Automate Subcontractor Data Collection and Tracking

Many small construction firms rely on general project management software like Procore or Buildertrend. While powerful, their daily log features often require the general contractor's superintendent to manually enter data received from subs. Subcontractors are reluctant to learn and log into another system, so they default to texting photos of their paper logs. The GC's project manager then spends hours a day transcribing this information.

In practice, this creates a chaotic mix of texts, emails, and phone calls. Consider a 15-person GC with 12 subcontractors on a job. Every morning, the superintendent chases each sub foreman for a daily report. The plumbing sub sends a text, the electrical sub emails a PDF, and the concrete sub sends a photo of a handwritten log. The superintendent spends the first 90 minutes of his day manually entering this data into an Excel sheet for the daily owner meeting. Last week, he misread a handwritten '3' as an '8', causing an incorrect progress payment calculation.

The structural problem is the 'last mile' of data collection. Large software platforms are built for GCs to input data, not for making it easy for subcontractors to submit it. They assume subcontractor buy-in, which rarely happens. Subcontractors optimize for their own field crews, which means paper logs and text messages. Existing tools fail because they impose a rigid data structure on people who are not employees and have no incentive to adopt it.

The first step is an audit of your current subcontractor communication. Syntora would analyze how you receive data from your top 10-15 subcontractors, categorizing the inputs: structured forms, PDFs, emails, text messages with photos of logs. This audit determines the right mix of intake channels. You receive a scope document outlining the proposed system and a fixed timeline.

For unstructured data like photos of handwritten logs, the system would use the Claude API for optical character recognition (OCR) and data extraction. The API can parse an image and return structured JSON with fields like 'crew_size' and 'materials_delivered'. A central FastAPI service would receive these inputs, validate the data using Pydantic schemas, and write it to a Supabase database. The entire parsing process for a single report would take under 15 seconds.

The delivered system is a simple dashboard that gives a real-time view of all subcontractor activity, built on Vercel for fast access from any device. This system can feed data directly into your existing accounting or project management software. Instead of a superintendent spending 90 minutes transcribing data, they spend 5 minutes reviewing an exception report for any of the 50 daily reports the AI could not parse. You receive the full source code and a runbook for maintenance.