Every hour on the ticket. Every ticket on the invoice.
Concrete pumps, boom trucks, hydrovac and cranes rent by the hour with an operator attached. The bill depends on a job ticket: portal-to-portal time, travel, overtime, the 4-hour minimum, the washout, a signature. Tallyboom puts that ticket on the operator’s phone, prices it against your rate sheet the moment it’s signed, and pushes the invoice to QuickBooks the same day.
This is a pre-build concept. There are no customers, pilots or partners. The prototype runs on a fictional fleet, “Demo Pumping & Crane Co.”
Paper tickets leak money in four places
A ticket that rides in a truck door pocket for a week is a ticket that gets lost, priced from memory, or invoiced late.
- Lost tickets. No ticket, no invoice. In a vendor case study, one hydrovac operator says it lost $154,000 in a year to lost paper tickets. E source (vendor-selected, self-reported)
- Unbilled overtime. The 9.5-hour pour gets billed as 8.
- Missed minimums. A 2-hour pick billed as 2 instead of the 4-hour minimum.
- Forgotten travel and washout. The line items nobody wrote down.
What we don’t know yet
All the direct evidence of pain we found is vendor marketing. We found no independent user complaints. Some “leakage” is deliberate: an owner waives a minimum to keep a contractor who sends 200 pours a year. And a lost ticket leaves no record to audit.
So the plan claims only true loss the owner agrees was a miss, and it must find at least 0.5% of billings in on-site audits before anything gets built. Kill criteria
One ticket, from the cab to QuickBooks
Version 1 is cut to four things. Everything else waits until there are paying fleets.
Operator e-ticket
Native, offline-first phone app in English and Spanish. Clock in/out, portal-to-portal, standby, washout, photos, customer signature. A server-acknowledged outbox so a ticket can’t die on a phone.
Rate engine
Hourly, minimums, OT after N hours, travel, washout, fuel surcharge, per-yard and per-load charges, customer overrides. Rules are versioned with effective dates so old tickets reprice the way they were priced.
Same-day invoice
Invoice PDF and a push to QuickBooks Online, with IIF/CSV for Desktop. Nothing syncs until the customer approves. Sales tax goes to the tax engine, not to us.
Audit log
Every edit after signature is recorded with who, when and why. Disputes end at the log.
Four steps, same day
Dispatch
Drag a unit and an operator onto a day. The board checks the operator’s NCCCO card and DOT medical expiry before it lets the assignment stand.
Run the job
The operator clocks in at the yard, logs travel, pours or picks, washes out, and gets a signature on the phone. Offline is fine.
Price it
The signed ticket prices itself against your rate sheet: minimum, OT, travel, washout. Every line shows the rule that made it.
Invoice
Approve and push to QuickBooks. The customer gets a PDF ticket and a one-click reorder link.
Recovered billing vs. what you’d pay
Move the sliders to your fleet. Defaults: 7 units (the 2018 industry mean pump fleet), 1,000 billed hours per unit, $235/hour (IBISWorld 2026 pumping benchmark), 0.5% true loss recovered.
Sources: mean fleet size E SEC filing, 2018; rate E IBISWorld. Hours per unit and loss rate are A assumptions; the loss rate has never been measured.
Net, year 1
Our own read: at 0.5% the ROI is thin, about break-even on a 7-unit fleet. The pitch has to lean on faster invoicing and less bookkeeper time at least as much as on leakage.
Per unit. Operators ride free.
$395
base per month + $40 per registered unit, $595 minimum, annual contract
- Unlimited operators, dispatchers, bookkeepers
- Winter floor: minimum only, Dec–Feb, if you park the fleet
- Onboarding $1,500–3,000 list
$250
base + $35 per unit, for the first fleets that go live
- Same product
- Requires a refundable $500 deposit
$500
on site, 2 weeks of tickets photographed and checked against your invoices; credited to onboarding
- Splits “waived on purpose” from “never captured”
All prices are A proposals, untested with buyers. Competitor prices (RapidWorks, CreteSuite) are quote-only and we could not verify them.
Straight answers
Is this a real product I can buy?
No. It is a concept with a clickable prototype on fictional data. The plan is to validate demand first (count the market, run three on-site audits, collect refundable deposits) and build only if those pass.
Don’t RapidWorks and CreteSuite already do this?
Largely, yes. CreteSuite already ships an offline Spanish crew app, text-link e-sign, two-way QuickBooks sync and self-applying price lists, and claims “20%+” of US pumping revenue runs through it E cretesuite.com (a vendor claim). RapidWorks bought Visual Dispatch in 2024 E source. There is no product moat. The only advantages open to a newcomer are distribution, service and niche focus, which is why the plan targets paper shops first.
What happens if an operator’s certification is expired?
The prototype hard-blocks the assignment and shows a red badge, as specified. Our business plan actually recommends a soft block with a logged owner override, because a typo in an expiry date should never stop a 5am pour and the software should not sit inside your OSHA 1926.1427 evaluation. The prototype lets you switch between the two so you can see the difference.
Does the “AI” order intake really use AI?
In the prototype, no: it is a rule-based parser running in your browser, so nothing you paste leaves the page. A production version would use a language model, flag low-confidence fields, and require a dispatcher to confirm every job card. It is a convenience, not a differentiator.
Will it work with QuickBooks Desktop?
The plan is QuickBooks Online by API and Desktop by IIF/CSV import at launch. We don’t know what share of fleets run Desktop; that is the first question on every owner call.
Who handles sales tax?
Your tax engine (QuickBooks Online Automated Sales Tax or Avalara). Whether operated rental is taxed as a service or a rental varies by state; the customer makes that determination.
Run a fleet on paper tickets?
The founding team is looking for owners willing to let us photograph two weeks of tickets and check them against invoices. We’ll tell you what we find, including if it’s nothing.