Builder FAQs

TradeTrax is a jobsite intelligence and scheduling platform built by Trades specifically for production homebuilders, where trades and construction managers report the actual state of every home in real time. Where ERPs and scheduling tools capture the plan, TradeTrax captures reality — the data foundation builders need for schedule reliability, cycle time improvement, and trade performance accountability.

Your ERP is designed to manage back-office operations — accounting, procurement, and supply chain. That means your schedules are optimized around when payments are due, not around true construction flow. Your ERP reflects what the plan was, not what reality is. TradeTrax is the system of record for what's actually happening at every jobsite, updated in real time by the people doing the work. Trades interact with it daily — checking in, checking out, flagging issues. CMs manage tasks as they happen, not after the fact. That ground truth feeds back into your decisions: which trades are performing, where cycle time is slipping, and what needs attention today. It works alongside your existing systems, not instead of them.

Schedule adherence, start and finish performance, cycle time, job readiness, and schedule reliability — and quality at every stage — across every home, every community, and every division, updated in real time.

Quality is tracked at every stage of the build — QC checklists, punchlists, and quality-driven delays captured in real time alongside schedule data. You can see where issues are concentrated, which trades are generating them, and where quality is driving cycle time impact. That's the difference between knowing you have a quality problem at warranty and seeing it form on the lot.

Most updates come directly from the crews doing the work, captured in real time on the mobile app.

But schedule reliability doesn't depend on a single person to keep things current. Different trades work differently — so TradeTrax captures data from whichever source is best positioned to report it: the crew on site, the trade's office, or builder field staff. The result is a real-time, accurate record of every home, captured by the right source — not pieced together by office staff after the fact.

Yes. There's no need to wait for a new community or a new start.

Every home currently in WIP gets loaded into the platform at onboarding. If you have 205 homes in progress when you onboard, those 205 homes are immediately telling you which trades are hitting their dates, where cycle time is slipping, and why. Start another 20 homes the following week and you're now tracking 225. The sooner you start, the sooner you can answer questions that aren't answerable today — why a schedule slipped, whether a trade is consistently late or just had a bad week, how actual durations compare to your template assumptions.

Ongoing pricing is per home start — you only pay for what you build. In a slow market you pay less. In a strong market you pay more. The pricing aligns directly to your unit economics, so there's never a fixed overhead burden running regardless of how many homes you're closing.

Unlimited users, included. Most software companies charge per seat — that's the traditional SaaS growth model. We don't. Anyone on your team who needs access gets it — superintendents, CMs, procurement, finance, executives. No license tracking, no awkward conversations about who gets a login. Our incentive is simple: the more people using the platform, the better your data, and the more value you get.

Also included at no additional cost:

• Unlimited data storage — every job, every trade, every community
• 24/7 technical support
• All product updates

Yes. TradeTrax supports integration with most ERP and third-party software that are API-friendly. If your system allows for integration through APIs, TradeTrax can integrate with it.

Getting up and running is straightforward. Individual user training takes less than an hour — the platform is built to be easy to learn. Full rollout across your trades and communities typically takes 6 to 8 weeks — including all homes currently in WIP, so you're not waiting for a clean slate to start generating data. Our implementation team manages that process end to end.

Our implementation team works directly with your trades — training their teams, monitoring usage, and making sure the platform gets used correctly from day one. You're not on your own to manage trade adoption.

TradeTrax was built by trades, designed around what trades actually need. They get real-time visibility into job readiness — no more dry runs, no more calling the CM to find out where things stand. They get schedule data they can trust enough to run their business around: cadence planning for crew deployment, accurate start dates, predictable handoffs from upstream trades. That kind of predictability doesn't exist in their current world.

They also get something no existing system provides: clear, objective transparency on how they're being measured. Every trade today thinks they're being judged unfairly by their builder's existing system. TradeTrax gives them the actual data - monthly performance reports, crew-level reporting on start and finish performance by plan and template, visibility into where their team is succeeding and where it's struggling.

Your team will have access to 24/7 technical support for the length of your contract at no additional cost. If something isn't working, someone is available — no support tiers, no ticketing delays.

Yes. The full knowledge base — articles and videos covering every role — is available in both English and Spanish. For teams with Spanish-speaking trades or field staff, nothing gets lost in translation.

Simply use the link below and complete our contact form and a TradeTrax team member will reach out to you within a business day.

Your operation gets measurably more efficient — fewer people doing administrative work, and the people you have doing more of what actually matters.

Construction, scheduling, procurement, and quality teams stop working from different versions of the truth and start operating from one real-time view of every home, every trade, every commitment. When you know which trades are adding days to cycle, what those days cost, and where quality issues are surfacing before they reach the homeowner, sourcing and contract decisions get sharper.

CMs spend less time chasing field updates and more time on quality and customer experience. Published completion dates become reliable. Go-backs drop, and so do warranty claims.

Cycle time comes down as a result of all of that, not as a goal in itself.

"Fine" in a slow market isn't much of a bar. Trades are more available, schedules run cleaner, and cycle times look good almost by default. That's not operational excellence — that's a favorable environment.

When starts pick back up, that slack disappears quickly. The divisions that deliver on their annual plan and outperform other divisions are the ones that used the quiet period to build real operational discipline — not the ones that mistook a slow market for a well-run one.

Right now you have something you won't have when the market turns: bandwidth. Your CMs have time to adopt new workflows. Your trades have the capacity to engage with a new system. The divisions that build that foundation now will define the next cycle.

You get hours back in your day.

Today most of your time goes to chasing information — calling trades, confirming dates, hunting down updates, keeping schedules current by hand. The data comes to you in real time from the trades doing the work, and one tool replaces the patchwork: schedules, payment approvals, quality, trade communication, all in one place. You spend your time on what actually matters — walking houses, managing quality, working with homebuyers.

House walks change too: lot-level scope, outstanding items, and approvals at your fingertips instead of buried in your inbox. And accountability stops being a relationship problem you manage. The system holds trades to their commitments. The data is the data, visible to everyone.

Yes. Over 90% of the updates in TradeTrax come directly from the trades themselves. You're not chasing them down anymore. Trades are doing what they already do today — communicating about the work — but through one tool, the same way every time. No more tracking down texts, emails, voicemails, or notes scattered across your phone and inbox. One place. One record. Every trade. Every job.

No — most CMs or field superintendents find it reduces their workload significantly.

Unlike top-down scheduling systems where the CM is the hub for every field update, the information flows the other way — trades communicate the status of their own work to each other and to you. CMs manage exceptions and approve trade-proposed schedule changes with a single click, rather than chasing updates and manually rescheduling after every overrun or no-show.

Most customers report a noticeable drop in coordination calls from trades within the first week. When schedules update automatically from the field, trades stop calling to ask what's next.

The platforms most CMs deal with today were built for back-office workflows, not field workflows.

They're so painful to keep current that nobody really does it — trades don't check the system, CMs work around it, and what's in there doesn't match what's actually happening on the lot. This was built for the people doing the work and the people coordinating it. You and your trades finally share a source of truth you can both trust.

Procurement teams today don't have a reliable trade performance dataset. What you do have is incomplete and misleading — maybe you know how often a trade finishes late, but that doesn't tell you whether they're starting late, finishing on time but missing schedule, or eating cycle time you can't see. You have no real basis to compare trades, or to evaluate what their performance actually costs the business.

The platform captures a complete trade performance dataset — start performance, finish performance, cycle time impact, quality impact, quality-driven delays — across every home, in real time. That's how you find out whether the trade you picked because they were $100 cheaper per house actually saved you anything once you account for their cycle time and quality drag. And when contract talks come around, you're not negotiating about what happened. Both sides are looking at the same record, with the performance evidence on the table.

The reports you can build today are limited by the data your existing systems capture — which is shallow. You can see how often a trade finishes late, maybe how often they hit a target date. That's it. None of them tell you why, or what to do about it.

The platform uses real CPM schedule logic, so it can separate a trade that started late and finished late from a trade that started on time and still finished late — two completely different problems with two completely different conversations. The reports you get aren't a better version of what you have today; they're reporting your current tools physically can't produce.

More than your current tools can show you. Across the trade base:

• How reliable each trade's start dates really are, and how often they miss by how many days
• Finish performance as a separate variable from start performance (a trade that starts on time and finishes late is a different problem from one that starts late — your current data treats them the same)
• Cycle time impact attributable to specific trades
• Quality performance and quality-driven delays alongside schedule performance
• How accurate your schedules really are day to day, and who's keeping them current

That's the performance evidence you need to make sourcing, contract, and bid decisions based on what trades actually cost — not just what they bid.

Yes, peer comparison is core to how the platform is built — head-to-head trade comparisons, peer group benchmarks, and anonymized peer reports you can share with trades themselves.

You can see which electricians outperform which on the same plan in the same community, how a trade ranks against their peer group on start reliability or cycle time impact, and where individual trades sit relative to the benchmark on quality.

You can also see which trades perform best together — useful when you're doing community planning and want to pair trades whose schedules and quality reinforce each other rather than collide.

That comparison data turns subjective performance conversations into objective ones: for sourcing decisions, contract negotiations, and the conversations you have with trades when their numbers are in front of them.

Pricing conversations stop being subjective. When a trade asks for an increase, you have the actual performance evidence in front of you — start reliability, cycle time impact, quality, finish performance — and a way to quantify what their impact costs the business in carry days. Internal view for your team, trade-facing view for the conversation itself.

The same data works both directions: a trade saving you days in cycle time has earned a conversation about a pricing increase they couldn't have gotten under your current process. A trade costing you three days and several hundred dollars per house in delays has a different conversation.

Yes. Deliveries are tracked against the job schedule, so you can see exactly how supplier timing impacts construction flow.

For offsite manufacturers, real-time jobsite visibility also helps them plan production more accurately — which reduces waste they'd otherwise build into their bid price.

Less firefighting, more planning.

The rescheduling logic lives in the build template, not in a scheduler's head. When trades update their status from the field, the schedule adjusts automatically — no manual data entry, no chasing updates, no judgment calls on every task change.

Real CPM logic and definition-of-ready checks catch schedule errors before they propagate, and that frees scheduling teams to focus on what actually prevents delays: planning labor availability with trades ahead of time, rather than scrambling to reschedule after someone doesn't show up.

Continuously, as work happens in the field — starts, completions, delays, accelerations. Over 90% of updates come directly from trades as the work is occurring, not after the fact.

It accelerates it — but not just by running faster. Most builders today are stuck with templates built around payment scopes, not actual construction flow. When templates reflect how work actually moves through a job, you can continuously optimize: dynamic templates by trade, by crew size, by plan, refined from what actually happens in the field. Cycle time reduction follows as the outcome, not the target.

No. There are multiple ways to integrate with your existing ERP and production management tools — including an RPA bot that keeps your legacy system current during the transition. The integration approach that fits your stack is worked out during implementation.

Improving cycle in a slow market is driven by available capacity versus true process change.

But when starts pick back up, that slack disappears. Hidden inefficiencies resurface. Builders who implement genuine operational discipline now will capture the most from a growth phase.

Two ways: margin and cash flow.

A home sitting in WIP can cost $300-$500/day in carrying costs — financing, overhead, insurance, taxes. That meter runs 24x7x365. Shorter cycle means fewer days on the clock. All those costs shrink. It also means faster inventory conversion to cash.

The core formula is straightforward:

ROI = Benefit divided by Cost
Benefit = Days saved x $300 daily carrying cost x annual closings = annual margin recovery
Cost = Platform Subscription

A division closing 400 homes a year that reduces cycle by 15 days recovers approximately $1.8M in annual margin. That's before benefits of cash conversion and freed-up build capacity.

The variables to substitute with your own numbers:

• Your average daily carrying cost
• Your realistic cycle time improvement (conservative starting point: 10-15 days in year one)
• Your annual closings in the division or community being evaluated

We'd be glad to work through your specific ROI.

SG&A, corporate allocations, and regional overhead get spread across more homes. That's where per-unit economics improve.

A division running 150-day cycles runs at roughly 2.4 annual turns. At 120 days, that same division - same superintendent, same G&A, same sales staff - produces 3.0 turns. That is the definition of productivity: doing the same (or more) volume with fewer resources.

Investors and analysts valuing your company and comparing to peers care about that productivity.

Through ROIC — the metric behind enterprise value creation.

Shorter cycle times improve ROIC from both directions: operating profit goes up as carrying costs shrink, and invested capital goes down as WIP inventory decreases. Investors pay a premium for durable ROIC exceeding cost of capital. The reward is a higher earnings multiple.

Consistency matters. Cycle improvement from slowing starts is temporary — it reverses the moment volume returns. Improvement from operational discipline is structural and compounds over time.

No. TradeTrax is fully cloud-based. There is nothing to install, patch, or host on your infrastructure.

TradeTrax supports integration with most ERP and third-party software that are API-friendly. If your system allows for integration through APIs, TradeTrax can integrate with it.

TradeTrax is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United States. For a full list of sub-processors and security controls, visit our Trust Center.

No. TradeTrax does not use customer data to train AI models, and we verify that our AI sub-processors maintain the same standard as part of our vendor review program. For more information, visit our Trust Center.

No. TradeTrax does not sell customer personal data. See our Privacy Policy and DPA for full details.

You have 30 days following termination to retrieve your data. After that, the remaining data is deleted in accordance with our DPA, subject to any applicable legal retention requirements. Additional terms may be available in your service agreement. Full details are at DPA.

Yes — TradeTrax is SOC 2 Type 2 certified. Compliance documentation is available at our Trust Center.

Outside your standard security and vendor approval process, there is no required lift to support a rollout. The platform is cloud-based with nothing to host, install, or maintain. Initial IT involvement is primarily a security review, which the Trust Center and SOC 2 Type 2 documentation are designed to support. For builders using the RPA bot during the integration period, IT will be involved in that setup. Native integration and SSO are on the roadmap to reduce that overhead further.