The first customer was the founder's own crew

The problem was the quote for the software

Glazing work is bid-heavy: storefronts, impact windows and doors, shower enclosures, railings — each one priced from supplier parts, labor, and margin, sent as a proposal, and billed as the work progresses. The software that promised to manage that workflow either charged per user, buried pay applications behind enterprise tiers, or was built for the general contractor on the other side of the table.

So National Glass ran on spreadsheets — until its owner started building the tool he couldn't buy.

What a real contractor runs every week

• Bidding from a catalog: supplier parts and labor rates priced into line-item bids — more than 400 bids and 3,200+ priced line items since going live — with margin applied systematically instead of re-derived in a spreadsheet each time.
• Projects, not paperwork piles: 143 projects with their documents, phases, and billing in one record — the job's whole history findable in seconds.
• A CRM that remembers: 1,160 contacts — GCs, property managers, suppliers, homeowners — with every bid and job tied to them.
• Books that agree: invoices and payments synced to QuickBooks Online, so the office isn't re-typing what the field already recorded.

The newest habit: bids that start as conversations

The way National Glass builds bids has changed again — most of them now start as a chat. BuildWorkPro connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so describing the job in plain English — at a desk or from a phone — is enough to get the bid built in the account, ready to review.

"When I start a new bid, I usually just start chatting with Claude on my computer or my phone. I give it the information and it builds the bid for me. When it's done, I review it in BuildWorkPro and send it. Projects work the same way — the team and I run almost everything through natural conversation now."

— Ivan, founder

No prompts to learn, no technical setup beyond connecting the account — and nothing goes to a customer without a human review. How the AI assistant works.

Why this matters to you

Most construction software is designed in an office and tested in a demo. This one gets tested on Monday mornings — real bids that have to go out, real pay applications a GC has to approve, real crews on real jobs. When something is slow, confusing, or wrong, it costs National Glass money before any customer ever sees it, so it gets fixed. You're not buying a promise about how contractors work. You're buying the tool one already runs on.

Read the founder's story, or see the workflow National Glass runs: bidding, pay applications, and project management. In the glass business yourself? The whole workflow is mapped to your trade on the glazing contractors page.