Features
Everything between the yard gate and the invoice
Nine areas, designed for how crane and rigging work is actually billed. Below is what each one does — and further down, an honest list of what it doesn’t do yet.
Field ticket
One ticket per day, filled in as the day happens
Dispatch creates the ticket shell before the crew leaves — job, site, assigned crew already on it. The operator opens it on their phone and fills in the rest as the shift runs.
- Portal-to-portal timestamps: left yard, arrived, departed, back in yard
- Crew present by role — operator, rigger, oiler, signal person — added or removed on the spot
- Equipment used, plus catalog charges for travel, fuel, permits and consumables
- Autosaves as a draft all shift: a dead battery or a closed tab loses nothing
- Submit locks the ticket to the crew — corrections go through the office, so the record stays trustworthy
- Admin-defined custom fields for whatever your customers demand on a ticket
Rate engine
The pricing rules you already have, applied without you
A company-wide rate card, with optional per-customer overrides, and per-worker overrides under that. Set it once; every ticket after that prices itself.
- Minimum hours set per customer or contract — 4-hour and 8-hour both handled, not one global setting
- Overtime calculated daily, per ticket, at your multiplier (1.5× by default)
- Weekend and holiday multipliers, configurable up to 3×
- Role rates with per-worker overrides for the operator who's paid differently
- Time rounds up to the nearest 15 minutes before minimums and overtime apply
- Standby is billed like active time — it's inside the portal-to-portal window, because it costs you the same
- A structured charge catalog instead of free-text lines, so the same permit is priced the same way twice
- Operator · 8.0 h @ $95.00
- $760.00
- Rigger · 8.0 h @ $72.00
- $576.00
- Travel — portal to portal
- $340.00
- Permit — municipal road occupancy
- $185.00
4-hour minimum applied. Overtime after 8 hours at 1.5×. Nobody re-typed a rate.
Compliance
Every expiry date in one place, warned about three times
Worker credentials, equipment inspections, rigging gear and company documents — tracked together, with staged warnings at 60, 30 and 7 days before each one lapses.
- People: crane operator licence, rigger, signal person, working-at-heights, WHMIS, first aid
- Equipment: annual crane inspection, CVOR, and per-unit certificates
- Rigging gear tracked individually, with kit grouping so a sling set moves as one
- Company level: insurance, WSIB clearance, COR
- Bulk CSV import, so moving your spreadsheet across is an afternoon, not a project
- Notifications go to the office and to the certified worker — not just to whoever remembers to look
Dispatch
Crew and iron on one board
A weekly grid of every operator and every unit, so you can see what's actually free before you promise a customer a Tuesday.
- Drag a job onto a crew or a unit; conflicts surface immediately
- Certificate expiries flagged at the moment of assignment, before the crew is dispatched
- Unavailable and in-maintenance blocks shown as blocked, not as silently empty
- Filter to crew only, equipment only, or both
- Assigning a job creates the ticket shell the crew opens in the field
Equipment
Know what you actually have to sell
Each crane, boom truck and picker as a record: its certificates, its inspection dates, and where it's committed this week.
- Per-unit certificate and inspection tracking, feeding the same four-tier status as your crew
- Availability visible from the dispatch board when you're quoting
- Maintenance windows that block scheduling instead of surprising it
Accounting
QuickBooks Online, one way, no double entry
Approved work becomes an invoice and pushes to QuickBooks Online. Your bookkeeper keeps working exactly the way they do now.
- One invoice per job — a three-day lift is one bill, not three tickets to reconcile
- Map your customers and charge types to your QuickBooks accounts once
- One-way push: cr4nes never rewrites anything in your books
Customers
Enquiry to customer, without the sticky notes
A simple pipeline for the work you're chasing, and a customer record that holds the sites, contacts and rate agreement you keep re-explaining.
- Lead pipeline: enquiry, quoted, won, lost
- Multiple sites and contacts per customer — the yard, the tower, the guy who actually answers
- Per-customer rate overrides attached to the customer, not remembered by one person
- A public intake link you can put on your own site so enquiries land in the pipeline directly
Customer portal
Your customer can look it up themselves
A separate, login-protected view where your customer sees their own bookings, the site and equipment assigned, and what was invoiced.
- Their bookings, their sites, their invoice references — nothing else
- Completely separate from your staff login: a customer never touches your dispatch board
- Cuts the “can you resend the ticket from the 14th” phone call
Reporting
The unbilled pile, on the first screen
The dashboard opens on the number that matters: finished work that hasn't been invoiced, and how long it's been sitting there.
- Unbilled ticket ageing, bucketed 0–3, 4–7, 8–14 and 15+ days
- Compliance items needing attention, worst first
- Equipment status: what's out, what's in the yard, what's down
Not built yet
What cr4nes doesn't do
Every one of these is a real reason someone might not buy. You'd find out in week two anyway — better now.
Photos, video and signatures on the ticket
The single best dispute-killer, and it isn't built yet. It's the next thing on the list. Until it ships, crews send photos the way they do today.
3D lift planning and load charts
Not on the roadmap at all. Specialist tools do this properly, and pretending otherwise would waste your money.
Two-way accounting sync
The QuickBooks Online push is one way, on purpose. Nothing cr4nes does can rewrite your books.
Payroll
Hours are captured per worker per ticket and can be exported, but cr4nes doesn't run payroll and won't pretend to.
Worth fifteen minutes of your day?
No slide deck. Tell us how a ticket gets from the truck to the invoice today, and we’ll tell you whether this changes anything.