Commercial Property Inspectors Roundtable Meeting #30: Report Software, ScribeWare

• Commercial Property Inspection Walk-Through Online Course (Includes sample inspection reports)
• Pricing, Proposals, and Inspection Walk-Through Basics Online Course (Includes sample inspection reports)
• Commercial Property Inspection Checklists and Field Guides
• Cost to Remedy Reporting Fast-Track Course
• P³ Profitable Commercial Property Inspection Pricing Course
• Commercial Property Inspector Mentoring
• Proposal and Pricing Resources for Commercial Property Inspectors
• Building Your Business Ep. 28: CoStar, The Secret Weapon for Building a Commercial Client Base
• Commercial Property Inspectors Roundtable Meeting #28: Websites and SEO with Paige Wiese of Tree Ring Digital

Rob Claus (00:05)
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our another edition of the Certified Commercial Property Inspectors Roundtable. ⁓ It’s ironic that ⁓

given all the stuff that’s going on in the social media world and inspector’s world that we have Dylan Chalk today from Scribeware on. I promise you, we’ve had this scheduled for quite a while and we’ve been looking forward to this, but we’re gonna spend the first bit of this round table letting Dylan talk a little bit about Scribeware.

and what he’s doing in the commercial world. So welcome, Dylan.

Dylan Chalk (00:52)
Hey, thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here.

Rob Claus (00:56)
Yeah, you and I have been talking about scribeware now for a bit. I think well over a year, year and a half that you’ve grabbed the Comm Stop and started playing with it. And I think it’s about time that we can show a little bit of the world what you’re doing.

Dylan Chalk (01:14)
love it. No, it’s great. It’s funny. I was looking, I’m working on a commercial template and you’d be happy to know that it’s on version 5.0. ⁓ So, you know, it’s been a learning curve of just like, all right, let’s start with the Comm Stop and I’ll write a template. ⁓ then you do a report with it and you’re like, that didn’t really work, you know? So it’s been a lot of going back to the well, but I don’t know. It takes time to build things, right?

Yeah, well, I’d love to show you guys around. ⁓ I am, just to introduce myself, I’m a home inspector, a building inspector. I don’t do a ton of commercial. I’m probably like a lot of residential inspectors. I live in a kind of rural area and there’s not a ton of commercial buildings. But I pick a way, do like two or three a year enough to know that I always need to get better at it. So I’ve been appreciating CCPA and Rob’s videos and stuff.

So I’ll share screen with you. mean, probably like a lot of you as a sort of residential inspector, I’ve always really suffered when I go to do ⁓ a commercial report. I wanted to solve a bunch of things at Scribeware, like what we’re trying to do for commercial inspections. One is I want to deliver a report where the information is easily digestible for the client. And to me, that’s always been a problem. Like when I look at commercial inspections, often there’s

They’re very hard to navigate and quickly get what I want. So that was kind of, for, I want to start with the finished report, but I would say another big problem. And I’d love to everybody’s point of view on this, but navigation, when you’re doing a mobile app on commercial was always kind of a nightmare of just having to navigate all over the place. And by the time I was halfway done with a commercial job, I was so sick of navigating back into the electrical section and navigating back into the heating section. And it just made, made data collection really hard.

on site. So what we’re trying to solve is both the finished report that it’s really easy for the client to get at all the information and then on the back end for the home inspector trying to create minimal navigation. ⁓ So this is a finished report in the HTML version. ⁓ We have a quick glance summary page so you can quickly see, you know, this is more residential style but major concerns, repairs. There’s a lot of customization in Scribe where if I click on these summary items,

I just used voice to text and did these overview statements of all the main systems so that, and I included photos in the summary here so that just in the summary page, you could quickly as the building owner get a nice narrative overview of how the systems were doing. I chose not to, but you could have the pictures in the summary for all these other defects, but you can.

We call these modifiers in Scribeware, but you can make your own modifiers. So if you don’t want to use major concerns, you could call them, you know, urgent issues or whatever. You can rename these, can give them different colors. You could have no color at all, which I know would be more of a commercial thing. So we could kind of talk about that at some point. ⁓ But I think at a glance we have for the client, like, okay, I’ve got these summary items. I can see what’s going on with the building and I’ve got major concerns, repairs, maintenance items and due diligence items.

and it’s all fairly concise. ⁓ Without going into the full report, another one of my favorite things we’re doing is I’m auto generating a list for the electrician, a list for the plumber, a list for the HVAC, for the general contractor. So this is pretty cool, but in Scribeware on the backend, you can tag all of your comments with contractor-specific tags. If I click on a, this is actually a unique URL. This is not,

part of the regular report. So I can copy this URL, send it to Sparky, and he’s got ⁓ has their own electrical list. And so ⁓ pretty nice. And this was no extra work. Like I have already pre-tagged all my electrical comments with an electrical. It’s automatically generating all that stuff. ⁓ And then if you go into the full report, now you get kind of the more typical layout of a building.

could click on the decks and stairs. Here you start to see some of our table functionality that we’ve built. So this has both a cost to cure table in it, as well as ⁓ a sort view of remaining what I sort of built a capital reserve study. So that’s all within this comment. Let me show you guys that. We can go up into the summary. ⁓

So here’s our long awaited table functionality. And I have my mobile app on here, and I can show you how you do these. But you can actually do them as you work ⁓ and slowly build these out. My expectation would be things like capital reserve studies and cost to cure. You’re going to need to think about and fiddle with back at the office. ⁓ But this was, and I’ve never done a capital reserve study, so take this with a grain of salt. But I kind of like.

built my own here, just playing around with it. So this probably needs a little bit of work. And I projected things out over a really long period, like electric service equipment replacement in 2064. Some of it’s a little arbitrary. But ⁓ I’ve got a capital reserve study here. ⁓ This is the list of HVAC equipment. ⁓ All of these columns you could build. So one thing I don’t have in here is the location of the HVAC equipment.

⁓ And our guy Tim has actually automated some ways that we can automate that now, which is kind of cool. I don’t have that in here. But ⁓ I’ve got our water heaters. This was a building that only had one water heater. And then electric service equipment. So we’re kind of auto generating schedules of systems. And then we’ve got a cost to cure. And this shows some of the newest stuff Tim’s been working on where you can build in like a 3 % inflation factor.

We’re starting to build in all the math and stuff that you can have auto built into your tables. ⁓ Did Tim make it on here? Are you on here, Tim? Yeah, Tim’s on here. So if we have time and we dive into tables, Tim, we can unpack this a little bit more. But this shows our ability to now produce tables that we think can handle cost to cure, reserve studies, as well as ⁓ systems of equipment or sort of

equipment schedules. Cool. And then you can go into a unit. And so this has everything that you would need to find within unit 200 all in one place. This is where those systems tags are so important. So this HVAC thing, even though I’m in unit 200, this exact same comment will also show up in the HVAC list. And that’s kind of the key to me to not needing to navigate.

And I want to show you on the back end and I can log in on the mobile too, but I’ve really built unit. Let me, let me show you this. I’m going to go into the same. Do you have any questions on the finished report before I dive out of it? Or you want to show your workflow?

Rob Claus (08:31)
Do you

Guest (08:31)
have built into it there. like I see this unit’s old and we’re doing cost to cure. ⁓ if there’s something smaller, can we drop in a price for repair or a price for an estimate or something like that?

Dylan Chalk (08:46)
Yeah, yeah, that’ll all be how you set your table up and then, but you could have like open fields and stuff that you just fill in as you need to. Yep. Yeah. Great question. And we can kind of play around with that a little bit if we have time. Let me show you on the backend. Cause I think to me, this was one of the key things. So I’ve actually used this a couple of times and it was really pretty phenomenal from a navigation standpoint. So this is neat, but this is an entire unit.

that I’ve tried to devise every single thing that you could think of that you need in a unit, and it’s all in one place. So I don’t have to navigate anywhere. So let’s say I’m in this unit, and we could call this ⁓ interior number 202 or something, right? And so now we’ve identified what unit it is. And we can fill stuff in, so we could, you know, it’s drywall and drop ceilings.

and flooring, there’s carpet and concrete, you know, it’s all your basic stuff. Down here you see these buttons. So let’s say you’re in a unit and there’s four water heaters. So these buttons let you add these little photo buckets. So I just clicked this four times and now I’ve got a kind of bucket to handle four water heaters. I could go grab a couple of pictures and drag them in and then…

⁓ The yellow stuff is what we call gunny sacks. These are unique to scribeware, but I could go ahead and say, you know, what’s wrong? Well, they’re missing seismic restraints and the TPR discharge is done in corrugated pipe, right? And then we could recommendation, could ⁓ water heater repairs are needed. So we’ve recommended somebody fix it and you could change the modifier and call it a repair item. So now we’ve kind of handled the like

Reporting we’ve got the defects. got a recommendation. We could click on the table here and fill it out. Maybe it’s an American water heater. It’s electric. It’s an electric tank. It’s from 2008 so it’s old and repairs are needed. And again, all of these columns can be completely edited by the building inspector so you could set up your tables however you want. I’ve just kind of built these as like a place to get started.

This is all totally doable on mobile. So now as you go, even though I’m in unit 202, this is populating something for the plumber in the plumbing list. And I’ve designed it where this tag won’t print in the report because I don’t feel like the client needs to see the plumbing tags. that’s kind of, but those could be displayed in the report or remain hidden. So that’s kind of a workflow. But the thing that’s so great is, you know, when you go on a roof in a commercial building and there’s 10 heat pumps, you can just now,

you can come up here and fire off HVAC unit, HVAC unit. And the concept that we work off in Scribeware, I call these photo buckets. Because even if you wanted to finish this back at the office, one of the worst things to me about commercials is getting back home and having all these photos that all look exactly the same and they’re not organized and they’re all jumbled together. And it makes writing the report 10 times harder. Whereas with these photo buckets, you can just sit up there and be like, okay, this is a unit number and you could rename it. You could call it East Side or whatever.

And so, but now you can dump all your pictures in there and go on to the next one. And at least all of your data gathering is super organized for, for your systems. That makes sense on these buttons. And so the idea of photo buckets and then with these gunny sacks, you really don’t even, the, you know, one of the things I wanted to get away from, and I’d love your guys feedback on this, but the residential way of doing comments where you have a narrative library of 10,000 comments or whatever is just.

It doesn’t work that well on commercial, find. It’s too weird. So let’s say, it’s funny, but the weird stuff I call dead beaver comments, right? There’s like, you have like this list of all your things and you know that you’ve found all these things, but then there’s a dead beaver and you don’t have that in your library. So it’s kind of why we added these periods is that you can just freehand whatever you want. If you put a little period here, I could come in here and say ⁓ a dead.

Dylan Chalk (12:55)
either.

Dylan Chalk (12:59)
Oops.

Sorry, I kinda broke this one, hang on.

The basic idea is here is you can just freehand something.

terrible typer. And then you can go ahead and make a recommendation down here. The system is old and unreliable, and the system may require updating at any time.

Rob Claus (13:35)
So Dylan, one of the questions coming up is if I add my dead beaver there to observations, does that permanently go in my list of narratives or is that just a temporary narrative?

Guest (13:49)
No

Dylan Chalk (13:49)
So if you want to edit those, what you do is you click on them and you hit edit on desktop. And this is the list that I built. And you can completely edit that list. If you’re free handing it with the period, it’s not going to remember it. So the free handed ones will not get remembered. The idea is over time, basically the inspector creates their own list that they want as their default comments.

I would encourage you not to have everything in here and use the periods for the weird stuff. And then, you you’re trying to make kind of the greatest hits so that the stuff you’re finding every time you just go and click, click, click. And then if there’s something strange, you hit the period, add the dead beaver comment.

Rob Claus (14:30)
Sure, and if I’m a multi-inspector firm and I create this, now is this a universal template that will go across my entire team or is each individual desktop kind of their own autonomous system?

Dylan Chalk (14:52)
⁓ You could fork it and have different ones for different people, but most people aren’t going to want to do that. And so if I were to go ahead and edit this template and I like, for example, add a new thing here, we’ll just add a period, I could come here and just hit update library. ⁓ It’s going to say, do you want to include the media with the library? In this case, we do not want to, right? So we would say no, but that extra period will now be available to everybody.

So it automatically would update across everybody’s library. Yeah.

Rob Claus (15:25)
And can

you lock out to prevent your staff from adding narratives?

Dylan Chalk (15:29)
Correct, under settings and teams, we support the ability to add users to teams and you can control who can edit templates, who can edit the library and who can view reports by other inspectors. So we’ve got pretty good controls on that.

Yeah, so the workflow to me that’s kind of key here is like, look at this. I don’t have to navigate anywhere on the mobile app. I, I’m going to show you guys the mobile.

Guest (15:56)
View.

Dylan Chalk (15:58)
Let me try to share here.

Rob Claus (16:03)
You may have to unshare the other.

Dylan Chalk (16:05)
Yeah, let me stop share here.

So this is pretty cool. I’m sort of proud of this, but this is everything you would need for an entire unit right here. And so you can click on what you need. So the wall systems looks like we already filled that out. This is that report we were working on. So we tested the receptacles, the doors were tested, their solid core, the flooring we already did. And you see how they can shrink up so you can make them go away when you’re done with them. Maybe there was no vertical transportation.

⁓ And then interior stairs, if you just want to snap a picture of them, you can long press on this, snap a picture and get a couple pictures. And now you’ve got, you kind of just documented that, right? That you’ve got some pictures there. If we go under stairs, here’s what those buttons look like. So we could add a stair system and we could go ahead, snap a couple pictures.

And then if there were issues, we could change it to a repair item, click on the little gunny sack, inadequate stair width, the bottom of, this was one of Rob’s videos, four feet required, the handrail’s inadequate, needs to be type one, type two, graspable, inadequate height for the handrails, they need to be 34 to 38 inches. So boom, boom, boom, they’re all there and you could recommend a qualified party to fix it.

So the goal is, I I’ve always wanted to produce reports that feel as though I’ve spent all night writing them when in fact I’m just kind of clicking on the things that apply. And so with these gunny sacks, you really see how you can take Rob’s information, you can take all of the codes and everything and build them into a single comment. And you don’t have to go chasing all that stuff everywhere. And I think it’s a little cleaner for the client too, because they’re not.

The way a lot of people do is this would have been three different repair items under stairs, which kind of bloats the report. To me, it’s one system, right? So now I can handle it all in one place. Does that make sense, guys? You kind of see the workflow here, and there’s no limit on what I need to add. Again, there’s another HVAC unit. You just click on it, open it up, all this information only. We can snap on a couple pictures.

This is how those tables work. So we click on the table and it’s an American standard. It’s a heat pump. See no actions needed. It’s in the utility room. It’s electric. It’s five tons. It’s from 2013. So it’s kind of middle-aged and recent service records were noted.

I kind of added all that. And again, that’s going to populate those common tables that I showed you guys in the beginning.

Hey, Dylan. Yeah. Quick question for you. ⁓ me, from our reporting view to how it ultimately shows up with the client, you talked about how the, just take an HVAC system and reporting by unit, right? We got multiple units. How does it look when it goes, when we pull or extract all the HVAC systems into that one area so the client can see them all at once? want to see.

I’ll reshare here on my desktop and we’ll pull that up. But right under the summary, you can control where these tables go, but this is what they look like. So here’s that HVAC where I’ve got, you know, can you see that okay? Yeah. Yes, yeah, I can see that. Cool.

Rob Claus (19:53)
Yep.

Dylan Chalk (19:57)
Yeah, so the one thing I would add to this table that I don’t have is location. And then you would be able to see like, you know, unit one two unit nine four or whatever. Right. Like, so again, I’ve been we’re building all this stuff. So there’s still like little tweaks we’re making on it all. But, you know, I think and we’ve designed these tables. I’ll show you guys how you can build them yourselves. But, you know, they’re all editable. So you could put whatever fields in there you want, including like the cost to replacement.

stuff. Right. So Tim, just before our meeting, added like, ⁓ EUL, RUL, right? So I these are things that you could have pre-built in quantity units. Like Tim’s done some really cool work on the table. So if you want, Tim could even kind of dive into this a little bit, but I could show you on the backend, like where some of this lives. If you go under settings and smart tags,

is sort of what we’re calling all these tables, we could open up this, let’s see, where’s cost to cure? that might not be in this one. I’d have to go into a different one, but we’ll open up this capital reserve study I did. ⁓ So here’s all the different components. And if you wanted to add more, like I wanted to add to my HVAC, let’s go into HVAC because we want to edit something. So you click on it to open it up.

And here’s all my tags. So you could go ahead and click on these to edit them. So here’s where I built American Standard, Carrier, Dykan, and you could add another one. I’m sure I’m missing millions of them here. What would be another one?

So we could add that one, and then you can re-sequence it. So they’re in alphabetical order, if you want. And then we could go ahead and add a whole new column here, right? So we could ⁓ call this one location.

speaker-4 (21:55)
And…

Dylan Chalk (21:59)
Then we could add locations. Tim, this a spot where I ⁓ can start adding automatic locations?

Tim Trickle (22:07)
Yeah. Yeah, you just start typing there and hit enter.

Dylan Chalk (22:12)
Just start typing it in.

Tim Trickle (22:16)
if you wanted to like do.

Dylan Chalk (22:19)
No, but how do you you built a way where we can refer to like the sections and.

Tim Trickle (22:25)
Yeah, so that would be in the table settings. OK. So this is the smart tags is the where you collect the information. And then when you go to the overview section, go to the table settings, that’s where you would define what shows up in the table. ⁓

Dylan Chalk (22:41)
Gotcha. Go

to overview.

this is a different report. Let me go to that other one we were working on.

Is this the one you were working on? Yeah.

Tim Trickle (23:05)
So from this page, can see all the data that’s in there. You can edit the data directly from there. If you click on the word electric on one of them, it’ll pull it up. then if you wanted to change that from American Standard to something else, you click on it and it’ll pull up here. Just click there. You can change it.

Dylan Chalk (23:24)
cool. Move

that to Carriers. So you can edit these right from the back end.

That’s pretty cool. And then you can click on all the years and stuff. The location was something that

Tim Trickle (23:41)
Yeah, and so if you go into the

the HVAC table at the top. hit the edit button. And then you can under add column, you can, think most of your locations are the chapter. So you can just do plus chapter to add the, ⁓ it’s like right in the middle of the, there. to Next to location. It’s like the one, two, three, four, the fifth bubble there.

Dylan Chalk (24:10)
soon.

⁓ plus location.

Tim Trickle (24:21)
So location is your smart tag. And then if you do plus chapter, then that would just bring in the chapter name. Like if your all your locations were your chapter names, but then there’s also, and we can get into that separately, but there’s a way to do a formula where you can say like use the chapter name if it’s there, use the location if it’s there or use a chapter name. And there’s like, can do if statements, you can do math, you can do like, there’s so much you can do as far as how to, like this will take a little more time to get set up than we can do here. But once it’s set up, it’s good.

But yeah, you can do all kinds of math and logic as far as how to populate the tables.

Dylan Chalk (24:56)
And the idea with location would be that as you’re building out your template, so let’s say you’re at unit 204, unit 205, unit 206, you’ve automatically tagged it to say, put that location in the tags. don’t have to write that every time. It would be like built in there, correct, Tim?

Tim Trickle (25:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, I just, built that feature in after Dylan started on this template. So it hasn’t, wasn’t built into this report yet.

Rob Claus (25:24)
Now some of the questions that are going come up, but Dylan and Tim, and Tim, thank you for being here as well, is where are our reports being housed? Are they housed in your servers, on our computers?

Dylan Chalk (25:43)
Yeah, so how the system works, that’s a great question, is ⁓ all of the data is stored on your devices. So that means both mobile and desktop. On your mobile devices, we auto wipe the data every, I think it’s like 10 days or something. And that’s so you don’t have to manage all that data on your device and delete stuff manually. Everything is live syncing in Scribeware unless you turn it off on mobile.

So everything you do is going up into the cloud, being automatically saved. It’s Amazon Web Services banking level sort of security stuff. that’s where all of your data is automatically backing up. It’s nearly impossible to lose data in Scribeware. About the only way you could lose data would be to go out in the field offline, take a bunch of pictures, fill out a report, and then delete the app or.

you know, lose the apps like your phone falls into the ocean or something, you know? Yeah. Does that make sense, Rob?

Rob Claus (26:42)
It does. so because of that, it’s almost an autonomous system. There’s no other communication with it. It’s not linking with a ⁓ third party scheduler or anything else. Anything that’s being linked to this is self-derived.

Dylan Chalk (27:05)
For the most part, we do have open API things. So you can actually link it to different scheduling systems. We have pretty tight integrations with ISN and Keystone for scheduling. But for the most part, there’s no third party table software, anything like that. The tables are built right in to Scribeware. And one of the things that’s been taking us a while is we want to be able to ship with tables intact that are really working.

so that the inspectors using it could edit the tables but not have to completely build them from scratch, because it’s a lot of work. Like what Tim and I were showing you, linking things, was like, we’re trying to save you guys having to do that work. We think it’ll be a better user experience if you could use it out of the box and then be like, I want to edit these four things. And then you can either figure it out or we can help you edit those four things, as opposed to completely building all these tables from scratch, which is just more work.

Rob Claus (27:59)
Excellent. I think probably the big question is, what are the costs?

Dylan Chalk (28:05)
Yeah, so Scribeware is, you need an admin account. And so that’s basically 89 a month for the admin account. And that’s unlimited report writing for a year. That’s sort of the annual subscription ends up being 89 a month. So it’s like a little over $1,000 for a year. And that’s the sort of first inspector. And then every member on the team is $69 per month.

⁓ And you can add or remove team members as needed. ⁓

Rob Claus (28:38)
And if I wipe a team member out Dylan from space and say, separate, then does that immediately void the void, any use of that report?

Dylan Chalk (28:52)
I know so let’s say you’re in here’s your team settings if I delete this account this would mean Aaron can no longer get at my system but I don’t delete his reports all those reports would be sitting there and that would mean that the next month you wouldn’t be paying for that person either that would like automatically.

Rob Claus (29:09)
Sure, and another question I have is, is there a way that…

Can I know if one of my subordinate accounts is doing inspections not assigned, i.e. moonlighting?

Dylan Chalk (29:30)
Yeah, we don’t have that has come up a couple times. I mean, you would be able to see anything that they’re doing in your account. So, you know, it would it might become clear, but we don’t have this kind of moonlighting button. But I mean, they would have to really have like a different account ⁓ in order to do something that you would know about it, like because everything would show up in your account, if that makes sense.

Rob Claus (29:54)
So I’d be live. And so anytime I ever felt like, Stephen decided to take the Friday off and then I’m looking at, I can pull up Stephen’s account. And so wait a minute, you just put in three reports today.

Dylan Chalk (30:11)
Correct, yeah, you’d be able to see all that. So ⁓ Stephen would be able to have a different Scribeware account that he’s paying for, right? And we can’t control that, but ⁓ within the system, everything would be visible to you as the admin and the owner of it all, yeah.

Rob Claus (30:28)
Excellent. Anybody have any questions?

This is the time.

Dylan Chalk (30:38)
I’ve got one other question. So this is just something I’m looking at personally as I’m going through all these different types of software. ⁓ One I signed on for you have your proposal and your agreement and wanting to get both of them signed. I’m looking for that streamline process where I can have both documents ⁓ published and sent off to the client for signature. We had different times.

Rob Claus (30:40)
Yeah, Kevin.

Yeah.

Dylan Chalk (31:08)
⁓ I haven’t seen anything like that yet. can only find software where can plug in the agreement and get that signed and then perhaps send the ⁓ proposal just via email. But I like to do it all as one trip for the client because going

Rob Claus (31:25)
You can set up something with jot form, can set up something with a third party, or you could create a ⁓ docu-sign that includes your proposal and your agreement in the same document.

Dylan Chalk (31:42)
One workaround I did just for this inspection I just recently did as I put the proposal in with the agreement. it’s all one. I’m not sure if that’s appropriate or not.

Rob Claus (31:48)
Yeah

I’ve always done that Canon so that if, my decision maker is only accessible one time, they hit them both. And, and, and if I am, it, cause I might not get that person again and I might have a subordinate at the inspection that does not have signing authority. Right. And so

Dylan Chalk (32:00)
Yeah.

Rob Claus (32:16)
So even if they signed my proposal, they signed my agreement simultaneously because they’re all included in the same document. there’s a lot of workarounds to do that, even with some of the scheduling apps that are out there as well. ⁓ They have that.

Dylan Chalk (32:35)
And we do have an agreement system built in. So you could put a proposal, you could custom write one. So if you go under.

contracts, here’s a commercial inspection agreement, but you could always add a new one here and just edit this and rewrite it and then save it as proposal for whatever. Over the time, you would end up with a lot of agreements in your system. So there might need to devise a better way to organize them, but there would be no reason you couldn’t essentially copy and paste your proposal into the contract editor and have it sent out to Scribeware.

⁓ I suppose what we don’t do though is we do support multiple agreements for the same ⁓ job. So you could probably then get both signed, meaning like you send the proposal as one agreement and then the, you know, like the actual contract where they agree to do it as a second agreement. ⁓ But you would to

Rob Claus (33:39)
It would not be unusual, Dylan, in a commercial inspection to have four, five, or six different agreements by the time I’ve added all of the other ancillary services.

Dylan Chalk (33:48)
I bet. Yeah. mean, cause you get the issue of like, and then you get the final and like, well, we’re not going to do the roof because we don’t need to do the roof. And then you’ve to go redo the proposal. And yeah, now I get it. I, ⁓ yeah, interesting. ⁓ Tim, you, don’t know, you might have some thoughts on, on it, but,

Tim Trickle (34:04)
Yeah, but all those agreements that you would go into one portal, it would be like, here’s the things you need to sign. And so you could pick and choose how you want to do that and how you want to edit it. the agreement part of it is ⁓ part of an update that we’re working on. that’s still, we’ve always had basic functionality there, but it’s actively being upgraded to help with some of that as well.

Rob Claus (34:29)
Yep. Steven, you your hand up, buddy.

Dylan Chalk (34:31)
Steven had a question.

Guest (34:35)
Did it on mute?

Rob Claus (34:37)
You did.

speaker-7 (34:38)
got you now

Guest (34:41)
I’m having an operator malfunction here. The, my question is on the, ⁓ is on the, ⁓ do sync with ISN cause we use ISN to like, for our agreements and payments and that kind of stuff.

Dylan Chalk (34:55)
Yeah. Yeah. So how that works is like on the, this is the home screen I’m going to now. I use Keystone for scheduling so I can just hit that button and then all my jobs come over to Keystone, but the same thing happens with ISN. And then when you’re ready to publish, you would hit publish and update ISN and ⁓ everything would just go right back to ISN. So it’s really about a two-click integration, one to get your jobs over and one to push them back.

Guest (35:24)
Okay. And then, ⁓ what about in real time? Like we did, ⁓ did an 80,000 square foot medical facility, had a kitchen and everything inside there. So I’ve got, ⁓ multiple inspectors on site since it’s live sinking. Do we just step outside and hit a sync button and it lines up the inspectors with each other? And is there like a process for it or can inspect the rate check out? Sorry, go ahead.

Dylan Chalk (35:50)
No, that’s an awesome question. So live team jobs, the single most important thing is making sure all your guys are logged into the right job before they show up. You know, just because if you show up and there’s no internet and they all want to work in the same job, they’re kind of hosed. Does that make sense? Yeah. You know, so before you leave the office, you want to load the job and make sure you’re in the right job. Then you could go out, you could have 10 guys all working live and.

you know, all that data is going to be moving around. If you start getting a ton of data, the live syncing can start bogging down the devices because it’s just so much pictures, you know? So you can turn, we’ve designed it where you can turn syncing off. But I’ve done live inspections where I have a guy upstairs and I’m watching him fill the bathroom out. I mean, it’s really pretty cool. This, you know, I call this part learning to dance where you just.

There’s a lot of variables with like, you your device and the size of the job and the internet connection that you just have to kind of like learn to play with it. it, know, basically live syncing, works pretty flawlessly once you learn to dance with it.

speaker-8 (36:55)
You know?

Rob Claus (36:55)
So, Dylan, have you and Tim ever tried this? No, no, no, no, don’t fill in the blank too quick. ⁓ That Tim is sitting in the office and Dylan, you and another inspector out in a property and you’re doing the live syncing and Tim’s in the office almost quality assuring simultaneously and, you know, conducting the band.

Dylan Chalk (37:24)
Yeah, there’d be no reason you couldn’t do that. if you think back Rob to those photo buckets for the guys out in the field, you could just be going click HVAC number one, click HVAC number two, dump all your pictures in there and just keep moving. And you could let somebody back in the office be like looking for the defects and making a clicking on the things that apply and so forth. You know how it is. if I’m working with a good inspector, I can actually write their report off their photos.

Rob Claus (37:50)
So

for all of you control freaks that nobody’s as good as you are, you can be watching over their work simultaneously and really truly building a multi-inspector firm with a program like this.

This is awesome, Dylan. I love what you and Tim are really putting together and where you’ve gone. Yeah, Steve, you got another question?

Guest (38:19)
I do got some more questions for you. So we’re going to variety and this actually applies to both residential and commercial. I got people asking me to do phase inspections. So there may be a remodel going on. I do have a guy on staff that’s a licensed general contractor for both residential and ⁓ commercial. So he’s IBC as well. And ⁓ are we able to in a report like go out there and on May 1st, update a report.

and then create a second report to go back out on June 1st and then kind of ⁓ copy the report and make the updates from there like I do in some of the other softwares. Do you have that capability yet?

Dylan Chalk (38:58)
Yeah,

correct. So you could totally do that. Now there would be some different ways to design that. So one of the ways I might do that is actually having a chapter that documents each site visit, you know. And so, for example, we have the power in Scribeware to use copy chapter and copy section. So from my commercial template, ⁓ if we went under ⁓ this unit number,

The idea is I could come up here and copy section. So instead of this saying interior, this could say like ⁓ March 31st or whatever, right? And then you could, so you could document it by date, you know, or you can actually use copy report and build a whole copy of the original report ⁓ and then add onto it. So there’d be different ways you could do it. But the cool thing about

⁓ doing it within one report. If you do copy report, you actually end up building a new URL. So you’d have to send a new report link to the client. Whereas if you just keep adding chapters within one document, you’ve essentially created one link that you just keep adding onto and republishing and it’ll just sort of morph. all you need to tell the client to do is hit refresh on the browser and it would just pick up all the latest changes that you made.

You could even, this would be really cool for certain commercial stuff is you could make a scan code of the URL and then you just scan it and like it would like, would be like this one living document that could keep being updated with that building. So for commercial work, like the balcony inspections in California, if you have to keep updating all that stuff, you could literally post in the laundry room a scan code and then that document would just keep being updated if that makes sense, you know.

Guest (40:44)
Yeah, it does completely. It’s kind of where we’re heading. We’re not doing the balcony inspections, but we’re doing phase inspections for builders. So if I get the foundation, I can come back, copy the section and then show the next the next phase in that process. And instead of creating a whole new report or like a re inspection, which wouldn’t be needed, just copy in the section over what accomplished that and then give them the QR code to work off of for the guys that are out in field. And they got the link for the guy back there with the desktop. Am I understanding that correctly?

Dylan Chalk (41:13)
Yeah, think for what you want, the copy chapter or copy section would be the most powerful. Because then you’re just, it’s one report link and you can just keep adding onto it with all your site visits. again, you just, you know, you’d probably manually put in what date you showed back up and then you’d have all the pictures linked to that date, you know.

Guest (41:33)
⁓ follow on question for this, what about video and what is like some of the software is they limit you to like 30 seconds of video. So if it’s something more than 30, do you have like a limit on how much video to put in, in there before we switch it over to like a Google link?

Dylan Chalk (41:48)
That’s an awesome question. So I think we’re the only software that lets you have pretty huge videos. I’m sure there’s a limit, but you do need what we call the SewerScope plan. So we back all that data up for you. So it costs a little bit more for us, but it’s only 10 bucks a month more for the SewerScope package. And then we support companies that have like 10 SewerScope inspectors and all they do is SewerScope. So they’re just.

And they just, don’t upload their videos to YouTube. They just dump them right in describe where and they’re all backed up and there’s no ads or anything. So, and because they’re HTML reports, the videos all stream right in the finished report. that’s.

Guest (42:24)
Alright, so to caveat on that, that does work for our sewer scoops. We got licensed drone pilots on staff, so we’re doing inspections using the drones. If I normally I just take a couple photos, but if I ran a video of say a minute and a half of a drone inspection on a church steeple, would I be able to drop that in the reporter? So I still hit that into YouTube and that link in.

Dylan Chalk (42:46)
No, you just drop it straight into Scribler.

Guest (42:49)
Okay, because I know it’ll look different, you know, if we’re using a drum with infrared capability versus going back to the regular so that people can understand the differences on the overlap there.

Dylan Chalk (42:59)
Yeah, no, you’d just be able to drop all those videos in. could have chimney scan videos, drone videos, sewerscope videos, all that stuff. It’s possible you hit a limit. I actually haven’t heard of anybody hitting a limit when they have the sewerscope plan. ⁓ you know, your mileage may vary, but if you hit the limit, we can work with you and try to figure it out. One thing to note, if you have that many videos in, when you go to publish, you can’t just hit publish and like.

slam your laptop shut, you know, got to make sure all that data actually moves over.

Guest (43:31)
Okay, now you answered my question because those videos get made separately and then we drop them into the report from the desktop because the sewer scope equipment, they got the SD cards and stuff. Same thing with the drones, the mini SD.

Dylan Chalk (43:43)
If you can get those videos into your devices, your mobile devices gallery, we have the ability on the mobile to swipe up and that gives you access to your devices native gallery. So anything that ends up in your devices gallery can easily be added into a report on the mobile device. So we have some sewer inspectors that basically do everything on mobile. They never need to touch the desktop, but.

That is somewhat complicated. There’s the tech problem of getting that video onto your phone basically that is ⁓ I think different sewer scope packages that can be challenging or easy depending on what you’re using for a sewer scope camera.

Rob Claus (44:24)
Joe, can your mobile device publish an inspection or do you have to go to a desktop to QA it and publish?

Dylan Chalk (44:35)
You can publish from mobile as long as you have a subscribe where subscription. So we do support an a la carte, is for, it’s really not meant for busy inspectors. It’s sort of for students and stuff. And we can’t support mobile publishing on that, but as long as you have a subscription, could, you could get your whole workflow down where everything’s done mobile and you don’t even touch a desktop.

Rob Claus (44:56)
Yeah. So, so all you inspectors that are running fast, you know, if you thought, okay, I never want to touch my, my, my laptop or my desktop at the end of the night. Now I’ll look at it a couple of times a week. Then you could be out there in the field publishing between inspections. Yeah. Lastly, ⁓ least for my questions, you’re onboarding. ⁓ how much hand holding do you provide you, you intend to provide or, or is this a, ⁓

Dylan Chalk (45:12)
Correct. Yep.

Rob Claus (45:26)
Thanks for purchasing. Good luck. Have fun.

Dylan Chalk (45:29)
No, no, that’s really good question. And we’re actually kind of working on that now. As you can see, some of this stuff gets really sophisticated. I would argue that Scribeware has more customizable horsepower than any software on the market. So it’s harder to get going because it’s it’s just more sophisticated. There’s way more you can do. I would kind of even go to the, so far as to say, I view Scribeware as a communications tool. It’s not a report writing app.

And I think most of the market is much closer to like a report writing app, you know, and it’s like, cool, they write reports, but they like, it’s an app. So anyway, ⁓ we are, you know, we’d love your guys feedback a little bit, but we’ve been ⁓ offering sort of a white glove onboarding package where we do zoom calls and help you on an administrative level get set up, meaning we teach you some of the tools and show you how to do this yourself. We’re even starting to work with some bigger teams where we’re

We’re working with them on a more administrative level, not an executive level, and actually building templates for them. So we’ve got scribers who are typically retired home inspectors who are really good at using it, and they will do consultations and actually help you build your template. That’s more of an hourly cost, where we just work with you. But we’re trying to add.

layers of service that match your needs. What we found is we had a big team from a whole other continent, call me, and they’d like built 10 templates and like done all this stuff. And then we have other people that have a really hard time doing anything, you know? And so we’re trying to create a levels of service that could help every different type of company come over from, you know, people literally helping you build it to like just a few admin level Zooms to give you a broad brush of like a strategy and how the tools work.

Rob Claus (47:13)
Outstanding, Stephen.

Guest (47:18)
Two questions for you. ⁓ I know one of your reps, Mike Paris is about 30 minutes from me over in Owensboro. And I’ve been talking to him about the software. Could I technically hire Mike to get together with him to help me work on the template instead of assigning it to one of my inspectors? Cause he’s got more intimate knowledge of the software for building out our commercial versus the residential.

Dylan Chalk (47:42)
That’s exactly where we’re going with it is that you can just hire retired scribers that are really good at it. just because we understand if you’re a busy team, it’s harder to hire a new guy and why take a home inspector out of the field when we have all these retired home inspectors that know how to use Scribeware can help you. So that’s exactly where we’re going with it, Steven, is then rather than hiring your own people, you could just hire one of ours.

Guest (48:06)
All right. My second question is, ⁓ home inspections versus commercial inspectors. There’s a different mindset. often find, you know, the home inspectors, peace of mind and immediate repairs where a commercial reports fundamentally a financial tool. So it’s just a little bit different on the mindset to the people that are looking at the reports. Is that where someone like Mike can come in and kind of help us with how we phrase things and set up that template for expediency?

Dylan Chalk (48:33)
It’s kind of why I built this template the way I have is rather than these long comments, I’m just down to brass tacks. You just click on what’s wrong and you could move it to a repair item. there’s not a lot of, and then the tables, all the incredible work Tim’s done on tables, the tables become a really kind of driving factor of like what you’re producing at the end of the day. I agree with you. Like for commercial, it’s much more financial document and those tables could.

By the way, you can place those tables wherever you want. Like I had them set in this finished report, ⁓ you know, in between the summary and the full report, but you could have them be the very first thing that you see so that you open it up and the tables are just right there. Particularly, you know, this cost to cure that Tim built, this is where, this is pretty new with all this like formulas and stuff, but these are where we’re trying to go for you guys so that you could be quickly producing these like nice tables of like the.

what the client really needs to know. I think a lot of this, the inventory becomes that the client might only look at the tables and not even read the report. the thing about the report that I think is valuable is, now I’ve bought it. All I did was look at the tables, but now I need to flip unit 202 and I need to see what’s wrong with it. I can go in and see what the heck’s wrong with it and know what I need to do. So I do think it’s nice having all of that stuff in there, but.

But that’s where we try to sequence the document where you get what you need quickly with the summary page and ⁓ the tables. But then when you’re ready to, you can dive into the full thing.

Rob Claus (50:11)
I love it. Any other questions, team?

Guest (50:13)
Yes. ⁓ So we do inspections, I got construction and we do some real estate investing. If I send one of my inspectors out to a perspective, one of our investment properties, can they kind of walk through and they can drop in like, Hey, roof shot, here’s the estimate and stick it in there. So it goes back to our construction crew and stuff when I pass that report, or do they need to build a table out for like each section of the report for our guys as they’re rolling in the field?

Dylan Chalk (50:41)
Well, I mean, there’d be different ways to do it. I might build a really simple crude template. That’s just organized by like roof siding, you know, work, whatever. And then you just dump the pictures in. One of the things I didn’t even show, like one of my favorite tools in scribeware is the photo captions to bullets feature. And you can, we, I do a lot of workflow on my, on my, how I work today, where I just take pictures and caption them. And, ⁓ this is a residential report.

But we have a button, I just need to look at some of these comments. I might not have used it too much on this one, but see how I have these two bulleted items here? So I have garage deck needed, there’s somebody to fix it, super vague comment. But how I built that deck or that comment, excuse me, is I just took, see I have these three captioned pictures here. So I can go ahead and delete these bullets.

And I put my cursor here and I hit the photo captions to bullets button. And that makes a bulleted list of my photo captions. This is actually one of my favorite features in Scribeware because you can build what I call a parent comment. So your parent comment is this. And it just says, Hey, you need somebody to fix the decks. And then I can put my cursor there. And my workflow now is I just take pictures and use voice to tech to caption what’s wrong. Does that make sense? So that could be especially effective for you where your guys are like, take a picture.

hit a microphone, the concrete got damaged by the loader or whatever. The guardrail is loose at the entry deck. You just speak those things and then you keep moving.

Rob Claus (52:20)
I like that. I like the parent parent comment and then the subordinate comments underneath from your from your bullets. I think you showed me that once before and that was that was cool.

Dylan Chalk (52:29)
It’s one of the things that liberates you because from needing all those comments. The old way of thinking is I need 30, 50, 100, 200 deck comments. I actually built with a gunny sack. have a deck comment. It was pretty funny, but this is like 300 comments built into one. Now I can click on ledger board and it’s not bolted correctly. It’s installed over the siding. The hangers are corroded. They’re not the correct fasteners and the flashings are missing. You can just kind of choose the defects that apply to the system and fill them in.

This is with pre-made ones, but with the photo caption to bullets, you get to just freehand it, which is way better for the dead beaver stuff, right? Now you can just, you can handle it. I just take a picture and caption it. Yeah.

Rob Claus (53:10)
Well, it’s also more convenient because in commercial, can north, south, east, west. So you can add your orientations or your up, down, right, left, or you could add your room by room to that photo. And then when you say that, that parent comment of attention is recommended to the stairs throughout the building. And then you have this set of stairs, this set of stairs, this set of stairs, this set of stairs, this set of stairs with all those issues. It just makes writing the report a lot

freer and quicker.

Dylan Chalk (53:42)
does. And that’s kind of why we designed this template the way we did is that I could go under common systems in HVAC and I don’t have to use this pre-made one or these pre-made comments. You can literally use that photo captions to bullets right in here. So you could bring some pictures in, we could caption them. You can tab to the next one, which is really fast and then caption this one.

and you put your cursor there and hit the little button and now you’re off to the races. So you can see how like, and I think photo captions to bullets is literally you have a workflow where you take pictures and caption what you see and you’re not writing anything. And on commercial, you get it, commercial is so weird. It’s so hard to have pre-written stuff because like the location becomes really hard to manage. And then it’s always a lot of dead beaver things in commercial where there’s just weird stuff coming out.

Rob Claus (54:37)
And it’s also the effect of severity, urgency and priority too. And you’re able to take in place that specifically to the client’s needs in this particular inspection report.

Dylan Chalk (54:51)
That’s why love Scribe where these unlimited modifiers are so powerful because now I can just toggle it to a major concern or maybe it’s ⁓ an incomplete item because you’re doing a new building. It lets you communicate really clearly what your findings are and how important they are and so forth. ⁓

Rob Claus (55:10)
Excellent. ⁓ I’m sure there could be other questions. ⁓ We have links to Scribeware throughout our website. Feel free to reach out to Dylan and Tim ⁓ if you have any specific questions. Thank you guys for spending some time with us today.

Dylan Chalk (55:30)
Thanks for having us guys. It was super fun. yeah, we’ll continue rolling all this stuff out over the next probably six months, honestly. This template we will make available to CCPIA people if you’re interested in using the template I’ve been working on as a starter. And then ⁓ the table functionality and stuff’s going to launch for everybody here probably in the next month or so, something like that.

Rob Claus (55:54)
Outstanding. As far as what the CCPA’s got going on, we do have a 3P pricing course coming up on May 8th. If you have not seen that, it’s taking all of our already existing pricing methods and really redefining them into true job costing. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that before, but job costings, how

many service companies actually can assign pricing to be profitable. And so we call it the 3P, which stands for planning, pricing, and profitability. So check that out on our website. And if you’re looking for our next three-day introduction to commercial property inspections live class, it’s going to be on June 17th in North Carolina. So feel free to reach out to us. That’s our next class that we have coming up.

Anybody got anything they want to bring up?

Guest (56:56)
I got a question, a little bit of a ⁓ industry thing going on right now with our clients data being shared and stuff. lot of us aren’t happy about that ⁓ and those types of things. ⁓ Do you, how’s your, your, what are you guys doing with like securing our clients data and stuff? Or do you have plans to partner with other companies for data sharing with or without your clients, ⁓ our permission to business owners?

Rob Claus (57:23)
Are you asking me as the association or are you asking these people on the call?

Dylan Chalk (57:28)
For Scribeware, we do not share your client data. I mean, I’m a home inspector. I’ve always thought that the data doesn’t even belong to us. If you call me and ask me about a job that I did, I can’t just go blabbing about it and sharing that data. ⁓ that’s sort of our philosophy is the data really belongs to our clients and it’s not to be monetized. But that’s going to be an increasing thing. One of the problems I would say in the industry is

People are demanding a level of sophistication with software where corporations will be tempted to get involved and deliver that. It’s expensive to build all this stuff, you know? And so then it’ll be tempting to go with these beautiful things that corporations have built, but they’re gonna want their ounce of blood for that, and that’ll be the client data, you know? But we do not, we don’t play those games.

Rob Claus (58:21)
Hey, Dylan, when you and Tim are creating these tables, is that table exportable? I.e., so as an inspector that might be doing 500, 700 commercial inspections a year, I’d love to see an opportunity for me to go, just so you know, 70 % of my package units I find to be failed.

Dylan Chalk (58:52)
Tim, you got some dots on that?

Tim Trickle (58:54)
⁓ It’s something that’s been requested and I’m sure we’ll figure out how to do it. I haven’t made an easy way to do that yet, but if you’re talking about just like manually at the end of the thing, you know, export my tables ⁓ to a spreadsheet and then you can manage that look up.

Rob Claus (59:09)
I can pivot table or something later.

Tim Trickle (59:12)
Yeah, that shouldn’t be hard to do. This is a new feature, so we’re still building onto it and we’re taking a lot of feedback. the nice thing about being not that huge corporation is we’re very responsive to that type of thing. And yeah, there’s no reason we couldn’t do that. ⁓

Rob Claus (59:28)
It’s like

as part of the P3, we look at metrics and one of the metrics is speed and type of building. And then so you can go back and make sure your pricing was right. And so if I had this way to go back and look at it, because I mean, we all run fast. And so maybe I want to go back and say, OK, ⁓ I did this 35,000 square foot in this metric and it had this many ⁓ pieces of HVAC equipment.

my metrics were perfect, or I might be doing this was a medical, or this was mixed use, or just being able to see my data on completed projects even internally. And we can maybe talk about this offline too, of how I’m able to constantly take a pulse on my business to make sure I was working profitably.

Dylan Chalk (1:00:22)
Yes.

It makes sense. I mean, we’re going to be pivoting towards a bunch of AI stuff here soon. And the synthesis of that data is where AI would come in, I mean, that would not be something you’d want to do manually most likely because that’s just especially if you talk about 700 inspections and synthesizing all that, that would be more likely an AI tool. yeah.

Rob Claus (1:00:47)
Outstanding. Thank you everybody for being here. We’re right at the top of the hour. I sure do appreciate it. Our next month’s call, we want to hear from you. We’re going to talk a little bit about, we’re going to talk a lot about the industry and a lot about your businesses. So I look forward to seeing everybody on the, I guess it’ll be the May call for the, for the Commercial Inspectors Roundtable. So then everybody stay safe, follow the com stop.

Dylan Chalk (1:01:15)
Thanks for having us, everybody. Take care.