Offline capture, not offline-if-lucky
A basement, a rural site, a steel deck with no bars — the form still opens, the photo still attaches, and the record writes up when the truck gets back to signal.
Power Apps consulting for construction
A Power Apps consultant for construction companies whose crews work where the signal does not
Your crews are the only people standing in front of the work — but the daily log gets typed up that night, the punch list lives on somebody’s camera roll, and the safety inspection is a PDF that gets signed twice. We build offline-capable field apps that capture it once, on the phone already in a foreman’s pocket, and sync when the truck reaches signal. One written price, typical delivery in 2–4 weeks, 30 days of hypercare included.
Representative dashboard — sample data
What we build
Field tools built for gloves, glare and dead zones
Every app is shaped around one job a crew actually does, and tested against the conditions it will be used in.
Daily logs and progress reports
Manpower, hours, weather, work put in place and delays recorded on site at the time they happen, instead of reconstructed from memory in the trailer at seven at night.
Punch lists and closeout walks
Every item raised with a photo, a location, a responsible trade and a due date, so closeout is a list that clears itself rather than a chase through group texts.
Safety and quality inspections
Hazard checklists, pre-pour and pre-cover checks, toolbox talks and near-miss reports — where a failed item forces a photo, a corrective action and an owner before it can be submitted.
Equipment and materials tracking
Scan a tag to move a machine between jobs, log hours or fuel, photograph a delivery ticket at the gate and code it before it rides off in a truck cab.
Timesheets and T&M field tickets
Crew hours booked to a cost code and extra work written up with photos and a signature at the point of work, so a time-and-materials dispute is settled with a record.
How it works
Three steps from a paper form to a phone in the field
- 1
Walk the process, not the wish list
A free consultation covers what a foreman fills in today, where the paper goes next, which sites have no coverage, and who chases the missing forms. We reply with a written scope, one fixed fee and a delivery date.
- 2
Build against real field conditions
Screens are sized for a gloved thumb in daylight, tested on the phones your crews actually carry, and reviewed by a superintendent while there is still time to change them cheaply.
- 3
Roll out crew by crew, then retire the paper
We release through managed environments, pilot with one job, fix what the pilot exposes, train the rest, and stay on for 30 days of included hypercare while the old form gets switched off.
Dashboards report on data you have; apps are what create it
This is the split worth being clear about before you spend anything. Our Power BI dashboards for construction companies read what your accounting and project systems already hold — job cost, committed cost, WIP, retention, change order ageing — and put it on one screen. They cannot show you labor hours by cost code that nobody recorded, a delay nobody logged, or a punch item that only exists in a text message. That is the gap a field app closes: it is the thing that puts the record into a system in the first place.
In practice the two run together. Capture first, report second. Once daily logs, inspections and field tickets are landing in structured tables instead of PDFs and photo rolls, the reporting build on top gets both cheaper and more honest, because the numbers stop depending on somebody remembering to email a spreadsheet. Contractors who already have the dashboards usually come to us because the dashboards exposed how much of the field never got captured at all.
Why offline is the whole ballgame on a job site
Most field software demos happen on office wifi. Job sites are basements, elevator shafts, steel decks and rural lots, and an app that needs a connection to open a form is an app that quietly goes back to paper in week two. Microsoft’s guidance on building offline-capable canvas apps (opens in new tab) is direct about the trade-offs involved — what can be cached on the device, how much, and what happens when two people edit the same record from different sides of a site.
So we treat offline as a scoping decision rather than a checkbox. Which lists must be on the device before a crew leaves the yard. How many photos a phone should hold before it has to sync. What the app does when a submission fails halfway. Whether a conflict is resolved by last-write, by supervisor review, or by never letting two people hold the same record. These get answered in writing before the build, because retrofitting offline behaviour into an app designed online-first is close to a rebuild.
The rest of the field toolkit comes from the same platform: the camera for evidence, the location sensor for a GPS stamp on an inspection, a signature control for sign-off at the point of work, and barcode or QR scanning for equipment and materials. Microsoft’s Power Apps documentation (opens in new tab) covers the platform capabilities; the engineering is deciding which ones a foreman should be forced to use and which would just slow the walk down.
The apps construction teams ask for first
Most requests come from the same short list. The table below is the vocabulary we scope against — what the crew captures on the phone, and why that beats the version it replaces. Your build takes the rows that match how you run jobs, using your own cost codes, trades and site structure rather than a template.
| Field app | What the crew captures on site | Why it beats the paper or spreadsheet version |
|---|---|---|
| Daily field log | Manpower and headcount by trade, hours, weather, work put in place by area, delays and their cause, with photos | Written at the moment it happened and GPS stamped, rather than reconstructed at the end of the day — which is what makes a delay record worth anything in a claim |
| Punch list and closeout walk | Item, room or area, responsible trade, photo, due date, and sign-off when the item is cleared | Every item carries a photo and an owner from the second it is raised, so closeout stops being a chase through text messages and site pictures |
| Safety inspection and JHA | Hazard checklist, pass or fail with a required photo on any fail, corrective action, owner, and crew signatures | A failed item cannot be submitted without a corrective action and a name against it, which a paper checkbox has never once enforced |
| Quality and pre-pour checks | Checklist tied to the drawing area or grid line, photos before the work is covered, inspector sign-off | The evidence gets captured while the work is still visible, which is the only window in which it can be captured at all |
| Equipment and small tools | Barcode or QR scan, current job, meter hours or fuel, condition notes, and transfers between sites | Answers where a machine is and who has it without calling three superintendents, and gives utilization something real to be calculated from |
| Materials received | Photo of the delivery ticket, quantity, cost code, supplier, and a receiving signature at the gate | The ticket is coded where it lands instead of riding around in a truck cab until it is lost or arrives after the period closes |
| Subcontractor timesheet | Crew, hours by cost code and job, work description, foreman and subcontractor signatures | Signed at the point of work, so hours reach job cost days earlier and a billing argument is settled with a record rather than a recollection |
| Change event and T&M capture | Description of the extra work, photos, labor and equipment used, and an on-site signature | Catches extra work while it is still visible and attributable, before it quietly turns into unbilled work at the end of the job |
Where the captured records actually land
An app is only as useful as the place it writes to. For a small number of straightforward forms, SharePoint lists and libraries are a sensible, inexpensive home — and the documents an app produces file naturally into a properly structured SharePoint document management setup. When you need relational data across jobs, cost codes and trades, row-level security so a sub sees only their own tickets, audit history, or rules enforced at the data layer rather than in the screen, Dataverse earns its cost. We choose based on your workflow and your existing license position, and we say which and why in the scope.
Once the records are structured, the rest follows on its own. Routing and notifications — an inspection failure that pages a superintendent, a T&M ticket that needs a project manager’s approval before it bills — sit with Power Automate approval and alerting workflows behind the app. And the clean field data becomes the missing input to job cost and productivity reporting, which is where a construction Power BI build picks the story back up.
Who this fits
Small and mid-sized general contractors and specialty trades, typically where a superintendent is still filling in a form on a clipboard or a phone note and someone in the office is retyping it. If your foremen are competent and busy, your paperwork is late rather than wrong, and your job cost is accurate a week after it would have been useful, that is the gap. It is a poor fit if the process itself is undecided — an app makes a defined process faster, and an undefined one messier.
This page is the field-capture, construction-shaped side of our wider custom Power Apps development service, which covers canvas and model-driven apps, Dataverse design and release management across any industry. Nothing here is a different engineering standard — only a different job. Before you scope anything, our fixed-fee pricing and process page explains exactly how a written scope is produced, and the build-versus-buy comparison is worth reading if you are also weighing a packaged construction product.
Fixed-fee build tiers
Three shapes cover most construction requests. Every fee is fixed and put in writing after your free consultation — the table shows scope and typical timeline, not prices, because an honest number needs to see your forms, your sites and your license position first.
| Tier | Scope | Typical timeline | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single field app | One form — a daily log, a safety inspection or a punch list — with offline capture, photos, signature, one data source and deployment to a pilot crew | About 2 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Field capture suite | Two or three related apps sharing one data model, role-based access for superintendents and project managers, photo and GPS capture, and routing or notifications behind them | 2–3 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
| Field-to-reporting rollout | Multi-app suite on Dataverse or SharePoint, subcontractor and vendor access reviewed, dev-test-production pipeline, admin documentation, and a data model shaped to feed your job cost reporting | 3–4 weeks | Fixed fee — scoped after your free consultation |
Whatever the tier, you own every artifact — the app, its solution files, the data model and the tables the records live in stay in your Microsoft tenant from the first day.
Related services
Other ways we make Microsoft easy
Power Apps Consulting
The wider fixed-fee app service: canvas and model-driven builds, Dataverse design and release management for any industry.
Power BI for Construction
Job cost, WIP, change orders and cash flow reporting — the reading half of the pair, built on the data your field apps capture.
Power Automate Consulting
Approvals, alerts and integrations behind the app — from a failed inspection that pages a super to a T&M ticket routed for sign-off.
Build vs buy
A decision framework for a custom app versus a packaged product you subscribe to per user.
What to automate first
The processes with the fastest payback when you only have budget to fix one thing.
How fixed fee works
Free consultation, written scope, one price, 2–4 week delivery, 30 days of hypercare.
FAQ
Field app questions, answered
That is the design constraint we build to. Forms, reference lists and photos are held on the device and written up when the phone reaches signal, so a crew in a basement or a rural site keeps working. During scoping we agree what must be available offline, because caching everything is neither possible nor useful.
Yes. Power Apps reaches the camera, the location sensor and a signature control on the phone or tablet a foreman already carries, so an inspection item can require a photo before submission and a field ticket can be signed at the point of work. We agree what is mandatory and what is optional per form.
Dashboards report on data you already have. Apps are what create it. A dashboard cannot show labor hours by cost code that nobody has recorded yet, so field capture usually comes first and reporting is built on top of the clean records the app produces.
It depends on who they are in your tenant and which route they use, and Power Platform licensing for external users is genuinely nuanced. We check your current license position and the options during scoping, and put the answer in your written scope rather than discovering it after the app is built.
The fee reflects how many forms you need, how much of the work must run offline, how many systems the records have to reach, and whether people outside your tenant use it. After a free consultation you get a written scope with one price, and that price moves only if the scope does.
Typical delivery is two to four weeks from kickoff. A single offline form such as a daily log or a safety inspection lands at the short end; a suite of related apps sharing one data model with subcontractor access sits at the longer end. Your written scope states the delivery date first.
Book a free consultation
Get more from the Microsoft tools you already pay for
Tell us what you’re trying to fix — a report, an approval process, an intranet, a Copilot rollout. We scope it as a fixed-fee project, you approve, and a senior engineer delivers in 2–4 weeks.
- Fixed-fee scope agreed before any work starts
- Senior, US-based Microsoft engineers — no handoffs
- Typical 2–4 week delivery
- 30 days of post-delivery hypercare included
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we’ll reply within one business day.