I built SubPro because submittals wore me out.

On every job I ran, somebody had to sit down with the project manual and type every required submittal into a spreadsheet. Sometimes that was the project engineer and a lot of times it was me. Then you go hunting for the product data, the SDS and the shop drawings for every product in the book, one manufacturer website at a time and chasing endless company reps. Then you put the submittal packages together, send them, track them, and at closeout you pull a lot of the same documents together all over again. I've done it the hard way more times than I can count.

One job I still remember was a school renovation with an addition and a gymnasium. I had two giant spec books in front of me and I read both of them front to back and built the submittal log by hand in Excel. Then I had to wrangle all the subcontractors and suppliers, get all the documents, put them together, submit them and go through the whole submittal process. It felt like it was never going to end. I was exhausted.

What wore me out wasn't the work. It was where the work lived. The log was in a spreadsheet, the documents were in folders, and the architect's answers were buried in email, and somebody had to keep all of it in sync by hand. When something slipped, the submittal came back, the review clock started over and the order went out late. Good people were spending their best hours retyping what the spec book already said.

I don't think it should work that way anymore. Every requirement should point back to the page that asked for it. The reading and the assembling should be done for you, so your people spend their time on the decisions. And every submittal should be one record, from the spec book to closeout. That's what I mean by Submittal Intelligence.

So I built SubPro. It reads the spec book and the drawings, builds the submittal log, puts the submittal packages together and keeps all of it on one record through closeout. Every row shows the page it came from so you can check it yourself. It doesn't make the calls for you, and your team still reviews everything before it goes out. It takes the reading, the typing and the chasing off your plate so you can run the job.

Contractors who work this way move faster, make better decisions and carry less risk. I built SubPro so the next PM sitting in front of two giant spec books doesn't have to do it the way I did.

If you've run submittals on real jobs and want to help build this, take a look at careers. The FAQ covers pilots, how we handle your files and what we won't promise.