About Nail & Tally™

I built Nail & Tally because I spent my days losing track of tools, and I was the one responsible for them.

My job is the job this app is built for. I pull the tools, the material, and the equipment a crew needs, load them up, and drive them out to the site. I drop them off. At the end, I pick up whatever has to come back. Then I haul it all to the shop or the yard and put it away where I think it goes, so it's there the next time someone needs it.

That last part is where it falls apart. Where I think it goes. Multiply that by a full inventory, a handful of job sites, and a season's worth of days, and you get the thing every crew already knows: tools drift. They get left on a site. They ride home in the wrong truck. They end up on a shelf nobody checks. Nobody notices until the morning someone needs the thing and it's just… gone. Then you're buying another one, or burning an hour driving to find it.

I tried the usual fixes. Barcodes and tags want a perfect process and a person with time to scan, neither of which exists on a real job site. Spreadsheets are a snapshot that's wrong by lunch. So I started building the tool I actually wanted: something that lives on the phone already in my pocket, that I can update in the seconds between loading the truck and pulling out of the yard.

What Nail & Tally is

Nail & Tally tracks every tool across every job site. No barcodes, no tags, just your phone. You log what you have, where it is, and where it's going, in the time it takes to do the work you're already doing. Managers can see the whole picture from a desktop; the crew works from their phone in the field.

Pricing: coming soon.

Why I'm building it the way I am

I'm not a software company that interviewed some contractors and decided tools were a market. I'm the guy doing the pulling, hauling, dropping off, and putting away, building the tool for my own problem first. That means every decision gets the same test: does this make my actual day faster, or does it just look good in a demo? If it doesn't survive a real job site, it doesn't ship.

I'm also building it in the open. On this site you'll find a running journal, why we made the calls we made, what we cut, what we got wrong, and a changelog of everything we ship. I'd rather you watch the work add up over time than take my word for it.

There are things we're still building. Photo-assisted item entry, pointing your phone at a tool and letting the app help log it, is on the roadmap; I'll write about it here as it gets real, not before.

Thomas K., founder, Nail & Tally™