The best inventory app for a small trade contractor is one that tracks materials by location — shop, truck, jobsite — and charges them to a job at the moment they’re used. That second half is the part most apps skip: shelf-inventory tools like Sortly organize stock but never connect it to job costs, and tool trackers watch your drills while your materials walk out the door uncounted.
If you’ve gone searching for “inventory app” and come back confused, it’s because that phrase means three different products depending on who’s selling. Here’s the honest map — including where our own product fits and where it doesn’t.
“Inventory app” means three different things
Shelf-inventory apps (Sortly, BoxHero, inFlow) are built to answer “what do we have and where is it?” for a storeroom that mostly sits still. Tool and asset trackers (Milwaukee One-Key, ShareMyToolbox, Hilti ON!Track, GigaTrak) answer “where did my expensive tool go and who has it?” Field-service suites (ServiceTitan, Jobber, Simpro) try to run the whole business — dispatch, quotes, invoices — with inventory as one module among twenty.
A trade contractor’s actual problem usually isn’t any of those. It’s this: material leaves the shop every morning in fistfuls, nobody writes it down, and at the end of the job nobody can say what it cost. That’s a fourth category — materials-to-job-cost tracking — and it’s the one the market mostly skips because small shops sit in the gap: too big for paper, too small for the enterprise platforms.
The five things that actually matter
- Capture in seconds, at the point of use. Ask any owner who’s tried a tracking system why it died and you’ll hear the same answer: the crew stopped logging. The bar is brutal and simple — logging has to be faster than not logging. Scan, pick the job, done. Anything slower becomes fiction within a month.
- Every checkout ties to a job. A count that isn’t attached to a job tells you what you own, not what anything cost. Job attribution is the whole ballgame.
- Live budgets, not month-end archaeology. The point of capturing materials in real time is seeing a job eat its budget while you can still do something about it.
- Location awareness. Shop, trucks, and active jobs are different places and your counts should know it.
- Pricing that lets the whole crew on. Per-seat pricing quietly sabotages the system: every guy without the app is a hole in your data. Flat pricing means the apprentice scans too.
The landscape, honestly
Sortly is the name that comes up first, and for a parts room it’s genuinely pleasant. But it has no job costing, and its tiers cap users and items — long-time users have publicly reported steep renewal increases, and growing past your tier means paying up. Right for you if: you want organized shelves and don’t need job costs.
Tool trackers — One-Key is free and fine as a registry for Milwaukee tools; ShareMyToolbox does crew check-in/check-out well for tools, priced per user; Hilti ON!Track and GigaTrak are serious asset systems for serious fleets. None of them count consumables to a job. Right for you if: your pain is losing tools, not costing materials.
Field-service suites — powerful if you want the whole business in one system, but small shops consistently describe them as expensive and overbuilt, and inventory is rarely the strong module. Right for you if: dispatch and invoicing are the real problem and inventory is a nice-to-have.
Spreadsheets — free, familiar, and the honest truth is they’re what most shops run today. They work until the second person needs to update one, and they can’t capture a checkout at the truck at 6:45 a.m. The typical spreadsheet system is accurate for about two weeks.
InTrack is built for the fourth category.
InTrack is materials-to-job-cost tracking for trade crews: scan materials out to a job from any phone in seconds, watch the job’s budget update in real time, and let reorder points build the purchasing list. Crews get a dollar-free checkout screen; owners and PMs get budgets, spend by category, and estimate-vs-actual. It’s $99/month flat — the whole crew, not per seat — with a 7-day free trial and no card required.
How to choose in one afternoon
- Name your actual pain. Losing tools → tool tracker. Messy storeroom → shelf app. Not knowing what jobs cost → materials-to-job tracking.
- Run the crew test. Hand the trial to your least patient crew member and watch them check out three items. If it takes more than ten seconds an item, it will not survive the field.
- Check the pricing model against your headcount. Multiply the per-seat price by everyone who touches material. That number, not the headline price, is what you’ll pay.
For the fundamentals of setting up whichever system you pick, see our practical guide to jobsite inventory management — and if QuickBooks is your current answer, read what QuickBooks can’t do for material job costing first.
Common questions
Is Sortly good for contractors?
Sortly is a solid general-purpose shelf-inventory app, and plenty of shops use it to organize a storeroom. Where it falls short for trade contractors is the job side: it doesn’t charge materials to jobs or show job budgets, and its per-seat, per-item tiers get expensive as the crew grows — which discourages putting it on every phone, exactly where field tracking has to happen.
Aren’t free tool-tracking apps like Milwaukee One-Key enough?
Tool trackers answer “where is my drill?” — a real question, but a different one. They don’t track quantities of consumable materials, don’t attach anything to a job, and don’t produce job costs. If your pain is knowing what a job actually cost in materials, a tool registry can’t answer it.
Should a small shop just buy a field-service suite like ServiceTitan?
If you need dispatch, quoting, invoicing, and marketing in one system and can absorb the price and onboarding, a suite can make sense. But small shops routinely describe the suites as too expensive and overbuilt at the one thing that matters here — fast material capture in the field. Many pair a lighter, purpose-built inventory app with the accounting and invoicing tools they already own.
What should a 5–30 person shop expect to pay?
Watch the pricing model more than the sticker. Per-seat pricing quietly works against you, because tracking only works when every crew member has the app. Flat pricing — one price for the whole crew — removes the incentive to keep people off the system. InTrack, for example, runs $99/month flat, not per seat.