My name is Socrates. I run Alpha Painting, a residential painting company in Massachusetts.
PaintCurrent didn't start as a software idea.
It started with a question I kept trying to answer:
What is actually happening in the company right now?
From folders to connected software
When I started in 1990, every project had a manila folder.
Then Excel came along and replaced folders full of paper with data sheets that could actually calculate the business — hours, labor, materials, production rates, overhead and profitability.
By the mid-2000s, Excel had become mobile on devices like the Pocket PC. That mattered for contractors because information could finally leave the desk and go into the field.
Then smartphones, tablets and cloud software made mobility normal. Sharing became easy too — office, field and owner could all work from the same information.
At the same time, the contractor-software market exploded. Estimating, CRM, scheduling, time tracking, payroll, accounting and project-management platforms all became significantly better.
That was a huge improvement.
But it created a different problem:
The information was no longer stuck in a folder or spreadsheet. It was now spread across multiple very capable systems.
Estimating knew what was sold. Payroll knew what was paid. Time tracking knew where the hours went. The bank knew where the money went. Accounting knew the financial history.
The data was there.
The complete operating picture still had to be assembled.
The problem PaintCurrent is trying to solve
Most software platforms are built to serve a broad audience and solve a broad range of problems.
PaintCurrent is focused on a narrower question that most painting contractors simply do not have the time to build a system around themselves:
Are your jobs carrying your company?
Not just: Did this job make money?
But: Are the productive hours generated by all of your jobs producing enough profit to cover the salaries, non-productive labor, payroll burden, vehicles, insurance, software, advertising and everything else it takes to operate the company?
And just as importantly: What does that picture look like right now?
That is where the real difficulty begins.
The math was never the hard part
I wanted to know three different things:
- Are the crews producing?
- Are the jobs profitable after their actual direct costs?
- Are those productive hours generating enough profit to carry the whole company?
Those are not the same question.
Hours measure production efficiency. Margin measures what the job contributed after its direct costs. Net profit per production hour tells you whether the productive side of the company is generating enough to support everything else the business costs.
The formulas themselves are not complicated.
The hard part is keeping the information underneath them current:
- Actual payroll.
- Actual employer burden.
- Production and non-production hours.
- Salaries and their burden.
- Overtime.
- Materials.
- Subcontractors.
- Company overhead.
- Collections.
- Bank and credit-card activity.
Spreadsheets can calculate all of it.
The work is keeping all of it updated, classified and reconciled often enough for the answer to still matter.
The spreadsheets kept surviving
For years, I assumed better software would eventually make the spreadsheets unnecessary.
And contractor software did get much better.
Some products became excellent at the specific jobs they were built to do. PaintScout, for example, became something I wanted to keep for estimating and sales.
But I kept running into the same issue.
One system knew the estimate. Another knew payroll. Another knew employee hours. Another knew expenses. Another knew the bank.
Each system could give me part of the picture.
I still had to create the answer.
My spreadsheets could tell me what happened.
Eventually.
But the more current I wanted the answer, the more time I had to spend reconstructing the business.
That was the problem I wanted to eliminate.
I wanted the picture to stay current
A painting company changes constantly.
Production hours change. Payroll changes. Overtime changes. A project manager gets hired. A salesperson gets added. Vehicles, insurance, advertising and software costs change. Weather reduces productive hours while overhead keeps running. Jobs finish. New jobs start. Money is collected. Bills are paid.
The economics of the company are moving all the time.
So a profitability picture built three months later may be accurate historically, but it is much less useful for operating the company today.
I wanted the operating picture to move when the company moved.
That is the idea behind PaintCurrent:
Complete Current Visibility.
Production. Job profitability. Payroll. True overhead. Collections. Cash. Company profitability. Connected closely enough that the owner can understand what the business is doing while there is still time to act on it.
That became PaintCurrent
I didn't build PaintCurrent because spreadsheets couldn't calculate the answers.
They could.
I built it because I got tired of doing all the work required to find out what was happening in my own company.
The progression over the years was pretty simple:
Information → Calculation → Mobility → Sharing → Connection → Visibility
PaintCurrent is the next step in that progression for me. It takes the activity already happening inside the company and turns it into one current operating picture.
And ultimately, it is built to answer one question:
Are your jobs carrying your company — right now?