Why I Built Plan My Crew: A Cape Town Contractor's Journey

One van. One team. Excel spreadsheets and a notebook. It worked — small team, single city, all jobs visible in my head. The chaos came later, when we started to grow.

Three teams and Excel was breaking. Jobs fell through the cracks. I couldn't see who was where. A colleague recommended Tradify — I signed up and it genuinely helped. Clean interface, reliable scheduling, good invoicing. For Cape Town only, it worked well.

We were also growing our insurance panel work — Santam and OUTsurance primarily. Tradify could handle the jobs but the insurance compliance side was entirely manual. SLA tracking in a separate spreadsheet. DAS numbers captured by hand. COCs emailed separately. It worked, but it was fragile.

We got our first Gauteng insurance panel opportunity. This was the moment everything broke.

My JHB manager was seeing Cape Town jobs. My CT teams were seeing JHB jobs. Everyone was confused. JHB inventory was mixed with CT inventory in the system. I couldn't separate financials — no idea which province was profitable. And SLA compliance in Gauteng was a nightmare to track manually across two cities simultaneously.

Their answer was clear: Tradify is designed as a single-company platform. Multi-branch separation isn't something they offer. I wasn't critical of them for it — Tradify is built for the New Zealand and Australian market where this isn't a requirement. But for a SA contractor running insurance panels across multiple provinces, it was a fundamental gap.

Same problem. Single company structure. Everyone sees everything. Also cloud-only — every load shedding event took my teams offline mid-job. And Stripe-only payments meant significantly higher processing fees than PayFast.

Has multi-branch. Has insurance workflow features. Price: R50,000+/month. Not viable for a growing SA contractor. We weren't ServiceTitan-sized yet.

I had spent R80,000 on software that didn't solve my actual problems. I sat down and wrote exactly what I needed:

• True branch separation — CT, JHB, DBN managers each see only their own operations
• Insurance email parser — job auto-created when Telesure/OUTsurance/Santam sends an assignment
• Automated SLA countdown — 60-minute emergency timer, manager alerts before breach
• 40-metre GPS attendance lock — GPS proof for insurance claims, fuel fraud eliminated
• Full offline mode — load shedding can't stop my teams mid-job
• WhatsApp-native — 78% open rate vs 22% for SMS
• PayFast integration — SA payment gateways, not Stripe

Nothing on the market had all of it at an affordable price. So I built it.

Six months of development. Every feature designed around a real problem I had experienced. Not imagined features — actual pain points from running insurance panel teams across multiple provinces. I used it in my own business first, from day one of launch.

Added KwaZulu-Natal as a third branch. The system handled it cleanly. DBN manager saw only DBN jobs. CT and JHB remained completely separate. Financial reporting showed P&L per province for the first time — I finally knew which province was most efficient.

SLA compliance on insurance panels jumped from 87% (Tradify, manual tracking) to 96% in the first quarter on PMC. The email parser was the biggest contributor — no manual capture delay means the SLA clock starts at the right time, and teams get the alert immediately.