Builders: keep the site and the money in the same story.
A build runs for months, is paid in stages, and consumes material every single day. The gap between what a site has cost and what has been invoiced for it is where small builders lose their margin — usually without ever seeing the number.
Orbit is in development. Join the waitlist and we WhatsApp you when it opens.
rivonia slab done today. 12 bags cement 1090 from buildit
Two things logged against Rivonia ✅
invoice the slab stage
Progress invoice #0091 drafted — tap to check and send.
ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE
Where it goes
What costs a builder money after the job.
Progress payments are agreed, then argued
Foundations, slab, roof height, plaster. Each stage triggers a payment, and each payment is a conversation about whether the stage is actually complete. Without a dated record of what was finished when, the conversation is a memory contest.
Material costs are spread across three sites
One trip to the merchant supplies two jobs. Splitting that invoice correctly, weeks later, from a slip in the bakkie, does not happen — so one site absorbs the lot and your costing is wrong on both.
Labour on site is a rolling number
Four people this week, six next, one of them only on Thursday. Paid weekly, in cash, against a note. The total is knowable and almost never known.
What Orbit does about it
One message, at the end of the job.
Orbit is being built as a way to keep a running record of a site without leaving WhatsApp. Send what happened — the stage reached, the material bought, the labour paid, the amount invoiced — and each line attaches to the site it belongs to. There is no site diary to fill in later, because the messages you already send are the diary.
Because the record is per site, the money question can be answered per site: what has this job cost me, what have I invoiced, and what is outstanding. That is the number that decides whether a build is worth doing again, and it is the number most small builders only see at the end, if at all.
Invoices are drafted from the same record. Ask for a progress invoice and Orbit prepares it against the stage you recorded, on the date you recorded it. You read it and send it yourself — Orbit does not send anything to a client on its own, on any Vyso product.
What it keeps for you
- Every site as its own running record, dated
- Material and labour costs against the site that used them
- Progress invoices drafted from the stage you recorded
- Cost versus invoiced, per site, without a spreadsheet
Orbit drafts. You send.
Questions
Builders ask us this.
Can Orbit handle more than one site at a time?
Yes — name the site in the message and Orbit is being built to keep each one separate. Where a message is ambiguous it asks rather than guessing, because a cost on the wrong site is worse than a question.
Does it produce a bill of quantities?
No. Orbit is not an estimating package and this site will not imply that it is. It records what actually happened and what it cost, which is the half that usually goes unrecorded.
Can I track cash paid to labourers?
Tell Orbit what you paid and to whom and it holds it against the site as a cost. It is a record for you, not a payroll system — PAYE, UIF and employment compliance are your accountant's territory, not Orbit's.
When can I actually use this?
Orbit is in development and has no public launch date yet. Join the waitlist and we WhatsApp you when it opens; founding pricing is locked for people on the list.
Orbit for other trades
Orbit for builders.
Orbit is being built now. The list is free, it commits you to nothing, and founding pricing is locked for the people on it.