BEAM: one system for a contractor's entire back office

Context

A contractor’s office runs on receipts, estimates, invoices, schedules, permits, and a contact list. For most, those live in separate places held together by manual re-entry. It works until the job count climbs, and then the owner becomes the bottleneck the whole business waits on: the only person who knows what was quoted, what was spent, what was paid, and what’s due next.

Approach

BEAM consolidates that back office into one mobile app, covering intake, estimating, job costing, invoicing and payment, scheduling, communications, permitting, and government contracting. Quotes and work requests from the website, text, email, and voice land in one queue; estimates build from a materials-and-labor catalog; receipts are captured by phone camera and attached to the right job; invoices go out and take online payment through Stripe; a shared calendar sends automatic next-step texts for multi-stage jobs; and permit applications and the Notice of Commencement pre-fill from existing data for human review before anything is filed.

At its center is SmartBox (patent pending), the same multi-modal intake engine behind every CompVer build, tuned here to field operations. It reads incoming items (a photographed receipt, a forwarded text, a voice note, a website request) and extracts the details, presenting them in a review queue where a person approves each one before anything is stored. Human review is required by design, not bolted on: an internal note on an estimate stays internal, a payment can only be recorded against a real invoice, and every approval is written to an audit trail.

Under the hood

BEAM is a native mobile app (Expo / React Native, TypeScript) sitting over a TypeScript and Node service with a PostgreSQL data model and a queue that runs the background work without a separate broker. Subscriptions, checkout, and the customer billing portal run on Stripe, so a contractor can sign up and provision their own workspace with no developer in the loop; outbound texts and email go through Twilio and SendGrid, degrading gracefully to a logged fallback when a key isn’t set; documents and signed PDFs live in object storage rather than as blobs in the database. The whole thing is multi-tenant from the schema up, with a license layer that gates access per account, and ships as a Docker image on Railway.

Outcome

BEAM is live at getabeam.com. It’s configured for one contractor but built for redeployment: suppliers, work types, branding, and billing live as configuration, so the same system moves to other contractors and trades without code changes. The disciplined setup during this build is what makes that reuse possible: a single back office for this business now, and a productizable platform next.