Not a file and not a task. It has a discipline, a stage, a history, a transmittal, and somebody who approved a specific version of it. A tool that stores it as an attachment loses the only part that matters.
Ofivio Architecture →Why Ofivio is shaped this way
Operating systems for real professions.
Mainstream work-management tools are built to fit every business, which means they are built to model the one thing every business has: a task. Ofivio is built the other way round — one system per profession, in that profession's own units. That single choice is the difference, and it decides everything else.
The difference
A general tool models a task. A profession's real unit is not a task.
This is not a feature comparison. It is a difference in what the software believes the work is.
A tool for every business
- The unit is a task, a card or a row. Everything real becomes an attachment to one.
- Your trade's vocabulary is typed in by you — as list names, custom fields and colour labels.
- Two people configure it two ways, and the reports stop agreeing.
- The specialist work leaves for a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet becomes the real system.
- Money is a field on a card, so nobody can say what a job earned.
- It fits any business, which is the same as saying it fits none of them in particular.
A system for one profession
- ✓The unit is the real one — a revision, a BOQ line, a tenancy, a journal entry.
- ✓The vocabulary arrives with the product, because the product is only for you.
- ✓There is one way to record the work, so the reports cannot disagree.
- ✓The specialist work stays inside, because it was the reason the product exists.
- ✓The ledger is written by the work, so profitability is a fact rather than an estimate.
- ✓It fits fewer businesses, on purpose, and fits them completely.
What the unit actually is
Seven trades, seven things that are not tasks
Each one is the atom its product is built around — and the reason a general tool sends that work to a spreadsheet.
It carries a quantity, a rate, a cost and a client price; it becomes a purchase order, arrives at a store, gets built on a site, and comes back as a measured certificate. A task list cannot hold that chain, so it lives in a spreadsheet instead.
Ofivio Build →A rate is not a number, it is the materials, labour and plant underneath it. Change a material price once and every rate that uses it should re-derive. Nothing generic does that, because nothing generic knows what a rate is.
Ofivio Planning & QS →It has a unit, a term, a rent, a renewal date and an arrears position that ages by itself. The dangerous ones are the dates nobody has a reason to look at — which is exactly what a to-do list will never raise.
Ofivio Real Estate →Real double-entry, written by the work that already happened, rather than a cost field typed onto a project after the fact. If the books are not written by the operation, the two disagree by month end. They always do.
Ofivio Books →The roster, the attendance, the advances, the warnings and the letters are one record, and payroll is what that record produces. Rebuilt by hand from three registers, it is wrong every month in a different way.
Ofivio People →The sale is not the end of it: the stock it moved, the reorder it triggers and the ledger line it writes are the same event. A till that only prints a receipt leaves the other three to somebody's memory.
Ofivio POS →When the other side is right
A general tool is the better buy in these cases
If one of these is you, we would rather say so now than in month three.
A team whose output is a queue of assignments — support, editorial, general operations — has no specialist unit for a trade system to hold. A good general tool will beat us, and cost less.
If the point is a single view over teams that share nothing but a company name, that is a general tool's home ground and not ours.
A folder and an invoice template are still enough, and we say so on the industry pages. Ofivio Solo is free if you want to try anyway.
Ofivio does not author drawings, coordinate models or run structural, MEP or energy calculations, and it never will. It manages the work around them.
What that gets you
Niche products, one account
The trade-off a specialist system usually forces — a separate tool per department — is the one thing Ofivio does not ask of you.
Drawings, stages, bills of quantity, procurement and the site. Are you an architect, a builder or an engineer?
3 products →Run the work, the property or the pipeline — with the people on it. Do you run projects, property or a pipeline?
4 products →A counter, the stock behind it, and getting paid at the front. Do you sell from your own stock?
1 product →The three desks behind the work — pricing, books and payroll. Do you price the work, keep the books or run the payroll?
3 products →A student and their own record — free, forever. Are you a student, or teaching them?
1 product →Find out in an afternoon, not in month three
Say what your business does and Ofivio builds the system your trade runs on before you pay for anything. If your work really is tasks, you will see that quickly too — and we would rather you did.