Pylon
A job board for electrical contractors that shows the crew, the money and the paperwork in one place: who is on site right now, what is booked, which invoice is late, and where the next contract is coming from.
What it is
Electrical contractors run on three systems that do not speak to each other: a scheduling whiteboard, an accounting package, and a phone. Pylon is the tool that holds all three. It answers the questions a working day actually asks, in the order they get asked.
Who is on site and who is still driving. Which job is at risk because the part is not on the van. Which quote is sitting unanswered and what it is worth. Which invoice is 47 days late and what has already been sent to chase it. And when a job finishes, how quickly the money can be in the account.
One job, end to end
The centre of the product is the chain from finished work to cleared funds. Every step is a real screen, and each one hands its evidence to the next.
Invoice on site
The tradie raises it on the spot, priced from the job: labour hours by name, cable by the metre, parts by unit.
Signature captured
Client signs on the crew phone with the electrician standing there, or by emailed link if nobody is on site.
Received in Pylon
Signature, timestamp, device, location and hash land in the office. The job closes and the evidence pack builds itself.
Paid and answered
Stripe captures the card, posts the event back, and the receipt email goes out under the contractor's branding.
Signing, with someone standing there
Most on-site signatures are collected by a tradesperson handing over their own phone. Pylon treats that as the default: the crew member is named as witness, the finger is mid-stroke on the pad, and the job stays open until the client accepts. If nobody is on site, the same document goes out as a signable link and comes back marked remote rather than witnessed.
What arrives in the office is not a picture of a signature. It is the mark plus the signatory's name and role, the timestamp to the second, the device, the site coordinates, and a document hash, all attached to the job it belongs to.
I confirm the work described was completed to a satisfactory standard and accept the amount shown.
Card payments handled by Stripe · Signed copy emailed to you
Quotes and invoices as real documents
A quote is the first thing a client sees and the last thing they compare, so it is designed as a document rather than a screen export. Both quote and invoice print to A4 on the same sheet, carrying the contractor's identity, licence number, scope by line, discount and GST in a fixed order, an acceptance block, and the terms that make it enforceable.
The template they already use
Most trade businesses already quote from a document: a Google Doc or a Word file that has been copied and edited for years. Asking them to abandon it is how software gets rejected. Pylon reads the document instead, matches what it finds against records that already exist, flags the one thing it had to assume, and produces the invoice.
Money arriving, not just money owed
Payments are wired through Stripe: the client taps the card on the signed invoice, Stripe authorises and captures, and the payment_intent.succeeded event posts back to Pylon. One write updates the invoice, the job, the aged debt and today's cash, then fires the receipt email and queues a review request three days out.
The settings screen shows the connection as a link rather than a checkbox, because that is what a contractor needs to trust: which account is attached, what has cleared, what failed, and when the next payout lands.
Where everyone actually is
Eight crew across greater Sydney, on a real map. Each node carries its own state: on site working, quoting on site, travelling between jobs, or task complete and waiting to be moved. Click any of them and the record opens as a modal with their day, their booked value, and the open work nearest to them.
The intelligence is the last part. Pylon measures every unassigned quote against where the crew already stand, and when a job falls inside fifteen kilometres of someone who has just finished, it offers that job to them rather than sending another van across the city.
Dispatch
The dispatch board is the scheduler's screen: eight staff rows against the working day, the job queue on the right, and the same map underneath so a decision about who takes the next call can be made without leaving the page.
Freight, and the client who is waiting for it
A bath does not arrive by itself. Pylon books the freight against the job, tracks the carrier's scans down a single timeline, and branches at each one to show what the client was told. The contractor sees the consignment; the client sees a plain message saying where their bath is and who will take it in.
Today there is exactly one thing on the road, and the screen says so before it says anything else. When the delivery window came back at six in the morning, it went to the client by text and onto the crew's run sheet in the same movement, so somebody is on site to receive it.
Into the books
Money arrives through Stripe and leaves for the accounting file. Pylon sits between them and does the part bookkeepers usually do by hand: splitting a payment into income, GST collected and merchant fees, coding each to the right account, and posting it so the bank feed matches the payout without anyone re-keying a figure.
The rest of the system
Beyond the screens above, Pylon is planned as one operations picture for the business.
Revenue and inquiry overlays
The same map, re-skinned: suburb heat by revenue banked this quarter, and inquiry pins tagged by the channel they arrived on.
Pipeline
Proposals from inquiry to contract, each carrying value and probability, with the weighted total against the raw.
Inventory in two tiers
Van stock with per-vehicle minimums and job-committed levels, plus warehouse plant and test instruments that expire on a calibration date.
Communications
Every channel in one thread per client: web form, phone, SMS and email in, quotes, confirmations and receipts out, approvals and photos back.
Invoices and chasing
Aging by column, a chase list ranked by days late against amount, and a record of every reminder already sent.
Automations
Trigger, condition, action. Job completed raises a draft invoice; stock below minimum joins the Thursday order; an inquiry in the city auto-assigns.
Design notes
The interface has one job: stay readable at seven in the morning on a phone in a van, and at five in the afternoon on a monitor in the office. So it is white, ruled with hairlines rather than boxed into cards, set in one grotesque with tabular figures, and square-cornered throughout. Turquoise appears once per screen, on the action that matters; amber and red are reserved for risk and overdue money. Nothing else is coloured.
It builds on patterns proven in earlier work: dense operational tables where a summary drills straight through to the raw evidence, partial data shown rather than a dead end, and a real invoice ledger underneath the money, with statements, aging and payment tracking rather than a list of totals.
Technology
Running a trade business on three systems that don't talk?
Pylon is a concept. The thinking behind it is available.
Pylon is a concept product. Every client, crew member, job, address, licence number, account, card and figure shown in these screens is invented for design purposes. Stripe is shown as an integration partner. Back to all projects