Software built at 10pm, at a kitchen table

A decade on site

Graftum's founder came to the UK and spent over a decade in construction — starting on the tools, ending up running projects. Not reading about sites. Standing on them, at 7am, in the rain, working out why the materials hadn't turned up.

In 2018 he started his own electrical contracting firm. And that's when the second job began — the one nobody warns you about. Days belonged to the site. Evenings belonged to paperwork: quotes typed at the kitchen table at 10pm, timesheets reconstructed from memory and WhatsApp, invoices pushed to "the weekend", certificates expiring quietly in a drawer.

We tried the software. All of it.

We did what everyone does: we tried the tools on the market. Office ERPs built for administrators, that assume there's someone sitting at a desk all day. Enterprise platforms priced for corporations. Apps for domestic jobs that had never heard of monthly valuations, retention, or CIS.

Every one of them was built about construction, not inside it. None of them understood that the whole company is in a van, that the crew speaks two languages, that a "quote" can be dictated in ninety seconds between site visits — or it doesn't get done at all.

So we built our own. Not as a product — as survival. A system shaped around how a trade firm actually runs a day: quote from the van, jobs by zones and units, valuations that match what the QS expects, CIS and reverse-charge VAT done exactly to HMRC's rules, a worker app so simple it needs zero training and keeps working when the signal dies in a basement.

Then the other trades started asking

Word travels on site. Plumbers, dryliners, carpenters, groundworkers — people we'd worked alongside for years — kept asking the same question: "Can we get that?" Their problems were our problems with different tools in the bag.

Alongside the contracting firm, our founder also spent years in the trade qualifications and training world — helping construction workers get certified and stay compliant. That experience shaped the other half of Graftum: certificates, cards and CPD treated as first-class citizens, not an afterthought.

So we rebuilt the system for every trade, tested it over a long period on live projects, and gave it a name that says exactly what it's for. Graftum — from "graft", the British word for proper hard work. Software for people who graft.