trenchbooks.com

What It Is

TrenchTracker is an expense and project cost tracking SaaS built for underground utility contractors. Its positioning is highly vertical: from trench to report, it covers expense records, production logs, crews, labor hours, 811 locate tickets, payroll, and prevailing wages. Its core value is not as generic accounting software, but in bringing common jobsite elements—projects, budgets, linear-foot production, crew hours, and compliant wages—into one interface.

Core Features and Ease of Use

Based on the available information, the product has a fairly complete set of modules. Expenses can be recorded by project, category, and subcategory, with support for receipt photos, vendors, quantities, and units. The project module allows budgets, clients, start/end dates, and status to be configured. The production module records daily linear feet, job addresses, and onsite crews. Crew and employee modules support member details, project assignments, regular hours, and 1.5x overtime. Reporting supports monthly, quarterly, annual, project-based, category-based, and date-range views, with CSV/JSON export. Particularly valuable for U.S. contractors are support for 811 locate tickets, Davis-Bacon, state prevailing wage requirements, SAM.gov wage determination links, and certified payroll reporting.

Pricing and Trial

Pricing is transparent and low: $7 per month, or $64 per year, with the annual plan marked as saving 20%. The plan includes unlimited expenses, unlimited projects, CSV and JSON export, and category management. A 14-day full-featured free trial is available, with no credit card required, and users can cancel anytime. Based on the text, there is no free plan; after the trial ends, a subscription is required to continue using the service.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are its industry focus, simple onboarding, low price, and features that closely match the day-to-day recordkeeping and compliance needs of U.S. underground utility construction companies. The drawbacks are also clear: there is no disclosed support for a mobile app, offline use, role-based permissions, approvals, audit logs, data encryption, backups, SOC 2, or other enterprise-grade capabilities. Third-party integrations also appear limited; only Google login, SAM.gov links, and data export are visible, with no evident integration with accounting systems such as QuickBooks.

Who It’s For and Access from China

TrenchTracker is best suited for small U.S. underground utility contractors, pipeline construction crews, or project teams that need to manage Davis-Bacon/prevailing wage requirements. Access from China cannot be determined from the available text, and payment methods are not disclosed. Meanwhile, 811, SAM.gov, and U.S. wage compliance features have limited applicability in China. For similar use cases in China, teams could consider building expense, labor-hour, and project ledgers using DingTalk, WeCom, Feishu multidimensional tables, Jiandaoyun, or Mingdao Cloud.