Job Management Software for Pipework & Ducting

That is fine. Keep both parts on one job if that is how you run it.

Keep the changes and extra work against the job as they happen.

Use the job detail you need without making every piece complicated.

Keep it. WorkGuru is there for the job, hours, purchasing and costs.

One job, in most cases, with separate tasks for shop and site. The client contracted for an installed system, and splitting it into two projects makes the commercial result unreadable — you end up with a profitable fabrication job and a loss-making install and no way to tell whether the package was ever priced properly. Tasks give you the internal split without breaking the job. The exception is genuine supply-only work, which is a different commercial arrangement and belongs on its own job.

Yes, by structuring the job so fabrication is broken into the tasks that match how you actually work — cutting, fitting, welding, testing. On pipework this granularity earns its place because the labour content is concentrated in welding and the welding content varies enormously with material, diameter and position. A job costed as a single fabrication figure cannot tell you whether the stainless package was underpriced while the carbon steel carried it.

Testing performed externally goes on as a project purchase; internal inspection time records as a task. Both belong on the job, and on pipework the testing regime is frequently specified rather than chosen, which makes it a cost you inherit from the contract rather than control. Recording it against the project is how you find out what a particular client’s inspection requirements actually cost you to satisfy — useful information the next time they tender the same specification.

Material certificates, heat numbers and test records attach to the project as documents, which keeps them with the work they relate to. Be clear on the boundary, though: WorkGuru gives you a place to hold that documentation against the job, not a formal traceability system that enforces certificate-to-spool linkage. Fabricators working to a standard that requires auditable traceability normally maintain that discipline in a dedicated quality system.

Changes record against the job as they occur — additional spools, re-routes, extra supports, the hours to modify work already fabricated. Pipework and ducting sit late in the construction sequence, which means you absorb the accumulated variation of every trade ahead of you: a duct run that no longer fits because the structure moved is your rework and someone else’s error. Capturing it as it happens is what turns that into a claim rather than a cost.

Yes, as tasks with their own time and cost. Testing is the stage where pipework projects most often lose their remaining margin, because a failed test means finding the fault, cutting out, re-welding, re-testing and doing it while the programme is already late. Costing it separately across projects tells you whether your test allowance is realistic, and it usually tells you something uncomfortable about first- time pass rates on particular jobs or crews.

Yes, and they need to be read differently. On supply-and-install the material and fabrication content dominates. On labour-only the entire result is your hours against a rate, which makes productivity and standing time the only variables that matter. Running both through the same system is fine as long as you resist comparing their margins directly — a labour-only job at twelve per cent may be a better outcome than a supply-and-install job at twenty.

Yes. Work Areas can represent bays, welding stations, the rolling machine or the test bay. On pipework the constraint is often qualified welders rather than physical space — a coded weld needs a specific ticket — which is a capacity problem a bay-based schedule will not show you on its own. Structure it around whichever resource genuinely limits you, and be honest about which that is.

Yes, provided you kept shop and site as separate tasks on the job. This is the single most useful comparison in the trade, because the two are managed by different people and the assumption in most businesses is that the shop is efficient and the site is chaotic. Sometimes that is right. Frequently the shop is producing spools that do not fit, and the site hours are the symptom rather than the cause.

No. Your drawing package produces the isometrics and spool drawings; WorkGuru handles the job, the labour, the purchasing, the testing costs and the commercial result. The handover is the spool list and the material take-off. What WorkGuru adds is what happened to those spools in practice — the hours they took, the rework they needed and whether the package was worth tendering.