Project management for builders who are sick of the WhatsApp group

Most small building firms run on one WhatsApp group per job, plus one for the whole firm. It works. Until it doesn’t. A photo of a cracked lintel gets buried under forty thumbs-up, the kitchen fitter asks for the worktop measurements for the third time, and the group still includes a plasterer who left in 2023 and gets every picture of your client’s bathroom.

The trouble is that a group chat has no idea what’s finished. Somebody says ‘I’ll order the Veluxes’ on Tuesday and there’s nothing to tick. By Friday nobody’s sure he did. Klusko gives each job a board and a chat channel side by side. The order is a task with an owner and a date; the chat is where you talk about it, and dropping the task into a message turns it into a live link anyone can open.

Name each project after the site, ‘27 Kingsley Avenue’ or ‘Unit 4, Brook Lane’, and put them all in a workspace called Live jobs. Star the three you’re running this week. Stages can be whatever suits your firm. We think To order, On site, Snagging, Done is a sensible start.

Snagging lists work well as tasks with a Snag tag and a photo attached: ‘Architrave gap, landing door’, ‘Touch up ceiling, bed 2’, each assigned to whoever’s fixing it. The client can be invited as a Guest to their own project and see the snag list go down, which saves a few of the ‘any update?’ calls. They won’t see your other sites, but they can read public channels, so keep pricing and moans about the client in a private one.

Deliveries and inspection dates go on the Calendar view. If building control moves the visit, change the date on the task and everyone sees it straight away.

We’ll be straight about this: Klusko suits the office side of a building firm first. There’s no Android app yet, and the iPhone app is still in testing, not on the App Store. There’s no offline mode either, so a basement with no signal is a basement with no Klusko. If most of your crew are on Android and never sit at a laptop, that’s a real gap. Better you hear it from us now.

Where it helps today is the person in the office who orders materials and chases building control for a date. Supplier orders become tasks with a custom field for the merchant’s order number. The Workload view shows who’s stacked up next week. And the team chat keeps job talk out of everyone’s personal WhatsApp, where it was never going to get ticked off.

Free covers up to 10 people but only 5 projects, which is tight if every job gets its own. Say you’re a six-person firm with eight live jobs: the Team plan is £30 a month billed yearly, or £36 monthly, with unlimited projects and guests. During early access every plan is free, and we’ll give 30 days’ notice before we charge anything. Details are on the pricing page.

Klusko doesn’t do quotes or invoices, and there’s no timesheet or Gantt-style build programme. It can’t talk to your accounts software either. If you need those, a dedicated trades package is the better buy. Ours is for the jobs list and the conversation around it, which is probably the bit your firm currently runs on a whiteboard and a group chat.