BRCKS case studies

JPAV Ltd — 44 live projects run by five people

JPAV is a London technology, AV and maintenance contractor. Five people in the office, 44 live projects at any one time, and dozens of subcontractors and engineers moving between sites every week. The work is not complicated on paper: install, commission, snag, hand over, maintain. The problem was never the work. It was knowing where 44 jobs actually stood on a Tuesday afternoon.

Before BRCKS, every project had its own WhatsApp group. Photos, delivery confirmations, access issues, client changes and snags all landed in whichever group happened to be open. Nothing was filed against a job. Nothing was searchable. The director spent evenings scrolling back through threads trying to reconstruct the day, then rewriting it as a site diary from memory so there would be a record if anything was ever disputed.

JPAV rolled BRCKS out in an afternoon. The team was given a dedicated BRCKS WhatsApp number and kept messaging the same way — the same photos, the same shorthand, the same voice notes. BRCKS files each message against the right project and turns it into a dated record: site diary entries, snags, tasks, time and materials, and a document store. Nobody had to learn a command set.

"I've got 44 projects and five people. Before BRCKS, I'd spend my evenings scrolling through WhatsApp. Now I text the bot and I get every open task across every project in seconds." — James Shorter, Director, JPAV Ltd

The change the team notices most is asking a question instead of hunting for an answer. "What's outstanding?" returns every open item across all 44 projects, grouped by job. "What happened at the Kensington job today?" returns the day's entries with the photos attached. The evening scroll is gone, and so is the risk of a change being agreed in a group chat and then forgotten by invoicing.

Bonchurch Property Management — 22 properties, one feed

Bonchurch manages 22 residential properties across Notting Hill, Chelsea, Kensington and Hampstead. Maintenance is constant and small: a leak, a boiler service, a lock change, a redecoration between tenancies. Dozens of little jobs a week, spread across contractors who are in and out in a morning.

Small jobs are the hardest ones to bill accurately. Work was requested by phone or WhatsApp, done the same day, and then had to be reconstructed at month end from memory and a handful of photos. Anything that could not be evidenced quietly went unbilled, and tenants chasing an update meant scrolling threads to find out whether a contractor had actually been.

Now the team messages BRCKS the same way they messaged each other. Tasks, hours, materials and photos are filed against the property they belong to, a daily digest lands each evening, and the owner has one feed covering all 22 addresses instead of 22 separate conversations. Invoicing is built from the record rather than from recall.

"The task tracking is the big one — I can see exactly what's been done and bill accurately for it." — Ben French, Director, Bonchurch Property Management

What both teams have in common

Neither company set out to buy software. Both had already tried tools that failed for the same reason: they required every subcontractor to download an app, create an account and change how they worked. On real UK sites that does not happen. The trades go back to WhatsApp within a fortnight and the record stays empty.

What worked in both cases was leaving the behaviour alone and putting the structure behind it. Three things follow from that:

• Adoption is immediate. If the tool is the messaging app people already use, there is nothing to roll out.
• The record is complete. Because subcontractors, trades and clients are free, nobody is left off the system for cost reasons — which is what usually leaves holes in a project history.
• The office stops doing double entry. The diary, the snag list and the timesheet are by-products of the conversation, not separate admin jobs done at night.

The record you end up with

After a few weeks on BRCKS, both teams had the same thing: a dated, searchable project history that nobody had to type up. It covers the parts of a job that get argued about later.

• Site diary — who was on site, what was done, what held things up, with photos and timestamps. See the site diary app.
• Snags and defects — raised from a photo, assigned, chased and closed with evidence. See the snagging app.
• Variations and extras — the moment a change was agreed, in writing, with the message it came from. See variation management.
• Time and materials — captured as the work happens so invoicing matches reality.
• Client portal — a filtered view your client can look at instead of ringing you.

Could BRCKS work like this for you?

It fits UK builders, fit-out and MEP contractors, electricians, plumbers, solar and HVAC installers, AV specialists, maintenance teams and property managers running roughly 2–50 live jobs with a small office team and a rotating cast of subcontractors.

It is the wrong tool if you need estimating, takeoff, BIM coordination or an enterprise ERP. We will tell you that on a call rather than sell you a seat you will cancel. If your team has already given up on two pieces of construction software, the honest reason is usually adoption — which is the specific problem BRCKS is built around.

Try it on one job

The pattern in both case studies is the same: pick one live project, point the team at the BRCKS number, and look at the record after a fortnight. Nothing else changes. Start a 14-day free trial, check pricing (from £40 per paid seat per month, subcontractors free), watch the overview demo or talk to us with the founder.