Software that grew up on the job.

From the founder

Why Daybook exists

I grew up on Prince Edward Island and studied computer engineering in Toronto. My first job was troubleshooting printer software — steady work, but the trades kept pulling at me. So I quit, apprenticed as a bricklayer, moved to Calgary for the work, and earned my Red Seal. In 2014 I started a masonry company there — small and mid-sized commercial restoration and new construction. More than a decade later it’s still at it, crews in the field every working day — and it runs on Daybook.

In 2016 I married a girl from home, and we moved back to the Island to raise our family — while my business partner ran the Calgary crews, five thousand kilometres away. I ran my side of the company from an office at home on PEI: the quotes, the schedule, the money, the email. Nothing off the shelf could show me the whole business in one place — it took three subscriptions and a lot of copying and pasting. That distance is where Daybook started.

In 2023 I lost my wife, Janna, to brain cancer. I became the only parent to our two daughters, and simplicity stopped being a preference — it became the only way any of it worked. The business had to run without me standing over it: the paperwork written for me, every conversation already filed in the job it belongs to, nothing waiting on somebody to find a desk.

And that’s who Daybook is really built for. The best tradespeople are in a truck between sites all day — they don’t have time to sit at a computer, and they shouldn’t have to. A foreman can price a job from his phone in the minutes between site visits and get back to the work.

The office sees everything. The field never has to stop.

I knew computers and I knew the trade. Daybook is what a decade of running a real company taught us to build — and why it isn’t just another CRM.

— Ryan, founder