Tess is an AI agent that calls or texts your field teams, asks what happened in plain language, and turns their answers into structured field data.
No app to download. No spreadsheet to fill in.
Structured in PayShepherd, no typing required
Poured roughly two thirds of the north slab, shut down at 4:00 PM. Remaining third rescheduled for tomorrow morning once the pump is confirmed.
Field data is the ground truth behind every schedule, claim and cost decision. It is also the data most likely to arrive late, thin or secondhand, because every existing method asks the field to work the way the office works.
Spreadsheets nobody owns
A tracker per project, per supervisor, per subcontractor. Consolidating them is a week of someone's month, and by then the detail is gone.
Paper in a truck
Handwritten tickets and timesheets that get photographed, re-keyed, or lost between the site and the office.
One more app to log into
Rollout, training, and a crew that may not have a devices to use on site.
Already buried in paperwork
Crews finish a ten-hour shift and then face forms. Reporting becomes the last thing done, and the first thing done poorly.
The interface is the one every worker on site has already mastered: a phone call and a text thread. No dropdowns, no required fields, no right way to phrase it. People answer the way they would answer a coworker, in plain speech or shorthand.
Tess
PayShepherd · Field intake
Tess works from a question set you configure per project and per role. These are the categories it collects today, and you can add your own custom questions to any call.
What job are you reporting for? Include an address or job number.
Job contextHow did the work go, and what got done?
ProgressHow many hours did you put in on this job?
HoursWhat materials did you go through, and roughly how much?
MaterialsWhat equipment was on site, and was any of it sitting idle?
EquipmentAny injuries or close calls on site?
SafetyAnything that held you up, and what caused it?
DelaysAnything the office should know about, or should do differently next time?
LessonsAnything specific to your project, like permit sign-offs or weather conditions.
Custom question“We tried multiple field apps before this. The crews never used them. A phone call at the end of the job is the first thing that actually worked for us.”
Owner
Specialized contractor organization
FAQ
Common questions from project delivery and field leadership teams.
No. Tess reaches people on an ordinary phone call or SMS thread. There is no app, no login and no device requirement, which is why it works for everyone on site from day one.
Progress and quantities, hours and headcount, materials and equipment, delays and their causes, safety observations and anything the office should know about. You choose which categories each person is asked about, and you can add custom questions of your own.
Your first calls go out the same day. There is nothing to install and no one to train, so setup is a list of phone numbers and the questions you want asked. Tess starts contacting that first crew within hours, and most teams have multiple crews rolled out inside the first week.
Tess retries on a schedule you set and switches channels, so a missed call becomes a text. Persistent non-responses are surfaced to the supervisor rather than quietly leaving a gap in the record.
