Constructing
WRK.00Case study
Trade & field servicesFrom site records to commercial evidence
Built end to end by Matter — strategy, brand, marketing site, SaaS application and infrastructure. A complete evidence platform for UK subcontractors, capturing labour, plant, progress, delays, instructions and photographs as the work happens, in a form that holds up when it is disputed.
- Client
- Site Chronicle
- Category
- Construction technology
- Status
- Live product
- Duration
- Ongoing — live on UK projects
- Scope
- Product strategy · Brand & positioning · Marketing website · SaaS application · UX & interface design · Multi-tenant architecture · Authentication & permissions · Automation · Business email · Analytics · Hosting & infrastructure
The problem
On a construction project the money is decided months after the work. A subcontractor who cannot show what happened on a given day — who was there, what plant stood idle, which instruction the work was against — argues from memory against a valuation built from records. The industry answer was a paper diary nobody reads and a phone full of undated photographs.
Objectives
- 01Capture the day as it happens, on site, with one hand and no signal
- 02Tie every hour, photograph and delay to an instruction and a location
- 03Turn the record into something a commercial team can hand over
- 04Keep tenants isolated from one another at the database, not the query
Work delivered
One project. Every layer.
01
Product strategy and positioning
The commercial argument first: what a record has to contain to be worth anything in a valuation, and which of those things a site team will actually enter at four in the afternoon. That answer shaped the schema before it shaped a screen.
02
The marketing site and the brand
A public site that argues the commercial case rather than listing features, with the product's own vocabulary — diaries, instructions, certified amounts — carried straight through into the application.
03
The tenant application
Daily diaries, projects and site areas, scope and bill-of-quantities tracking, snagging, quality, resources, delays, photographs on a map, and cross-project search. Offline-first: a service worker and an IndexedDB queue mean a basement with no signal still records the day.
04
Multi-tenant architecture
Organisations isolated by Postgres row-level security rather than by careful querying, with host-based routing resolving the tenant before login. The isolation is a property of the database, so a mistake in application code cannot leak across it.
05
Client acknowledgement without accounts
A tokenised sign-off link lets a main contractor acknowledge a diary without an account, a password or an app — the step that turns an internal note into a record the other side has seen.
06
Evidence out of the system
PDF and spreadsheet exports built for the commercial team's own process, so the record leaves in the shape a valuation or a claim actually needs.
07
The operator console
A cross-tenant console for running the product as a business — health, usage, adoption, support, audit and data-subject requests — so operating it does not mean querying production by hand.
08
Infrastructure and the machinery around it
Transactional email, weekly summary automation, push notifications, error monitoring, and a CI pipeline that gates type-checking, lint, tests and build — plus a schema type-drift job that fails when a migration lands without regenerated types.
StackNext.jsReactTypeScriptSupabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage, RLS)Tailwind CSSOffline PWA (service worker + IndexedDB)PDF & spreadsheet generationLeafletResendSentry
Before
- Paper diaries nobody reads after the day they are written
- Photographs on a phone with no date, location or instruction
- Instructed work started before the instruction reference exists
- Valuations argued from memory, months after the work
After
- The day captured on site, offline, against a location
- Every photograph tied to a project, an area and a date
- Instructed work that cannot be recorded without its instruction
- A contemporaneous record the commercial team can hand over
£300,000
Increase in the certified amount, supported by one week of contemporaneous diaries
£350,000
Additional instructed work recorded, claimed and paid
Tens of thousands
Site photographs held as evidence
Thousands
Daily records built by site teams
Figures are published by Site Chronicle and reflect genuine platform usage on live UK projects. Customer and project identities remain confidential. The records supported the valuation and payment outcomes; they did not, by themselves, determine contractual entitlement.
The work it records
