Arboriculture practice, Adelaide.

The problem

Arborists assess trees on site. They record what they find on paper, because paper works outdoors, works without signal and does not run out of battery.

Back at the office, somebody types it in again. That second pass is where the time goes, and it is also where the errors appear. A measurement misread from handwriting is wrong in the quote, wrong in the invoice and wrong in the record.

The paper was not the problem. The second typing was.

What I built

A job and field-capture platform, integrated with quoting and invoicing.

The constraint that shaped it was the field itself. Anything that assumes a good connection or a comfortable typing position fails the first time it is taken up a tree or into a back paddock. Capture had to be quick, tolerant of poor signal, and structured enough that what comes out the other end can feed a quote without interpretation.

Once the assessment is captured against the job, quoting and invoicing draw on it directly. The office stops re-entering and starts reviewing.

The result

An 80% reduction in manual data entry.

Data is entered once, where it originates, by the person who observed it. The transcription errors go with it.