Module · Subcontractors
The subbie confirmed Tuesday.
Nobody else can see it.
Subcontractor scheduling and communication is one module of VIABUILD, the Construction Operating System for residential builders. Send a trade their dates from your own business number, they confirm with one tap, and their text reply files itself back onto the task it belongs to. The booking, the confirmation and the conversation sit on the job, where the rest of the business can see them.
The Founding Builders Programme · Onboarding in small cohorts
01 / What it does
What this feature does
This module handles the part of subcontractor management that never makes it into software: telling a trade when to turn up, and knowing whether they agreed. It sends the dates, carries a one-tap confirmation, and reads the reply back onto the task, so a booking has a recorded state rather than living in someone’s recollection of a phone call.
The problem it solves is specific. You text the framer from your personal mobile. They reply to your personal mobile. The confirmation now exists in one phone, belonging to one person, invisible to your supervisor, your contract administrator and your schedule. When somebody asks whether the frame crew confirmed Tuesday, the honest answer is that only you know, and only if you can find the message. Then a trade doesn’t turn up and the job stops for a day that was, on paper, fully booked.
The dates being sent are the same dates in the construction schedule. A confirmation does not just answer a text, it changes the status of a scheduled task from tentative to confirmed, which is what makes the schedule worth reading.
02 / Why it matters
Why builders need it
The confirmation lives in one phone
A booking agreed by SMS on a personal mobile is invisible to everyone else in the business. Put the reply on the task and the whole team can see the state of every trade booking without asking the person who sent it.
Your number is your identity
The same subbie works for four builders. What tells them which job a text is about is the number it came from. Sending from your own business number means their reply comes back to you, and the system knows it is yours.
Chasing confirmations is a job
Ringing round on a Friday afternoon to find out who is actually coming Monday is unpaid administration. A confirm button turns that into something the trade does in about four seconds, on their own time.
Tentative is not confirmed
A date in a schedule that nobody has agreed to is a guess. Separating a tentative booking from a confirmed one tells you exactly which parts of next week are real and which need a phone call.
Wrong dates reach the wrong person
Dates sent to the accounts email die there. A subcontractor can nominate a schedule contact, the person actually running the crew, so the booking reaches whoever puts people in the ute.
Subbies will not learn your software
A trade running six jobs will not adopt a portal for one builder. SMS and a link they tap need no account, no app and no training, which is why they get used.
03 / The VIABUILD way
How VIABUILD handles it
SMS on your own number, threaded back to the task automatically.
Each builder is provisioned their own SMS number. That number is the identity of your business in the subbie’s phone, and it is also how inbound replies are attributed. Because the same trade works for several builders, the receiving number is the only reliable signal of whose job a reply belongs to, so the architecture starts there rather than treating SMS as a broadcast channel.
Outbound messages are built from templates with a job and task context header, so the trade always sees which builder, which job and which task before they read the dates. VIABUILD does not compose the message for you and does not invent site instructions.
How a text reply finds its way back to the task
SMS carries no thread identifier. When a subbie replies “yeah righto Tuesday works”, the message arrives with nothing but a phone number and a body. Reconstructing the conversation is therefore an inference, and it runs in a deliberate order:
The reply lands on your number, which identifies your organisation. The sender’s number is normalised (an Australian 04… mobile and its +61 form are the same person) and matched on the last nine digits, so formatting never breaks routing. The system then looks at your own outbound notification history for that number over the previous fortnight and builds a closed set of live conversations it could plausibly be answering.
If exactly one conversation matches, the reply files itself straight onto that task’s message thread. No ranking, no AI, no waiting. That is the ordinary case and it is deterministic.
If two or more conversations match, Oryn ranks that closed set using the job context and files the reply automatically when confidence clears the threshold, tagged as filed by Oryn so the automatic decision is always visible as one. Below the threshold nothing is guessed into place. The reply waits.
Anything still unfiled surfaces on your dashboard as “Text replies to file”, with the best guess pre-selected and one tap to confirm it. If you file it somewhere other than the suggestion, that correction is recorded and learned from, so the ranking gets better at your trades and your job names rather than at builders in general. This is human confirmation doing real work, the pattern Oryn follows everywhere in the system: the machine does the reconstruction, a person owns the judgement call when the evidence is thin.
Confirmation, not acknowledgement
Every notification carries a “Confirm dates” button backed by a single-use token. The subbie taps it and sees the task, the job, the start and the finish. Confirming flips that tentative task to confirmed and pushes a notification back to your phone. The same page offers “request a change”, so a trade who cannot make Tuesday tells you now instead of at 7am Tuesday.
Recipients are constrained by design. The system will not send to an arbitrary address or number typed in at the last minute. The recipient must already be a contact stored on that subcontractor’s record, which prevents dates for one job going to the wrong trade. A subcontractor can also nominate one contact as their schedule contact, so bookings go to the person running the crew rather than to accounts.
For trades who want more than a text, a builder can invite a subbie to a mobile login that shows exactly four things: their dates across every builder they work for, a confirm button, their safety documents to read and accept, and their purchase orders. One subbie login works across multiple builders, which is the only way a trade login ever gets used more than once. Nothing else is exposed to them.
Setup honesty: two-way replies require your organisation to have a provisioned SMS number. Without one, the module still sends notifications and confirmation links, but replies have nowhere to come back to, so it runs send-only until the number is in place. Email notifications are send-only in every case, an emailed reply goes to your organisation’s reply-to address like any other email, not onto the task.
- Your own SMS number, so replies are attributable to your business
- Templated messages with a job and task context header
- Replies threaded back to the task from your own send history
- Oryn ranks genuinely ambiguous replies, above a confidence threshold
- “Text replies to file” on the dashboard for anything below it
- Corrections to Oryn’s suggestion are recorded and learned from
- One-tap “Confirm dates” on a single-use token, or request a change
- Confirmation flips the scheduled task from tentative to confirmed
- Recipients limited to contacts stored on the subcontractor record
- Nominated schedule contact, so dates skip the accounts inbox
- Optional trade login: dates, confirm, safety docs, purchase orders
- Australian numbers normalised and matched on the last nine digits
04 / The workflow
How it runs, step by step
- 01
Set the dates in the schedule
A task in the construction schedule carries the trade, the start and the finish. Nothing is re-typed for the notification, it reads the schedule.
- 02
Pick the right person
The message goes to a contact already stored on that subcontractor’s record, and to their nominated schedule contact if they have named one. Arbitrary numbers are refused.
- 03
Send from your own number
A templated SMS goes out from your business number with a job and task context header, so the subbie knows which builder and which job before they read the dates.
- 04
The subbie confirms in one tap
The “Confirm dates” link opens a single-use page showing the task, job, start and finish. They confirm, or they request a change.
- 05
The task changes state
A confirmation flips the task from tentative to confirmed and pushes a notification back to your phone. Everyone reading the schedule now sees the booking is real.
- 06
A free-text reply comes back
“Can I start Wednesday instead” arrives on your number. The sender is matched on the last nine digits, and your outbound history from the last fortnight forms the candidate set.
- 07
The reply files itself, or waits
One candidate means it lands on that task’s thread immediately. Several means Oryn ranks the closed set and files it above the confidence threshold, tagged as filed by Oryn.
- 08
You clear the exceptions
Anything below the threshold sits on the dashboard as “Text replies to file” with the best guess pre-selected. One tap files it, and a different choice is recorded and learned from.
05 / FAQ
Common questions.
SMS carries no thread identifier, so the system reconstructs the conversation. The reply arrives on your own business SMS number, which identifies your organisation. The sender’s number is normalised and matched on its last nine digits, then the system looks at the notifications you sent that number over the previous fortnight to build a closed set of live conversations it could be answering. If exactly one matches, the reply files itself onto that task’s message thread. If several match, Oryn ranks that set using the job context and files it automatically above a confidence threshold, tagged as filed by Oryn. Below the threshold it waits for you rather than guessing.
It does not guess. Unmatched replies surface on your dashboard as “Text replies to file”, with the most likely task pre-selected so filing it correctly is usually one tap. If you file it against something other than the suggestion, that correction is recorded and learned from, so the ranking improves against your trades, your job names and your messaging patterns. Deliberately holding low-confidence replies is the point: a reply filed onto the wrong job is worse than a reply sitting in a queue for an hour.
Because the same subbie works for several builders at once, and a text message carries no other context about who sent it. The receiving number is what identifies whose job a reply belongs to, both for the trade reading their phone and for the software attributing the inbound message. A shared sending number would make every reply ambiguous by design. Two-way replies therefore require a provisioned number for your organisation. Until that is in place the module runs send-only, notifications and confirmation links still work, but replies have nowhere to come back to.
The notification carries a “Confirm dates” button backed by a single-use token. Tapping it opens a page showing the task, the job, the start date and the finish date. Confirming flips that task from tentative to confirmed in your schedule and pushes a notification back to your phone. The same page offers a “request a change” option, so a trade who cannot make the dates says so now rather than not turning up. There is no account to create, no password and no app to install.
No. SMS and a tap on a confirmation link need no login at all, which is why trades actually use it. If a builder wants to go further, they can invite a subbie to an optional mobile login that shows exactly four things: their dates across every builder they work for, a confirm button, their safety documents to read and accept, and their purchase orders. One subbie login works across multiple builders, so a trade is not collecting a new account for every client. Nothing beyond those four things is visible to them.
You can send notifications by email, but be clear about the difference. Email is send-only. An emailed reply goes to your organisation’s reply-to address like any other email, it does not thread back onto the task. Only SMS replies are reconstructed onto the task. If it matters that the answer lands on the job rather than in an inbox, send it by text.
Yes, in two ways. First, the system will not send to an arbitrary address or number, the recipient has to already be a contact stored on that subcontractor’s record, so a typo cannot send next week’s frame dates to a different trade. Second, a subcontractor can nominate one of their contacts as their schedule contact, which is how you stop bookings going to an accounts email that nobody reads before Friday. Australian numbers are normalised, so 04 formats and +61 formats resolve to the same person.
No. Outbound messages come from templates with a job and task context header, so what the trade receives is predictable and consistent, and you are never surprised by something a model composed on your behalf. Oryn is used for one narrow judgement: ranking a closed set of candidate conversations when an inbound reply is genuinely ambiguous, and only where confidence is high enough to file it, tagged as its decision. That is the sensible boundary, deterministic where the rules are clear, judgement only where the evidence really is ambiguous.
06 / Keep reading
Related features & guides
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