A field-logistics ledger for construction equipment and materials.

Tape a QR sticker to a scissor lift. Anyone who scans it sees what it is, where it's supposed to be, and who moved it last — and can log a move in two taps, gloves on, from a dirt lot with one bar of signal or none at all.

TrenchNote is a minimalist, self-hostable web app built by a project engineer at a water/wastewater general contractor. It answers three questions — what is this thing, where is it, who moved it — and refuses to be anything else. It is not an ERP, not a Procore replacement, and not accounting software.

The problems it exists for

Shared tools get bartered between job sites. Scaffold, lifts, and hand tools are traded and grabbed unannounced. Nobody knows where things are or who has them next.
Materials vanish from staging yards. Stock sits in a yard for a year or more, then goes missing right before startup and commissioning — delays, and vendor disputes with no paper trail.
Rented equipment outlives everyone's memory. Gear from rental vendors needs to be logged as on-site — without building vendor API integrations. In TrenchNote a rental is just an asset with an owner field and a PO number.

How it works

A tag is just a URL

Each QR label encodes a link to that asset's page, with the short code printed underneath as the mud-proof fallback. The phone's own camera opens it in the browser — no app store, no install, no account for the crew beyond one shared sign-in per phone.

The ledger is the truth

Every move is an append-only ledger record: what, from, to, who, when. Locations and stock counts are derived from the ledger, never stored where they can drift. Wrong entries are corrected by new entries — the history that wins vendor disputes stays intact.

One binary, your hardware

The backend is PocketBase: a single executable with an embedded database. A $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi in a job trailer is enough. The frontend is plain HTML and CSS with a little vendored JavaScript — pages measured in kilobytes, offline-first, no build step, no CDN.

What it looks like

The asset page on a phone: a large plate reading NORTHSIDE LIFT STATION, a RENTED badge with the vendor name, and an orange MOVE HERE button. — The page a scanned tag opens: where it is, how long it's been there, move it.

The dashboard: assets grouped by location, material totals, upcoming reservations, and a recently-moved feed. — The dashboard: everything, grouped by where it is.

A printable sheet of QR labels, each with a large human-readable tag code printed underneath. — Print-your-own labels; the code under each QR survives what the mud does to the QR.

Run it yourself

git clone https://github.com/mds08011/trenchnote.git
cd trenchnote
./scripts/setup.sh     # downloads the PocketBase binary for your OS
./pocketbase serve     # schema auto-applies from pb_migrations/

Then create your admin account, add locations and assets, print labels, and tape them on. The README has the full quickstart; DEPLOY.md covers running it for real — trailer Pi or VPS, HTTPS, and backups you've actually tested.

License

TrenchNote is AGPLv3. Self-host it, modify it, and run it for your company, your co-op, or your NGO, free, forever. The one condition: if you offer a modified TrenchNote to others as a network service, you must publish your modifications. A hosted, paid tier run by the maintainer may exist someday for people who'd rather not run servers; self-hosting will remain the first-class path.