How to organize/keep track of multiple Handymen

[Scott K.]

With 3 STR's I'm trying to start organizing and automating processes for myself. It's become a chore to organize my different handymen who all have different schedules, and I have to not only remind them of every single repair that is pending for each house, I have to make sure they know which dates the houses are available/free of guests to head over. In addition to that, they often don't report precisely what they did to fix a problem, or which problems they forgot to work on.

This leads me to needing a centralized system to track/manage their tasks.

I suppose before I get to my ideas - does anyone have this problem, and have a ready-to-go app or service they use to organize handymen, that they've found useful, especially given that handymen are often not technologically adept, and have very little interest in downloading a new app or learning a new system?

I'm thinking of coding my own web app. Basically, all a handyman has to do is go to a bookmarked website, where it lists all my houses. Under each house they would see pending repair tasks, and see the next available dates those houses are free of guests. They would then have a button to click to say 'working on', and they could enter their name. Once it's done, they would click 'finish', and it would require them to upload a photo to confirm. Once finished, a task disappears from the list.

They, as well as my cleaners, would be able to also add new repair tasks as they see them. On the backend, I would be able to see the finished tasks, a photo of the task, and who completed it. I would also be able to upload my iCal links to sync my booking availability automatically. I would be notified every time a handyman clicks 'working on' and also when they click 'finish' by email.

I could probably get this done for $400 or so with my developer, so it's quite cheap and easy to do. Just wanted to double check with everyone if they already have a solution for this, or any suggestions for how to improve it.