Most contractor software assumes someone sits at a desk. Paul runs his carpentry shop from his phone, so I built his back office to fit there.
My brother Paul runs Miter & Lathe, a custom carpentry shop in Northeast Ohio. He builds the cabinetry. He also answers the phone, buys the materials, tracks the hours, and works out what each job cost. There is no office manager and no dispatcher. There is a phone in his pocket and a bench covered in sawdust.
That is normal in the trade. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists self-employed workers as the largest single group of carpenters, at 25 percent in 2025. A large share of the trade is run by someone who still does the work.
Most shop software is not built for that person. This post is about the back office I built for Paul instead, why it looks the way it does, and why I am now opening it to a few other shops.
Shop software is built for the person at the desk
Look at how the well-known field service and construction tools are sold. Jobber sells its plans by the number of users, and charges for each user you add past that. JobTread charges a base price plus a fee for each internal user, though it lets some field crew in at no charge. Both are serious products, and plenty of shops are well served by them.
But the shape of the pricing tells you who the software expects to find. A per-user price makes sense when an office manager, an estimator and a bookkeeper each log in all day. A feature list built around quotes, client portals and dispatch makes sense when someone's whole job is the schedule.
A small shop has none of those people. It has an owner who works, and sometimes a crew. That owner does not need a second job running the software. He needs the back office to fit in the gaps of the day he already has: before the first cut, at the lumber yard, at the truck.
So the question I started from was not "what can shop software do?" It was "what does Paul actually do with his phone between jobs?"
What Paul used before
When I started on Paul's tools in 2026, his back office was the usual stack of free tools, each doing part of the job:
- Hours lived in a Google Sheet, one per job. Paul typed them in by hand, and then typed them again into Houzz for billing.
- The day's tasks lived in Apple Reminders, which cannot put a list in priority order.
- Shopping lists were shared lists, one per store.
None of these tools is bad. The trouble is the seams between them. Every seam is a place where Paul types the same fact twice, or carries it in his head until he gets back to a laptop. If that sounds familiar, the signs a business has outgrown its spreadsheets apply to a shop as much as to an office.
I did what I did for City Stems: fit the software to how the business already runs, instead of asking the business to change for the software.
What Miterbox does
The tools run in a phone's browser and install to the home screen. Sign-in is a code by text or email. There are no passwords to forget on a job site.
Paul calls his inbox "Miterbox," and the name stuck for the whole set.
The morning board, and one text to the crew
Every open task sits on one board, in one queue per person, plus an Unassigned column. Drag a task to whoever is doing it today. Drag it up or down to set the order.
When the board is set, a button reads "Text the crew," with a count beside it. One tap sends each person who has something new a single text: how many new items, how many are on their list, and a link to that list. Nothing sends on its own. The owner decides when the day is ready.
The inbox
A morning often starts with everything on your mind at once. The inbox takes it the way it arrives: type or paste one line per thing. Then sweep through the lines one card at a time. Pick the job, the person, and the store if it needs buying. "Save" puts the task at the bottom of that person's list. "Save to top" puts it first.
Hours from the phone
Each person enters hours against a job, in quarter hours, for today or the past week. The owner sees everyone's week on one screen, and can correct any entry or enter hours for someone else.
One detail I care about: each entry keeps the rate it was logged at. A raise prices only the hours after it, so a finished job's cost stops moving.
Purchases and receipts
Log a material or subcontractor purchase against a job, with its receipt. The store and the subcontractor are picked from a list, not typed, so one store never shows up under two spellings and splits its totals. Anyone on the crew can log a material purchase. Only the owner logs subcontractors, and the crew never see rates, costs or totals.
The job cost sheet
Each job keeps a running cost sheet: labor at cost and at bill rate, materials and subcontractors with your markup, and a total to date. The default markup is a setting the owner edits, and each job can override it. The sheet exports, so the numbers reach whatever you bill from as a file instead of being typed again.
That is the point of the whole set: know what a job cost before you invoice it.
The rest of it
- Store lists. A shopping list per store you buy from. Anyone on the crew adds to it, and whoever is at the store checks items off.
- Customer inquiries. A form on your website that lands in one inbox, with call, text and email buttons. Each morning you get a text or email with yesterday's new inquiries and today's booked calls.
- Job templates. Start a job from a template, and its standard tasks are already on the board.
The public side of Miter & Lathe, the website that asks callers for the job, the town and the start date, is a separate story. It is the Miter & Lathe case study on the Hurrah.dev home page.
An honest note about the crew half
Paul runs the shop on his own right now. The board is what he works from each day. The crew features (per-person lists, texting the crew, team hours) are built and in place, but they have not yet been used by a crew.
So I am not going to tell you Miterbox saves a shop so many hours a week, or cuts so many interruptions a day. Nobody has measured that, and I would rather tell you what the tools do than guess what they save. If you work alone, the tools work for one person: Paul works from the board each day. The crew features are there when you hire.
Why one flat price
Miterbox is $149 a month per shop. Flat. Unlimited crew.
The reason is the same reason the tools look the way they do. A per-user price charges you for the thing you want most: every person on the crew in the app. When each login costs money, the owner keeps entering hours and receipts for people, and the app turns back into a spreadsheet he fills in by hand. One price per shop means the whole crew can be in it, including the part-timer who comes in two days a week.
The founding-shop offer
Miterbox runs at one shop today. It opens to more shops if enough of them reserve a founding spot. Here is the offer, in the same words as the page:
- Founding shops: $99 a month, locked for as long as you stay.
- Reserve a founding spot with a refundable $99 deposit. Founding shops onboard in order. If the product does not launch, every deposit is refunded.
- Your deposit becomes your first month.
- Founding spots close December 17, 2026.
- Each founding shop gets its own copy. We set it up together on one call: your shop's name, your stores, your crew and your open jobs. Setup costs nothing extra.
There is no launch date yet.
Features. Tell me the one thing Miterbox is missing for your shop. When founding shops need the same thing, it is built into Miterbox for every shop. Change orders with customer approval are first on that list. If your shop needs something to work differently from everyone else's, that is a custom build on the Hurrah subscription, and the pricing section of the home page has the details.
Your data. You own it. If you leave, you get a full export of it.
Who it is for, and who it is not
Miterbox fits a small trade shop where the owner still does the work: carpentry, cabinets, trim, remodeling, and trades that run the same way. It fits a shop of one, and a shop with a crew.
It is not a quoting or invoicing system. It does not write estimates, send invoices or take customer payments. If those are the center of your week, a tool like Jobber or JobTread is the better fit today.
If your back office is a phone full of notes, a spreadsheet you catch up on every Sunday night, and receipts in the truck's door pocket, take a look. The Miterbox page has a short demo on made-up data, the full feature list, and the founding-spot deposit. If you are not ready to pay, the same page has a short form: tell me about your shop, and what you would most like off your plate.
Be like Paul
Paul runs his shop from the phone in his pocket. You can too. See Miterbox on made-up data, and reserve a founding spot.
Founding spots close December 17, 2026.
