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If you run a contracting business, you’re probably losing more time each month than you realize. Not a few hours here and there. Dozens. They disappear into the same silent drain almost every contractor struggles with: bad inventory systems.
Every missing part, every return trip, every van that isn’t stocked right, every “Do we have this?” call from the field—they all take a small bite out of your day. Add them up across a crew, across a week, across a handful of vans, and you start to see where the hours went.
None of this is about your people. It’s the system you’ve had no choice but to run, a system that forces you to spend time fixing inventory problems instead of doing the work that actually grows your business.
You didn’t misplace those hours. They were taken.
The admin pile you never signed up for
Contractors don’t spend huge chunks of their day doing inventory admin work because they love paperwork and spreadsheets (at least the ones I know). They lose those hours because their entire inventory process was built on top of disconnected tools that were never meant to run a contracting business. That’s what creates the chaos they’re constantly trying to clean up.
When your vans, your warehouse, and your job sites all run on different versions of the truth, you inevitably end up spending hours each week fixing problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place (missing parts, bad van stock, calls from the field asking “do we have this?”).
Each one creates extra work. Add them up across a week, across a crew, across a handful of vans, and they become the reason you’re constantly playing catch-up.
Why is this happening? Most shops are still tracking materials with a patchwork of tools that don’t talk to each other. Techs track their vans one way. The shop tracks stock another way. The office tracks POs in some completely different way. None of it updates itself, and none of it reflects what actually happened in the field.
That mismatch creates hours of extra inventory-related admin every single week:
• Manual van restocking because nothing shows what’s actually low
• Fixing POs and receipts because the information never lines up
• Reconciling job usage after the fact because the system isn’t accurate
• Constant interruptions caused by unreliable stock data
• Correcting mistakes that trace back to outdated or incomplete inventory info
With a setup like that, of course you’re drowning in admin work. Anyone would be. The real question is what your week could look like if these problems finally stopped.
How Ply gives you those hours back
Most of the time you lose each week disappears into little tasks you shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Ply removes that burden with capabilities built to cut out the admin grind:
✓ Accurate van and warehouse inventory: Techs roll out prepared, and you stop losing time to missing parts and return trips.
✓ Automatic stock updates: Materials update themselves as you use, receive, and restock them, so no one spends nights fixing spreadsheets.
✓ Custom truck stock lists: Every van has the right materials for the jobs it runs, which keeps the day on schedule and eliminates mid-day scrambles.
✓ Simple restock and receiving workflows: Techs can check their vans, mark what’s low, and keep moving without creating more paperwork for the office.
✓ Real-time visibility across every location: One place to see what’s in the shop, what’s in each truck, and what just got used on a job, which ends the guesswork and cleanup.
When contractors adopt Ply, they don’t just get cleaner data. They get hours back. Because every operational win below is one less pile of admin work waiting for you at night:
• Fewer return trips.
• Faster installs.
• More predictable scheduling.
• Higher first-time completion rates.
• Happier techs.
• Better margins.
What the difference looks like
| Before Ply Your tech shows up to the job and realizes the connector they need isn’t there. They call the office, and someone stops what they’re doing to hunt through the warehouse. Another person checks spreadsheets that haven’t been updated since yesterday. Nobody’s sure what’s actually in the vans, so the tech drives back to the shop to grab what they need. The job runs long, the next appointment gets pushed, and you end up sorting out the missing materials and fixing the paperwork that night. One small miss has already turned into an hour of admin cleanup—and that’s just one job. | After Ply The van was prepped correctly because the inventory was accurate. The tech arrives ready and scans materials as they use them, automatically adding everything to the job via Ply’s integration with your field service management platform (ServiceTitan, Jobber, etc.), ensuring everything stays on track for all future jobs. Job costing stays accurate without anyone having to chase usage later. The job finishes on time. No scramble, no wasted fuel, no missing parts, and no admin cleanup waiting for you at the end of the day. |
Multiply that across every tech, every truck, and every week, and the hours add up fast.
Take your time back
You can’t grow a contracting business on late nights and manual processes. You can’t scale when you’re constantly fixing avoidable mistakes. And you can’t lead when your time is stolen by paperwork problems that never should have existed in the first place.
Time is your scarcest resource. When you eliminate the admin drain, everything downstream improves. Your margin improves. Your schedule stabilizes. Your team’s morale gets stronger. Your customers notice the difference.
Your business is already working hard. Your time should work just as hard for you.
Ply gives you those hours back every month. What you do with them is what separates the companies that stay stuck from the ones that scale.
