usage limits. I don’t expect that we’ll use more than those limits over the next month or so, so it will give us plenty of time to determine if this works for us or not.

You can see by the screen recording, what I created is really very basic. I created an app for our small business, using their templates and adjust to what I needed, with very little prior research, and having NEVER created an app, in about 2 hours.

So, that’s what Kim Tried recently… stay tuned for more! 🙂 If this is helpful to you, please leave me a comment. Like and Subscribe to my YouTube channel, and like my Page on Facebook!