Torspan
AirOrchestra · a Torspan product
AirOrchestra — for ownersSomebody's going to ask you to prove it.
A wage claim. An inspector. A backcharge from the GC. An engineer who wants to know why it was hung that way. Every one of them turns into the same question — what have you got from that day, and who said it. This page is about what's there when you go looking.
03 Every line names who said it, or the sheet it came from. Person, date, and his own words; or document, revision, and page.
Four asks. They're always the same four.
Nothing below is hypothetical to anybody who has run a crew for five years. What changes from shop to shop is only how long it takes to answer.
01 A man says he worked eleven days and you paid him for nine.
What gets asked for is the hours, by day, by job — and where they came from. What's in the file is every entry with the sentence it was written from, the date it was said, and the name of whoever submitted it. If a foreman turned in hours for a man, that's on the row too. The argument that follows is about words somebody said, not about whether your software was working.
02 An inspector walks the job. Or the renewal questionnaire lands.
Nobody asks whether you have a safety program. They ask for the crew-leader safety meeting from the week of the 11th, the pre-task plan for the crew that was on level 3, and the signatures. What's in the file is the plan that was made that morning out of what the foreman described, one for each man, with the minute each of them acknowledged it — and the meeting record with the subjects covered and the men who were standing there.
03 The GC sends a backcharge.
Somebody says your crew tore up the conduit on 3 the week of the 14th. What's in the file is the photos that came in that day, filed under that job, with the date on them and the man who shot them, and his own caption in his own words — written at 7:22 in the morning, not reconstructed in November.
04 Somebody wants to know why it was hung that way.
An engineer, a PM, the GC's super. What's in the file is the answer that actually went out to the man on the ladder that morning, with the sheet number, the revision and the date printed under it. Not “we think somebody told him.” The sheet.
Four asks, four files. The difference between a bad week and a Tuesday is whether they exist before the question does.
Which one is going sideways.
Every job at once, and the signal is different on each. One is drifting because hours are piling into an area that can't be closed out. One looks worst on paper and is fine. One has had nothing written about it for nine days — and nothing in a dashboard shows an absence.
Sixty-one hours booked against something that cannot be closed out. Nobody is doing anything wrong — the block is on a unit, not on the floor.
The one that looks worst on paper, and the one that is moving. Heavy is not the same thing as drifting.
Either nobody is there or nobody is writing. I cannot tell which from here.
There is a health rating on every one of these jobs. Somebody typed it. It is not in this answer.
Invented crew, invented job, invented building — Ray D., Marco A., Dee W., Tomas R., RIVERBEND Building 2. Real records belong to the companies that made them, and those don't go on a website.
The safety file for that week.
A prequal packet landed with a document request in it. He is not asking what exists — he is asking what does not, and that is the difference between two record sets that never meet. Time entries answer who worked. Safety forms answer who has a plan. Nobody holds both.
- Tomas R. — Wed Jul 15. Six hours on this job, and no form.
“six hours today on rb2 pulled the l3 mains back to the shaft” — Tomas R., 3:41 PM. That sentence is where the six hours came from, and there is no plan beside it.
- Marco A. — Mon Jul 13
- Marco A. — Thu Jul 16
The database knows. The paper does not, on purpose — a filled-in plan prints identical to one written at the gang box. You should know which two before you send them.
- Weekly walk-around inspection record. No form, no screen, no file — and a pre-task plan is not going to be dressed up as one.
The crew-leader meeting record on the same rule is held, with the subjects covered and the men who were standing there. One of the two is real and one is not, and the file says which → Safety paperwork
No adjustment “shall be made for any costs incurred more than 20 days before the Contractor gives written notice,” and the right must be asserted “within 30 days.”
FAR 52.243-4 · acquisition.gov
Prescribed for federal fixed-price construction. If your contract carries the usual notice clause, the clock runs the same way. A verbal agreement that stays verbal is how it runs out unnoticed.
Invented crew, invented job, invented building.
Six more he asks.
The line under each one isn't the answer. It's what has to be held at once before there is an answer.
who worked rb2 last week with no plan on record
Time entries against safety forms, per man, per day — the set difference, not either list.
which job hasnt anybody written anything about
Absence across five record types on every job at once. A dashboard renders what exists.
show me every hour on rb2 that has no code on it
The hours that roll into no total, listed by day and by man, and not quietly divided into the codes that have data.
whats the oldest thing on this job nobody answered
Every question asked in every thread, against every answer that came back.
is anybody billing time against a unit thats blocked
Unit status, the RFI blocking it with days open computed server-side, and hours booked to that area since.
build me the safety file for july 13 to 17 and tell me whats missing
Nineteen documents, and the twentieth that should exist and does not.
What's actually in it
Three kinds of record come out of a day, and each one keeps a different thing. This is the whole list — there is no fourth kind hiding behind a login you don't have.
Hours
- person · date · jobsite · hours · cost code where one was recorded
- the exact sentence the entry came from
- who submitted it, and whether it was the man himself or his foreman
- every correction, with what it replaced
Safety
- the plan, one per man, with the crew listed on it
- the work described, the hazards named, the actions, the tools
- each man's acknowledgement, with the minute
- the day, the job, and who prepared it
What was said and shown
- every photo with the person, the date, the job and his own caption
- every question, who asked it, and the answer that went back
- the sheet, revision, date and page under every answer off a drawing
- the day's account, rewritten whole each time, never appended
Two rules run through all three of those, and they are the reason the file is worth anything on the day it gets asked for. Nothing in it was written by the system on its own — a fact came from a person or from a document, and where nobody said it, the day is blank and says so. Nothing in it gets quietly rewritten — a correction is a new line that carries what it replaced.
The words on the screen when there's nothing to show
The strings out of the product, not a friendlier version written for a website. Several of them are the whole point of the page.
| Where | What it says |
|---|---|
| Day nobody described | Nobody described this day. Nothing was written for it. |
| Photo whose job can't be resolved | Not filed. The words say Riverbend Building 4, the schedule says Riverbend Building 2. Which job? |
| A man with no hours on a day the crew worked | Dee W. — no hours reported for Aug 12. (shown as a gap, never as a zero) |
| Question about a sheet that hasn't been read | M-403 hasn't been read. That's the sheet this question is about. |
| Export produced | Aug 1–14, as of 4:12 PM Aug 14. |
| Export produced after a correction | New file. The one sent Friday was not changed. |
| Review list, empty | Nothing waiting. Everything filed has a source on it. |
| Review list, not empty | 1 item waiting — a photo whose words and schedule disagree. |
| Job with no documents | No documents on this job yet. |
| Owner searching a day with no work on it | Aug 16 was a Sunday. Nothing was reported. |
| Hours entry that was corrected | Corrected Aug 14 by Tomas R. Replaces 6.0. The original line is kept. |
| Safety plan reconstructed on request | Patterned from Aug 11. Not reported. |
Invented crew, invented job, invented building. Real records belong to the companies that made them, and those don't go on a website.
How long it's kept
Hours and the sentences they came from are kept for at least the federal periods for payroll and time records. Safety records are kept for the life of the account — the rule's floor on meeting minutes is one year, and a claim on public work can show up years after the punch list is signed. All of it comes back out any day you ask, in files that open without Torspan.
That is a description of what the record contains and how long it lives. It is not a certification, and no software can give you one.
29 CFR 516.5 — “Records to be preserved 3 years. Each employer shall preserve for at least 3 years:” — payroll records.
29 CFR 516.6 — “Records to be preserved 2 years.” — “all basic time and earning cards or sheets on which are entered the daily starting and stopping time of individual employees.”
WAC 296-155-110 — (5)(a) “You must hold crew leader-crew safety meetings at the beginning of each job, and at least weekly thereafter.” (6)(d) “You must document attendance.” (6)(e) “You must document subjects discussed.” (8) “You must retain minutes of crew leader-crew safety meetings by the employer for at least one year.”
Retention by record type, who can see what, and how the whole thing comes out. → Your records
It's not a way to watch your crew. That's why it works.
There is no location in it. No trail, no geofence, no radius to clock into, no map of anybody. There is no score, no ranking, no leaderboard, and no per-man number of any kind — not hours-per-unit, not photos-posted, not response time. Nothing in the product counts one man against another, and there is no setting that turns that on.
You can buy a product that gives you all of that. What you get with it is a crew that writes less, and a record with holes in exactly the places the wage claims come from. The men are the only source there is. Everything on the screen in the last section exists because four people wrote four sentences they were going to write anyway. The day they stop, there is nothing to hand anybody.
This is not a wall between you and your own jobs. Every word your crew wrote into it about your work is yours, and you can read all of it. What doesn't exist is a number about a man. Those are two different things, and only one of them makes people stop typing.
It also doesn't listen. Nothing is recorded in the background, no call is transcribed, no site walk is picked up by a phone in somebody's pocket. Every word in the record is something a person chose to write or say into the app.
The whole list of what is never collected, written for the men it's about. → For crews
The rollout you already paid for
If you have bought one of these before, you know the shape of it. It gets chosen in the office for reasons that make sense in the office. It asks the field to do new work — a form, a required field, a cost code to pick — and the field reads that trade correctly: my time, their screen. Under a deadline everybody reverts to the fastest thing they know, which is a text to the foreman. Then the entries are half-filled, so the reports are wrong, so the office stops trusting them, and the license keeps renewing for eleven more months.
The chain breaks in the second step, every time. Everything after it is consequence.
AGC and Sage asked about 1,300 contractors what gets in the way of new technology. 41% named employee resistance. 43% named finding the time to implement and train. Budget came in under both.
AGC of America / Sage, 2024 Construction Hiring and Business Outlook. sage.com
What's different here
There is no form.
Not a short one, not a smart one — none. A man writes or says what happened, the way he'd say it to his foreman, in whatever language he thinks in. That's the whole input.
There's nothing new to open.
The messenger is the app. It isn't a second thing sitting next to the group text; it's the thing the group text turns into, with the paperwork falling out of it.
Nobody has to be trained on a sentence.
There is no class, no rollout day, no laminated card by the gang box. The first thing a man does in it is the only thing he ever does in it.
Your foreman isn't the enforcer.
He doesn't have to chase four men for hours or nag anybody about an app, because there's nothing to nag about. That matters more than any feature on this page: the last rollout probably didn't die on the crew, it died on the man who was told to make it happen.
What it takes to put in: a list of your people and a list of your jobs. Torspan sets that up by hand from the list you send. There is no implementation fee, no minimum term, and no training day. What is left over for your office is the review list — the handful of things the system refused to guess, sitting in one place with both possible answers shown, waiting for somebody who knows which one it is.
How you'll know in two weeks
Not a pilot plan. Four things to watch for, and one to watch out for.
01 The Friday hours thread stops happening.
Nobody is reconstructing Tuesday in a group text on Friday afternoon, because Tuesday was written down on Tuesday.
02 Nobody asks you to reset a login.
There is one account per man, on his work email, and he uses it the way he uses a messaging app.
03 Your foreman stops writing at nine at night.
The day's account is already written when he gets home, out of what he and his crew said during the day.
04 The crew doesn't mention it to you at all.
This is the one that actually tells you. Field software gets talked about when it costs somebody time. Silence from the crew is the whole product working.
If two weeks in your men are still texting the foreman and nothing is landing in the record, it didn't take. That's a real outcome, and it's named here instead of found out at renewal. On that day you export everything — the hours, the photos, the plans, the reports, the conversations — and you leave with it. No retention fee, no exit call, no ninety-day notice.
There's no ROI calculator on this page.
It won't put a savings percentage on this page, in the app, or in a conversation. Torspan hasn't measured one, and a number you can't show the arithmetic for is worth less than the blank space it fills.
What can be named is where the money already goes.
The second shift.
Your foreman is on salary, so the hour or two he spends after the real day ends doesn't appear on any invoice. It appears the week he leaves, and the man who replaces him costs more and knows less about your jobs.
The week that gets keyed twice.
Somebody in your office reads a photo of a legal pad and types it into the accounting system. Then somebody argues about Tuesday, and a second person goes back through a text thread to settle it.
The day nobody can answer.
The four asks at the top of this page. The cost isn't a percentage — it's whatever the other side asks for, times the share of it you can't dispute with anything better than a memory.
The seat nobody opens.
A subscription that renewed every month for a product the crew quit in week three. That is the exact thing the section above is written to catch in two weeks instead of at renewal.
OSHA maximum penalties, for violations assessed after January 15, 2026
Source: osha.gov/penalties
Nothing in this product keeps anybody from getting cited. What it does is make the paperwork that gets asked for in that week exist before the week happens, made out of what your crew already said.
One price for the crew
$400/month — one crew.
$1,500/month — the whole shop.
A crew is a foreman and whoever works for him, on any number of jobs. The shop is every crew you run. Put a guy on Monday, same price. Take one off, same price. Nobody counts heads, and nothing about the bill changes when your crew changes, which is the only way a crew that changes weekly ends up with everybody on it.
Per-head pricing isn't just expensive — it breaks the record. The first thing anybody does with a per-seat invoice is cut seats, and the seats that get cut belong to the second-year men and the guy who started in March. Those are the men whose hours get argued about later. A record missing a third of the crew isn't a record. That is why the price is flat, and it is a product decision before it is a pricing decision.
Storage has no surcharge. Documents have no surcharge. Exports have no surcharge, ever, including the one you run on your way out the door.
The whole price, what's in it, and the short list of what isn't. → What it costs
What it doesn't do, and won't
The list below isn't a roadmap and none of it is coming. If any of these is what you're shopping for, buy the thing that does it.
The office systems
No accounting. No invoicing. No estimating or bidding. No job costing. No scheduling. No project management. It makes the day's records and hands them over; your accounting system stays your accounting system.
Payroll
It produces the hour record. It does not run payroll, calculate overtime, figure prevailing wage, or compute union fringes. It does not make certified payroll. On public work in Washington, weekly certified payroll reports have to be filed online with L&I at least once a month under RCW 39.12.120 — the file you get out of this is not that file, and nothing in here will turn into it.
Safety beyond the paperwork
It makes the pre-task plan and keeps it. It does not run a safety program, write OSHA 300, 300A or 301 logs, track incidents, hold training records or certifications, or tell anybody a job is safe.
Connections and devices
No named integrations. What you get is a file — hours as CSV and XLSX with columns your office sets once, reports and time records as PDF — because a named connector is a promise about somebody else's software that has to hold for years. No hardware, no sensors, no badges, no beacons. No Android app; on Android it's the web app, and that's said plainly rather than fudged.
And it does not decide anything. It doesn't approve hours, sign a plan, send a purchase order, or put a unit on hold. It shows you what's there and puts the call in front of a person who has the authority to make it.
The full list, plus a dated line on what is running today. → What it won't do
Who this is wrong for
Four disqualifications, so nobody spends a month finding out.
- If your business is service calls — trucks running to ten addresses a day, dispatch, memberships, price books — this is the wrong product. It's built for installation crews that have been in the same building since March.
- If what you want is to see where your guys are, this is the wrong product, and it isn't a setting that can be turned on for you.
- If you need one system that is also the accounting system, this is the wrong product. It makes records and hands them to whatever you already run.
- If nobody at your shop will send a list of your people and your jobs to get started, nothing here works, because the record is about your jobs and your men and it has to know both.
What it is right for: a commercial mechanical or sheet metal crew whose paperwork is currently living in a group text, a photo roll and somebody's memory.
If Torspan stops
It is answered with a procedure, not with a paragraph about commitment.
Export is always available and never gated — not behind a plan, not behind a support ticket, not behind an account being current. If Torspan shuts down, every account is told ninety days before anything changes, gets a full export built for it whether or not anybody asks, and the record then stays open read-only for twelve months — sign-in works, export works — before anything goes dark. Nothing is ever charged for keeping your own records, and cancelling doesn't take them away from you.
A contractor who hands his safety file to a software company is underwriting its survival, not its feature list. That gets answered in writing, on its own page, with the terms on it.
Ownership, retention, who can see what, and the continuity terms in full. → Your records
Five questions. Ask them of anybody.
Take these to whoever else is on your list. The answers here are on this site, in one click each.
01 What's the number, and can I see it without talking to a person?
Yes. It's on What it costs, above the fold, with no form in front of it.
02 Do I pay by the head?
No. One price for the crew, and adding a man on Monday doesn't change it. The block above says why that's a product decision.
03 Can I take everything out today, and will it open without you?
Yes. Hours as CSV and XLSX, documents as documents, photos as files with their attribution alongside, plans and reports as PDFs, the conversations as text. → Your records
04 What happens to my file if you shut down?
Ninety days' notice, a full export built for every account, and twelve months read-only after that — written down rather than promised. → Your records
05 Will you tell me what your system hasn't read?
Yes — by name, on your job, sheet by sheet. It's the one screen a company only publishes if it's willing to be looked at. → What it's read
See it work.
One flat number for the whole crew, what's in it, and the short list of what isn't → What it costs
The full list of what it refuses to do, and a dated line on what's running right now → What it won't do