Job management for contractors
Every job, from the first call to the last check.
Roofing, siding, decks, fences, windows, gutters. Quote it in the driveway, get it signed on the spot, put the crew on the board, and run it through to paid. One record per job, and everyone works off the same one.
Built alongside working contractors. Real crews, real quotes, real Monday mornings.
How it works
One record per job. Nothing gets retyped.
A job starts as a phone call and ends as a check in the bank. Along the way it never leaves Tailgate, and nobody types it into a second system. The office, the salesman, and the crew are all looking at the same thing.
What's inside
Built for the way the work actually runs.
Quote it at the kitchen table
Scope, a separate not included list, photos of their actual house, and a price. You can build the whole thing on your phone before you leave the driveway.
Sign it right there, or by link
Hand them the phone, or text them a private link to their quote. The signature locks a contract PDF with your logo, your license number, your terms, and a timestamp that holds up later.
Know the second they open it
"Customer opened your quote, 6:42pm." The tracking is on the link itself, so you know without burying a tracking pixel in anybody's email.
A dispatch board that behaves
A week grid with a row for each crew. Drag a signed job onto a day, or stretch it across three days if that's what it takes. It warns you when a crew doesn't do that kind of work, and it still lets you do it anyway.
The crew's whole day on one screen
The address with a map link, tap to call the customer, the scope, the exclusions, the photos, the materials. It all fits on a phone. Nobody has to go find a laptop.
Photo proof, built into the finish
A short checklist on each job, and every item gets stamped with who checked it and when. There's one hard rule in the whole app: no completed photo, no completed job.
Materials and permits, on the job
Needed, ordered, delivered, confirmed on site. Permits ride along the same way. The status shows up as dots on the board, so the truck doesn't roll out short.
Hours without a payroll system
Crews tap arrive and leave on the job, or just type in hours. Crew leads can enter time for the whole crew. You get a weekly view and a clean CSV for whoever cuts the checks.
Find anything. Prove what happened.
Half an address or a phone number finds the job in seconds. Every action gets logged, and old crew rosters get closed out instead of erased.
How we build it
Opinionated where it counts. Out of your way everywhere else.
Software for the trades usually fails in one of two ways: it nags you until you ignore it, or it's so loose that nothing in it is ever true. Here's where we drew the lines.
The app advises, humans decide.
Wrong crew for the job, unchecked steps, a permit that isn't pulled. You get a warning, and you can override every one of them, because you know things the software doesn't. The one hard stop: you can't close a job without a completed photo.
Today is editable. The past is evidence.
Fix today's schedule all you like. Signed PDFs never change, roster and time sheet edits get logged, and nothing quietly rewrites what happened.
Crews never see money.
That rule lives in the database, not in a settings page somebody can fat finger. A sub sees the job they're on. They don't see your customer history and they don't see your margins.
One app, every device.
The same URL on the office iPad and the foreman's phone. It installs to the home screen and works like an app, without an app store or per device licensing.
There is no "roofing module."
Your job types, roles, crews and checklists are your company's data, not our code. Which is why a fence company and a roofing company can both run on it without us shipping anything.
Your data stays yours.
Customers, jobs, hours and files export to CSV whenever you ask. Nobody should be stuck with software because leaving it costs them their history.
Straight answer
What Tailgate isn't.
We'd rather do the job board, the quote flow and the crew's day well than do nine things badly. Money fields export cleanly to your accountant's software. We're not trying to replace it.
- ✕ Not an accounting or invoicing system
- ✕ Not a supplier catalog or ordering portal
- ✕ Not a payment processor
- ✕ Not a GPS tracker on your people
- ✕ Not a payroll engine. Hours in, CSV out
- ✕ Not an email marketing tool
- ✕ Not an insurance or estimating workflow
Early access
We're onboarding a handful of contractors.
Priced per company, not per seat. Onboarding is a person who shows up and loads your real quotes with you, not a login link and a help center. Tell us about your shop and we'll be in touch.
Got it. Thanks.
We'll reach out personally. If it's urgent, just reply to the email we send. It comes straight to us.