Torspan
What it won't do.
Ten positions the product is built on, the work it refuses, the things we are not building, and at the bottom, dated, what is actually running today and what is not. Nothing on this page is softened with a promise about later. If a line here reads like a limitation, it is one, and it is one on purpose.
Every other page on this site is written in the present tense. This is the page where the present tense gets checked against a date, and the date is printed at the bottom.
Ten positions, and what each one costs.
These are not values on a wall. Each one is enforced somewhere in the machine, and each one takes something away from the product that a competitor is free to keep. The cost is printed under every one of them, because a principle with no cost attached is decoration.
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Position 01
Nothing is invented.
A fact in the record came from a person or a document. The machine does not fill a gap with something plausible.
This is first because everything else is worth nothing without it. A record with one made-up line in it is not a record — it is a story that agrees with itself, and you find out which line was the made-up one at the worst possible moment.
So the sentences the app writes about the job are made of sentences people wrote. Where it writes in its own voice, it writes about what it did — four time entries, out of Ray's message at 3:20 — never about what happened on the floor.
The one exception, named out loud. A person can ask it directly to write something up off a similar day, and it does, because refusing a direct request is not caution, it is uselessness. That row is then marked in the database as patterned rather than reported — a field, not a word buried in the text — so every row like it can be found and pulled out with one command. What the machine will not do is decide on its own that a gap should be filled.
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Position 02
An empty screen is an honest screen.
If nobody said what happened, the day stays blank and the app says so.
A blank Thursday is a fact about Thursday. It means nobody wrote anything down, and that is worth knowing — it is the difference between a day with no work and a day nobody reported.
Software that quietly fills the hole makes an empty afternoon look like a worked one, and it does it in the exact place where somebody will later go looking for the truth. So nothing writes into a blank day: not the overnight pass, not a summary, not a helpful guess about what the crew was probably doing.
What it costs: the product looks emptier than the ones it competes with, on the days it should.
Nobody wrote anything for this day.
No hours, no report, no plan, no photos. It's blank because it's blank — not because it's loading, and not because somebody forgot to look.
Invented job, invented day. A day nobody described stays this way until somebody describes it.
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Position 03
Every line names who said it, or the sheet it came from.
Person, date, and his own words. Or document, revision, and page.
Every row you can open carries the sentence it was made from and the man who said it, in whatever language he said it in. The original message is kept whole. You can go read it.
The quoted words are not written by the machine. The start and the end of the quote are cut out of the stored message by the server, which means a quote that is not in the message cannot be produced at all. That is a smaller promise than “it doesn't misquote people,” and it is a much harder one to break.
What it costs: a man can disagree with an entry, and when he does, the argument is about what he said — not about what the software decided he meant.
Time entry · Riverbend Bldg 2 · Wed Aug 19ManTomas R.Hours6.0JobRiverbend Building 2Said byRay D. · 3:20 PMHis words“6 for Tomas, he left at 1”SourceThe message, kept wholeInvented crew, invented job. The quoted words are cut out of the stored message by the server, not written by the machine.
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Position 04
It tells you what it hasn't read.
By name. On your job.
Every job carries a list of the paper filed to it and whether the words are actually in the machine. The documents it has not read sit at the top of that list, by name, with the reason each one is there.
It follows that it will not answer off a sheet on that list. Not a shorter answer, not a hedged one, not one assembled out of the sheets on either side of it. It names the document and stops.
What it costs: we publish where the product is blind, on every job, to everyone who can open it. No competitor is going to do that, and it is the reason the answers it does give are worth something.
The whole read log, and what puts a sheet on the short list →
Marco A.what's the hanger spacing they want on the riserAirOrchestraThere are no documents on this job. Not a drawing, not a spec, not a cut sheet. I'm not going to answer a spacing question out of general knowledge and let you think it came off your prints.Invented crew, invented job. An empty job says it is empty. It does not answer from somewhere else.
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Position 05
The crew is the source, never the subject.
The system works from what the crew says. Not on them, not about them.
This is a rule about what the software is allowed to be, and it is load-bearing for everything above it. A man who thinks he is being counted stops saying what happened. He rounds. He leaves out the hour he spent waiting on a lift, and he stops sending the photo of the thing that went wrong — which is the only photo anybody actually needs eighteen months later.
So there is nothing in the product that reads a man's words and produces a judgment about the man. His words make records about the work. That is the whole use they are put to.
What it costs: we cannot sell the report a certain kind of buyer asks for first — who is fast, who is slow, who is worth keeping. That report is not built, and it is not a feature we are holding back. What the crew sees, and what is never collected →
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Position 06
No score, no ranking, no location trail.
There is no number about a man anywhere in the product.
Not a hidden one, not an internal one, not one that only the office can see. The columns do not exist, so there is no setting that turns them on and no export that quietly contains them.
His hours are a number about the work, and he can see his own. Nobody's hours are shown beside anybody else's, because a list of four men with four numbers next to their names is a ranking whether or not you call it one.
What it costs: the whole category of workforce reporting. Location is the mechanism most of this market is built on, and we have no version of it — no GPS trail, no geofence, no clock-in radius, no idle detection, no map of anybody.
Everything held about Marco A.HoursWhat he reported, each with his sentencePhotosThe ones he sent, under the jobs he namedQuestionsWhat he asked, and the answersMessagesKept whole, in his own wordsSafetyHis plans, and his acknowledgementsNot collected — no column exists- Where he was, at any time, on any day
- How long anything took him
- How fast he answered, or whether he answered
- How many photos he sent, compared to anyone
- Whether he opened the app today
- Any rank, grade, score or percentage about him
Invented person. Both lists are the whole list — the second one is not a privacy setting, it is an absence of columns.
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Position 07
When it can't tell, it asks — and names both answers.
It does not pick the likelier one quietly.
Two documents disagree about the same tag. A man's words and the schedule disagree about which job a photo belongs to. Somebody says “yesterday” on a Monday. In every one of those, the machine has a favorite, and it is not allowed to act on it.
What happens instead: nothing is filed, both answers are named, and it asks. A photo it cannot place goes nowhere — not to the likelier job with a note nobody reads. It sits in one list of things the machine refused to guess, and both candidates are printed on it.
What it costs: somebody has to answer those. A product that guesses has a shorter list of chores and a record you cannot lean on.
Dee W.what filter does FCU-14 takeAirOrchestraTwo documents on this job disagree and I'm not picking one. The FCU-14 cut sheet, filed Apr 18, says one thing. The submittal that came back approved as noted, revision 2, filed May 30, is marked up different. Both are in the job. The marked-up return is normally the one that governs — but that's a call, and it's yours.Invented job, invented equipment tags. It names both, with the revision and the date on each, and stops.
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Position 08
It shows you the bubble. You call it.
An instrument does not overrule the man holding it.
You trust a level because it does not lie when the wall is out of plumb. It does not tell you to move the wall. You look at the bubble and you decide what to do about it.
That is the shape of every place in this product where the machine speaks up. It shows you what the sheet says, with the sheet. It shows you that two men reported the same unit. It never says you are wrong, and it never changes something because it worked out that it should be changed.
What it costs, mechanically: it cannot put a unit on hold or take one off. It cannot approve hours, sign a safety plan, or send a purchase order. It cannot create an hour for anybody under any circumstances. Everything of that kind is a proposal with a name on it, waiting for a person who has the authority to say yes.
Proposed · waiting on a personUnitAHU-3ProposalPut it on holdBecauseDee W.: “can't set AHU-3, curb's wrong”ConfirmsRay D.Status nowunchangedInvented crew, invented equipment tag. Until Ray taps it, AHU-3 is exactly where it was. Ask twice and there is still one proposal, not two.
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Position 09
The records are yours and they leave with you.
Any day, whole, in files that open without us.
The hours, the photos with their attribution beside them, the documents, the safety plans, the posters, the reports, the messages people wrote. Not a summary of them and not a report about them — the things themselves, in ordinary formats, on an ordinary day, with no request to make and nobody to ask.
A cancelled account can still export. An account behind on an invoice can still export. We do not charge to hold your own records, and we do not hold them while you leave.
What it costs: the ordinary way this business keeps customers. There is a whole model in software where leaving is technically possible and practically miserable, and it is worth real money. We gave it up in writing. What is kept, how long, and what happens if Torspan stops →
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Position 10
One price for the crew.
Never per head, because a record with a third of the crew missing is not a record.
This one is on the list because it is not a pricing preference. It is the thing that makes positions 01 through 04 possible. Charge for each login and somebody in the office buys eleven of them for fourteen hands, and the three men without one are the apprentice and the two who started this month. Their hours arrive by text on Friday, from memory. Their photos stay on their own phones.
What it costs: the revenue that arrives every time a shop hires somebody. Put a guy on Monday and the invoice does not move. The whole price list →
The work it refuses.
The positions above, said as behavior. This is what the running machine will not do, in the three places where software of this kind usually helps itself.
- No location of any kind. No trail, no geofence, no radius, no map, no idle detection.
- No score, no ranking, no leaderboard, no per-man number.
- No face recognition. A face in a photo is a face in a photo.
- No listening. It does not record calls, does not transcribe a site walk nobody asked it to, and does not run in the background. Every word in the record is a word somebody chose to say into it.
- It never writes in a person's name or signs as him. When it carries a word from one man to another it says who asked, in its own voice.
- It does not invent. Where nobody said it, it is blank and it says so.
- It does not answer about a document it has not read, and it names the document.
- It does not pick between two sources that disagree. It names both.
- It cannot fabricate a quote. The words are cut from the stored message by the server.
- It does not backdate, and it does not silently rewrite something a person wrote. A correction is a new record with the time on it.
- No confidence percentage next to anything. No badge that says an answer is probably right.
- It cannot put a unit on hold or take one off. It proposes; a person with the authority confirms.
- It cannot approve hours or sign a safety plan.
- It cannot send a purchase order. The order sits as a draft until a person sends it.
- It cannot create an hour for anybody. A man's pay is never a machine's guess.
- It cannot move a unit backward through its own status, and it cannot decide the job is safe.
Every one of those is a line in the machine, not a paragraph in a policy. The difference matters: a policy is something a company intends, and a constraint is something the software cannot do at four in the morning when nobody is watching.
What we are not building.
Named, so nobody has to ask twice and nobody assumes it is on a list somewhere. These are not gaps. They are decisions, and most of them are work other people do properly.
Your money
No estimating, no bidding, no invoicing, no accounting, no job costing, no change orders, no billing. AirOrchestra writes down what happened. It has no opinion about what anything is worth.
Your schedule and your manpower
It does not decide who goes where Monday, does not move hands between jobs, and does not tell a foreman what to do next. It reads the dispatch to know where a man was. It does not write it.
The paperwork with somebody else's name on it
No OSHA 300, 300A or 301 logs. No certified payroll. No lien notice calendar. Real work, done by people who do it well, and we are not among them.
Connectors into your accounting system
Our answer to how the hours reach payroll is a file, and we say which file: a spreadsheet with your office's own column names, in the order your bookkeeper already keys them. A named connector is a promise about somebody else's software that two people would have to keep for years. How the day reaches payroll →
Pictures
It writes real documents with real bytes — the poster, the report, the spreadsheet, the plan. It does not generate images, and it says so plainly rather than letting you assume it could.
Hardware
No badge, no beacon, no sensor, no tag, no box on the wall of the shop. Nothing to charge, nothing to lose, nothing to explain to a man on his first day.
Judgment out of photographs
No percent complete inferred from an image, no quality scoring, no automatic defect detection. Nothing that turns a photograph of a man's work into a grade for the man.
Anything on a machine
The documents on your jobs, and nothing else. Not files on a computer, not code, not keys, not anyone's folders, not mail that was never addressed to the job.
A second product
One thing, for one kind of crew. There is no suite behind this page, no modules to add on, and no version of AirOrchestra for an industry we have never worked in.
And on this site: no chatbot waiting to open, no demo calendar, no request-a-quote, no free trial button. There is nobody here whose job is selling it, so a button that implies otherwise would be the first thing on the site that was not true.
What's live today.
The rest of this site describes the product as it is meant to work. Here is where that description and today's machine are the same thing, and where they are not. Nobody asked us for this block. That is the point of it.
- One way in. A message — words, and up to ten attachments, in whatever language a man writes in. It answers with what it understood before it writes anything, and a correction lands in the same conversation.
- Hours out of a sentence, for himself and for the men he names by name. Send the same message twice and there is still one entry.
- Photos as their own records under a job, with the person, the date, and his words as the caption. Where his words and the schedule disagree, nothing is filed and both are named.
- Pre-task plans, one per man, as the printed poster, with a tap from each man on the record with the time on it.
- Tomorrow's plan, published to tomorrow out of something said today.
- The day's account, rewritten whole every time somebody adds to it — one current story, not three fragments.
- Work reports — what was installed, and where.
- Questions for the foreman, carried with the asker's own words, answered back in the app's own voice.
- Material requests as a draft order that waits for a person to send it.
- Equipment progress forward, with holds as proposals only.
- Documents: the catalogue, the folder tree, revisions and what supersedes what, page text, search — and the refusal where the words are not in the file.
- Real files out: PDF, spreadsheet, CSV, and the rest, with the bytes checked before they are handed over.
- Mail in: a cut sheet that arrives as an email attachment is filed to the job like any other document.
- The app in a browser, on a phone and on a small iPad: the home screen a man arranges himself, the messenger that floats and reflows the app instead of covering it, full-screen viewers for photos and prints, six roles.
- Voice. Men talk into it by holding the dictation key on their own phone keyboard. Holding a button inside the app and talking is not built, and neither is keeping the audio beside the words.
- The App Store. It is a web app you sign into. There is no listing, and there is no store badge anywhere on this site. On Android it is the same web app.
- The phone does not buzz. Notifications are written and nobody is subscribed to them. Anything waiting for you is waiting when you open it.
- Reading has not been run over every document. One pass over all the paper already sitting on a job has not been done, and nothing runs on a schedule to catch what came in today. Cut sheets, drawings and dispatch PDFs are the worst covered — which is exactly the paper a man on a ladder asks about. The app says so every time it is asked, which is the only reason this is survivable.
- The read log as a screen. The list is real and the machine works off it. The page that shows it to you, described on what it's read, is not built.
- Choosing the job and the day on a photo. A photo shot Friday and sent Monday files to Monday. Shooting inside the app, and a queue that holds photos taken where there is no signal, are not built.
- Thumbnails. Every photo comes down at full size every time it is opened. On two bars that is a spinner instead of a gallery.
- The foreman's pass over the week before it goes to the office, and the per-man weekly time record as a PDF.
- The payroll file as a repeatable thing. Hours come out as a spreadsheet when somebody asks. The weekly file with your office's own column names, sent on a schedule, is not built.
- The one-button export of a whole account. The files come out today, in real formats. The package described on your records is assembled by one of us by hand.
- Speaking up before the mistake. The lane that catches a man's own words against a sheet that changed is written, reasoned through, and switched off. It stays off until it can run without reaching into the database directly. It is the most valuable thing in this product and it is the thing we are least willing to rush.
- Answering more than one man at a time. It works through one turn at a time. Two men asking at the same moment means the second one waits.
- Signing yourself up. No button makes an account. Setting a shop up takes about a week and most of that week is one of the two of us. Billing is an invoice sent by hand.
- A check that runs every night. Three of the lanes above were dead for a week in August and nobody knew until somebody tried to use one. A nightly run against every lane that wakes a person when something is broken is not built, and until it is, this product finds out about its own failures the way that one did.
There is no customer on AirOrchestra today. No pilot, no trial, nobody we could point you at if you asked. Everything above is a description of the machine, not of anybody's business.
Why the date is on it
Because a block like this without a date is worth nothing. If the date at the top of it is months behind today, treat everything on it as months old and ask what changed.
It gets rewritten when something moves from the second list to the first. It does not get rewritten when the second list is looking long.
What this block is not
It is not a schedule. There are no dates against the second list, and there will not be, because a published plan gets read as a promise and every one of those items is work that could take longer than we think.
If you want to know when a particular one of them lands, ask, and you will get an honest guess from a person who is writing the code — labeled as a guess.
Why a page like this exists at all.
Because the whole claim of this product is that the record tells you what it does not have. A company that makes that claim and then describes itself the way software companies describe themselves has already broken it, on the page where the reader is deciding whether to believe anything.
So this is the same act as the read log, pointed at the company instead of the paper. The list of sheets it has not read is what makes the answers worth something. The list above is what makes the rest of this site worth reading.
Every line of it is a line somebody could hold against us later. That is what makes it worth printing.
A limit you can read is worth more than a promise you can't.
Nobody in this category publishes their limits. That is not a boast about us — it is a plain statement about what the pages you have been reading elsewhere leave out, and about what you would have found in week two instead of on a Saturday afternoon.
See it work.
Who owns the record, how long it is kept, and what happens to it if Torspan stops. → Your records
The questions people actually ask, including the ones with uncomfortable answers. → FAQ