David Peters spent 20 years in the trades — framing across western Canada, roofing, concrete — before an injury stopped him on site and forced a harder look at the one variable every contractor complains about but almost nobody measures properly: labour. His answer is ConstructionClock, a GPS-based time-tracking app that clocks crews in and out without anyone touching a phone. This episode is worth the hour for any trade shop owner who still spends part of every weekend reconciling timesheets.
At some point in running a construction company, the math stops working in your favour and you can't figure out why. The materials cost what they cost — suppliers set that price. Overhead moves slowly. But labour? Labour is where the money leaks, and the leak usually happens not on site but between site and payroll: paper timesheets filled out at end of day from memory, crew members rounding up, supervisors guessing at drive times, owners piecing it together on a Saturday morning with a coffee and a creeping dread.
David Peters knows that feeling because he lived it. He got into the trades at 16, building his dad's house, and spent the next two decades as a framing carpenter and then a roofer running his own 12-person company. He hit the scale that breaks manual systems — multiple crews, multiple active sites, jobs bleeding into each other — before he had any real system to track what each job actually cost in labour. When an injury took him off site, he built the tool he'd always needed.
"labor is the only thing where you're building a culture... labor is a massive part of that," Peters says in this episode of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. That framing matters: it positions labour not as a cost to be squeezed, but as the one major variable a contractor actually controls, and therefore the one most worth measuring.
The tipping point is smaller than you think
Peters is specific about who the app is built for: trade shops in the 3-to-12-person range that have recently split into two or three simultaneous crews. That's the inflection point. "companies that use our app are at that scale-up stage where now they've split off to two crews," he says. Below that threshold, an owner is on site with the crew and knows exactly what's happening. Above it, the paper chain falls apart fast.
The problem is structural. A supervisor texts in hours. The office admin transcribes them. Someone's phone died, so those hours get estimated. Another crew member worked a half-day on one job and a half-day on another — which job gets billed? By the time payroll runs, the numbers are an educated guess at best, and a costly wrong answer at worst.
Time theft is part of the conversation too, and Peters doesn't dress it up. On smaller sites without a dedicated supervisor present, workers logging their own start and end times have an incentive to err on the generous side. The aggregate hit to a small company across a full season is real money — and it's invisible unless you're measuring it.
How the clock actually works
The core mechanic is a geofence: draw a project boundary on a map, assign your crew, and the app automatically clocks them in when they arrive and out when they leave. No one touches a phone. "they show up on the project it automatically clocks them in when they get there when they leave," Peters explains. The geofence radius is adjustable — tighter for a house, wider for a commercial lot — and travel time between sites can be tracked separately.
From the owner's dashboard, there's a live map view of which crews are where and how many hours are accumulating against each project. That alone replaces a significant chunk of the mid-day check-in calls. After the job closes, the app generates a PDF labour-cost report broken down by worker and project. Peters describes the core feedback loop simply: "you can take our PDF document and put it next to your estimate and look at okay where did we go over."
That's it. The estimate said 80 hours. The actual was 107. Now you know where the frame went long, and you price the next one smarter. This is the kind of data most small trade shops are flying without — not because the data is hard to collect, but because no one had a hands-free way to collect it.
The integrations list — QuickBooks, Sage, CompanyCam — reflects where small contractors already live. Rather than ask owners to abandon their existing software stack, ConstructionClock positions as the labour-data layer that feeds those systems. Peters is clear on the product's scope: "we're not building scheduling and estimation and all this stuff... we're just focused on this one very specific problem." That discipline makes the product easier to adopt and harder to replace.
What the admin time data actually looks like
The ROI case is concrete. Peters describes a customer who ran payroll by hand every week — a full Saturday's work. After adopting the app: "it's down to an hour a day now instead of an eight hour day on a Saturday." An eight-hour Saturday reclaimed per week is not a marginal improvement. For a company owner who is also a parent, a partner, or just a person who would like a weekend, it's a meaningful change in how the business runs.
That kind of testimonial spreads fast in trade circles, which helps explain another number Peters drops: at the time of recording, the company was signing roughly 11 new companies per day. That's not a sales pitch — it's what happens when you solve a problem that every person in the target market has personally felt.
The privacy line
One objection surfaces consistently when owners introduce GPS tracking to their crews: it feels like surveillance. Peters' answer to that is a design choice the app makes explicitly. ConstructionClock tracks presence at a project, not every move a worker makes between the parking lot and the door. "we want to be as accurate as possible without crossing the line of user privacy," Peters says. No breadcrumb tracking. No movement logs. The app answers one question — is this person at this job site, and for how long — and stops there.
That distinction matters for adoption. A crew that understands the app isn't following them home is a crew that will actually leave it running. An app workers resent or disable solves nothing. The privacy boundary is also the accountability boundary: presence data is all an owner needs to close out accurate timesheets and it's all the app claims to provide.
Building software for an industry, not one customer
Peters' company is 19 people, fully remote, with team members from Ukraine to the United States — verified in a ConstructConnect profile from April 2023, within weeks of this recording. That's a real software company operating at scale, not a two-person side project. It's also a company that had to learn a different kind of product discipline.
Early on, Peters says, he reacted quickly to every feature request that came in from a customer. He had to stop. "I used to react very quickly to everything that they wanted and now I have to look at the entire industry," he says. A feature that solves one company's edge case often breaks the workflow for ten others. Building for a whole industry means holding the line on the product's scope — even when a specific customer is pressing hard for a custom path.
The platforms play into this too. Peters describes working toward the Procore marketplace — one of the larger construction-software ecosystems — and notes the welcome he received: "they're not Gatekeepers they made that very clear that we're going on to their Marketplace." Large platforms that open to specialist apps create a distribution channel for niche tools that would otherwise struggle to reach buyers. For any construction-tech founder watching this space, that's worth noting.
The trade background is the product
The thing Peters returns to throughout the conversation is credibility earned on site. "when I talk to customers they immediately know that I was a contractor." That's not a marketing line; it's the difference between a software vendor explaining what pain points contractors have and a former contractor describing their own.
It's also the thread behind the product's early adoption story. The first customers took a chance on an app that wasn't finished — they tolerated bugs because the underlying idea was right. Peters credits that clearly: "without those early adopters that believed in what this could become not what it was at the start" — those early relationships are what gave the company enough runway to get the product to where it works. Protect those relationships, he implies, because you don't build a second product without them.
For Atlantic trade shops specifically
Most of Atlantic Canada's construction economy is small shops — three to fifteen people, running a mix of residential and light commercial, often with one or two crews operating independently on any given day. That's exactly the company ConstructionClock is built for.
If your company's payroll still starts with a stack of paper timesheets or a group chat full of hour-reports, the case for trying an automated system is straightforward: the admin time savings alone likely cover the cost, and the job-cost data you get back from every closed project is something you can actually use to bid the next one.
ConstructionClock integrates with QuickBooks and Sage, connects with CompanyCam for site photo documentation, and is available for iOS and Android. The full conversation with David Peters is on Episode 44 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast.
Guest: David Peters, CEO & Founder, ConstructionClock. Episode 44 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Procore Technologies and Navacord. Team headcount source: ConstructConnect, April 2023.