Every job, from the first phone call to the closed invoice

The office pre-loads the document that needs signing. It appears under Ready to sign on the tech's screen. He taps once, hands the iPad to the customer, the customer signs on the glass, and he drags the signature into position — with optional printed name and date stamps. The backend stamps and flattens it into the PDF and files [document] - signed.pdf into Signed Docs/.

It handles scanned, rotated and inset-crop-box PDFs, which is to say the print-driver and Word exports that real customers actually send. Emailing the finished file is deliberately manual — DUDE has no email capability at all, on purpose.

Six steps of Drive-and-markup juggling became sign, drag, file. Entirely on open-source libraries, at no added monthly cost.

A seven-category hazard matrix, a task action plan, PPE selection, site emergency information, and signature pads for the lead tech and any subcontractor. On submit, DUDE composes a formal PDF and files it into Signed Docs/. A compliance artifact, produced from a form a tech can actually fill in on a phone-sized screen.

A per-job, per-day narrative from the field. There is no edit path and no delete path anywhere in the code — a correction is another entry. Admin can read across the whole company filtered by date range, job and tech, in any combination. When a job reaches a terminal status the whole log is written once into the job folder as Daily Log.txt.

If that final write fails, the notice on the job page is derived, not a stored flag — so it clears itself the instant the archive lands. No queue, no worker, no flag to go stale.

Anyone signed in can file an expense against a job. DUDE writes a real QuickBooks purchase, marks it pending review, attaches the receipt and drops a copy into the job's Receipts/ folder. The receipt image is run through Google's expense parser, and the amount, date and vendor come back as editable pre-fills marked from receipt — check it.

Vendors, categories, payment accounts and classes are cached locally, so the whole form runs fast on one bar of signal. A duplicate guard plus an idempotency key make a double tap safe.

The gas button is the neatest thing in the app: fuelling up asks for the vehicle and the odometer, and that odometer reading is the same number that later tells the fleet coordinator the van is due for service. Entered once, at the pump.

A later hardening pass went through the money path and gave every silent branch a sentence: an amount over the ceiling, a vendor typed but never picked from the list, a date the system won't accept, a job with no folder, an upload too big to send. Each one now says what happened and what to do.

The checks were deliberately ordered so the ones a tech is likeliest to trip fire first — because every refusal costs them re-attaching the receipt photo.

Clock in from the shift page as well as the job page. A clock-out note prompt that works with no JavaScript at all. Long dropdowns replaced with type-to-find boxes once the job list got big enough to scroll. Settings messages that appear in the section you were working in instead of somewhere off-screen.

None of these came from a plan. They came from using it, which is the advantage of the person who decides what gets built also being the person who has to live with it.

Usage readings are a dated, append-only log — hand-entered, baseline, gas fill-up, or captured at a service. Current usage is derived as the latest non-voided reading, so voiding one bad odometer entry corrects everything downstream instantly. Service intervals run every N days and/or every N miles or hours, whichever comes first.

The landing page is a board, not a menu: Overdue, Coming due, Not computable yet, Recently completed. "Coming due" is the last tenth of the interval, so the warning scales with the job. "Not computable yet" names its own reason for each machine, and the fix. And the slice that closed the rollout added a line counting the machines with no schedule at all — the ones no board can warn about — linking to the registry filtered to exactly those.

Implausible readings get a confirmation, never a rejection. The tech at the pump is usually right and always in a hurry.

Techs report problems from their own week screen — machine, description, one urgent flag, optional photo. Never a severity menu. The button shipped dark behind a single setting and was switched on once the registry held the real fleet; it has been live for every technician since 16 October 2026, and the first two reports — real records against a real van — were filed that same afternoon, on an iPad, as the pass that proved the button worked. Reports land in a queue, urgent first then oldest, and the coordinator moves each one through a matrix that only ever offers the legal next verbs: acknowledge, schedule, start, park as waiting on parts or shop or budget, re-slot, reject, complete.

Completing a record happens in one transaction: what was done, preventive or reactive, in-house or a validated vendor, the date, the usage reading, and an optional pass-or-fail inspection checklist. Costs file as ordinary QuickBooks purchases against a permanent internal fleet job, and the coordinator never picks an accounting code — DUDE derives it.

A tech's report can be attached to the schedule it satisfies instead of being rejected as a duplicate. "Rejected" is reserved for work that isn't real, always.

A completed job can carry an inspection checklist — pass, fail or not-applicable per item, with notes. The checklist lives in code rather than in the database, so rewording an item is a deploy and old answers stay attached to what was actually asked. A failed item records the problem and triggers nothing: raising the work is a person's decision.

The cost report gives maintenance, fuel and total per machine, by year or lifetime, including retired and zero-cost machines.

It prints its own limits on the page: this is not total cost of ownership — no depreciation, insurance or registration — and fleet costs start where DUDE started, because nothing was imported from before.