Construction and trades

Your business runs from sites, not desks. We set up the phones, tablets, email and job files your crews, estimators and supervisors rely on, and look after the office behind them.

Talk to us about your business

What gets in the way

The work happens on site. Supervisors and crews need email, drawings and job files on phones and tablets, and a phone left on site can carry all of it.
New offices and new entities. A second office or a new trading entity often gets set up with whatever was bought locally, including home editions of Windows and no common standard.
Email on hosting you don’t control. Email sold alongside a domain name or run by whoever built the website can keep dropping out, with nobody able to fix it when it matters.
Invoices from everywhere. Supplier and subcontractor invoices arrive by email all day, so a request to change bank details is easy to process without a second look.

How we help

Microsoft 365 & Identity: Multi-factor on every account, including the ones used only on site phones, and email moved into Microsoft 365 directly rather than left on hosting you don’t control.
Managed Security Tiers: Endpoint protection on every device, with mobile device and application management on the Fortress tier so a phone or tablet lost on site can be wiped.
Hardware & Procurement: Business grade computers with the right version of Windows, built to one standard so a new site office is set up the same way as the first.
Cloud Solutions: Job files moved into SharePoint and out of personal drives, with licences kept in line with headcount as crews come and go.
Hosted Infrastructure & Domains: Domains held in an account your business owns and DNS documented, so email doesn’t vanish because a registration lapsed or a login left with someone.
Security Awareness: Short training so office staff check changed bank details by phone before a supplier payment goes out.

Obligations worth knowing

Fair Work requires employee records, including pay and hours, to be kept for 7 years in a form that’s readily accessible to a Fair Work Inspector. Source
Most small businesses with an annual turnover of $3 million or less aren’t covered by the Privacy Act, but some are, and the OAIC has a checklist to work out whether yours is. Source

Set up the mobile side with the same care as the office

A year of work for concrete, plumbing and construction businesses showed how much of a trades business’s IT lives on phones and tablets: email on a new iPad, the authenticator app on a supervisor’s phone, Outlook on a new Mac. Those devices carry the same email and job files as the office PCs. Our Microsoft 365 and identity work puts multi-factor on every account, including ones only used on site, and managed security on the Fortress tier adds mobile device management so a lost phone can be wiped.

New sites, new offices, the same standard

When a concrete contractor opened a new office over the border, its two new PCs arrived with Windows 11 Home. We upgraded both to Windows 11 Pro, signed them in with the business’s Microsoft 365 accounts, brought them under monitoring and got the printer scanning to email. Hardware and procurement avoids that step next time by buying business grade machines with the right Windows from the start.

Email gets the same treatment. A fit-out contractor’s mail sat on a hosted Exchange product sold by its domain registrar that kept becoming unavailable, so we moved it into the business’s own Microsoft 365 tenant with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for the domain. And when Windows 10 support ended, an automotive workshop needed its reception and workshop PCs on Windows 11 without losing printing from its main software.

Records and payments

Payroll, timesheets and leave sit in your systems for a long time. Fair Work requires employee records to be kept for 7 years and to be readily accessible to an inspector, so they belong somewhere backed up and tested, through backup and recovery, rather than on one office PC. And with invoices arriving from every direction, checking a changed bank detail by phone is the cheapest control a trades business can have.