PaintMate · Custom Software for Trades
Get your evenings back.
Custom job-cost software for painting contractors and trades. Phone clock-in for your crew. Automated supplier reconciliation. Invoices that build themselves. Built around how your crew actually works — not around a spreadsheet.
Built for Alberto’s Residential Painting, Elma · Luis Cruz, OwnerIn daily use since 2025Built in Grays Harbor, WA
The Problem
You’re running a real business on Google Sheets and texts.
Before PaintMate, this is what an evening at Alberto’s Residential Painting looked like:
- Track down each employee. "What did you work on today? How many hours? Which job?" Type it into Google Sheets.
- Pull Sherwin-Williams invoices one at a time. Match each PO to a project. Add up the line items. Fix the cashier-typed misspellings.
- Build the invoice. Calculate labor × rate by labor type. Add materials with markup. Apply tax. Type it into a Word doc. Save as PDF.
- Run biweekly payroll math by hand. Reconcile against the spreadsheet. Pay the guys.
- Hope you didn't make a mistake. You'll find out next quarter when you do taxes.
That’s not a business. That’s a second job after the first one ends.
What PaintMate Does
Built around how your crew actually works.
Phone clock-in for the crew
Your guys clock in and out from their phones, select the project and labor type, and the system records everything by job, role, and date. No more end-of-day texts asking what they worked on. No more guessing on payroll.
Sherwin-Williams (and any supplier) automation
Sherwin-Williams doesn't offer an integration. We built one. The system logs into your account, pulls invoices, extracts every line item from the PDFs, and auto-matches purchases to projects by PO number — including the misspellings cashiers introduce. What used to take 30+ minutes per project happens with one click.
Invoicing in 5 minutes
When you're ready to bill, everything's already there. Labor pre-calculated at the right rate per labor type. Materials pulled in with markup applied. Tax computed. You review, click send, your client gets a professional PDF invoice by email.
Automated biweekly payroll
Payroll runs off the same clocked hours. No manual math. No reconciling spreadsheets against texts. The crew gets paid on the hours they actually worked, on the jobs they actually worked on.
Built for multi-job, multi-crew operations
If your crew is across multiple job sites in a day — and most of them are — the system handles it. Workers tag time to the project. Materials tag to the project. Your P&L by job is real instead of "close enough."
Your software, your business
Custom-built for how your operation actually runs. Add a customer portal, scheduling, equipment tracking, or subcontractor management over time. Owned, not rented. No annual lock-in like Procore or BuildOps.
What Changes
Before vs. After
| Before | With PaintMate | |
|---|---|---|
| Daily hours collection | Texts + Google Sheets every evening | Auto-recorded from phone clock-in |
| Sherwin-Williams reconciliation | 30+ min per project, manual | 1 click — automated PO matching |
| Invoicing a multi-phase job | An entire evening | 5-minute review |
| Payroll math | Manual every two weeks | Calculated automatically |
| Project P&L visibility | Whenever you sit down to add it up | Real-time |
| Software cost | Procore: $30–60k/year forever | One-time build + light monthly maintenance |
How Luis Runs It Now
Luis’s crew clocks in on their phones. Every job, every hour, every material run is already logged by the time he sits down to invoice. What used to take an evening of spreadsheets now takes about five minutes.
Free Consultation
The conversation costs nothing.
20 minutes on the phone or in person. No pitch. I’ll ask what your back office looks like today and what about it makes you wince. If there’s a fit, I’ll come back with a one-page proposal. If not, you’ve still got a free consultation from a local engineer.
Or just visit the main Elma Digital site to learn about other things we build.