Concept stage · Seeking co-builders
Automatic Proof of Work
A rugged badge, worn by each worker, that records who worked, where they went, and what they did. No phones, forms, apps, equipment tags, GPS, or cellular. Actual is in development. We're looking for partners: businesses that want to apply it to their work or industry, and engineers who want to build it.
The Problem
Tracking time and tool use in the field takes too much effort and still leaves gaps. Paper timesheets depend on workers remembering to fill them out. Phone apps assume coverage, battery, and willingness. Vehicle GPS shows where a truck went but not what the worker did.
So payroll cleans up mistakes, supervisors chase missing hours, and managers don't see the week clearly until it's over. Billing, job costing, scheduling, and estimating all start on shaky ground.
Goals
Crews: Wear the badge. Skip the timesheet.
Supervisors: Review exceptions instead of reconciling every timecard.
Managers: See where crews went and how jobs flowed, the same day.
Owners: Bid from production data. Pay from verified hours.
Ops: See how the day splits between driving, power equipment, hand labor, and idle time.
The Record
The badge would record time, movement, and the motion of the work itself. Data stays on the badge until the worker gets back to the shop, then uploads as a timestamped record nobody edits or has to remember.
What it would produce:
- Verified start and stop times for each worker and crew
- The driving route and every job site visited, scheduled or not
- The walking path on each property
- Time by type: driving, idle, power equipment, hand labor
A business could pay, bill, and plan from this data.
Reverse-Engineering
The same data could show how jobs run: where time goes, where work stalls, and where estimates miss.
a. Reverse-Engineered Schedule
- Planned vs. actual task durations by property and route
- Setup, travel, and delays across the day
- Bottlenecks and repeating patterns
b. Reverse-Engineered Estimate
- Cost per task and property
- Estimates based on observed work
- Bids based on measured production rates
The data that runs payroll would also feed planning, with no separate system.
How It Would Work
Capture: The badge works offline. Motion sensors, a barometer, and on-device models for motion and sound log movement and labor all shift. Nothing gets installed at job sites.
Reconstruction: Back at the shop, the badge uploads its log. Every shift starts and ends at the shop, a known point, so the cloud can correct sensor drift, match the day to road and elevation maps, rebuild the route, find each job site, and map the work on each property. Records can't be changed, and anything odd is flagged for review.
Integration: The data flows into the payroll, job costing, scheduling, and billing systems the business already uses. Every record shows who did the work, when, and which badge recorded it.
Cost Model (Design Targets)
We're designing for cheap hardware and cloud pricing that scales with the size of the operation.
Customers would buy one badge per worker, once, with no tags, beacons, or data plans. A monthly cloud fee would track the sites served or crews run, so the fee drops when you run 15 badges in winter instead of 50 in summer.
Hardware: Bought once and owned by the customer. Target: about $30 per badge.
Cloud: Monthly fee based on operation size, covering processing and storage.
Connectors: Monthly fee per active integration.
Who It's For
Outdoor crews that move, build, and maintain: landscaping, construction, utilities, municipalities, solar, facilities.
Millions of U.S. field workers rely on timesheets, phones, or truck GPS.
They need hours and tool use recorded accurately without extra steps, so payroll is correct, supervisors aren't chasing paperwork, and owners can trust job costing.
Partners Wanted
Industry partners: Bring a business or an industry where proof of work matters, and a place to test. We adapt the badge to your work together. You get early access and a stake or preferred terms in your industry, worked out together.
Engineers: Own a piece of what you build.
- Embedded hardware / PCB: a low-power, rugged badge with motion, pressure, sound, and vibration sensors
- Firmware: on-device capture, labor classification, local storage, offload at the shop, power management
- Cloud / data backend: rebuilding routes from motion data, matching them to road and elevation maps, finding job sites, tamper-proof storage
- Integrations: connectors to payroll, job costing, scheduling, and billing systems
Engineers get a stake in what we build, on terms we agree together, and a say in the architecture from the first prototype.
Explore the Deck
The principles, language, and practices behind Actual's design. Each card covers one concept: why it matters, how it applies, and where it fits. Use it to start a conversation with your team.
The Promise
The badge will not record conversations or monitor behavior. It records when you arrived, where you moved, what kind of work you did, and when the day ended.
The person doing the work should never have to prove they worked.