Case Study - Building Walkflow: turning job walkthroughs into professional paperwork

The Challenge

I work with C-Linx Marine, a marine electrical business. A single job can mean a walk around a boat with a client, a lot of photos, a few voice notes and a pile of things that were said out loud and never written down. The paperwork came afterwards, from memory and was eating into my personal time and energy.

It was also where some jobs went wrong. A line in a quote didn't match what the client thought they'd agreed to, or a variation had no record behind it. This was a problem for the business and for me personally.

My Approach

I started with the walkthrough, because that's the one moment where everything is visible and nobody has to remember anything. You record the job (video, photos, your voice), and the app turns that into the documscope of work, quote items, a materials listate.

Every line links back to the part of the walkthrough it came from. If a client asks where a quitem came from, you can show them the moment

The client gets one link. No login, no portal, and you can see when they open it. I wanted the person at the other end to need nothing from me except a phone.

I built it as a web app so it works on the phone you already have on site, and kept recording resilient to poor signal by making it local-first with idempotent, chunked uploads and a robust processing pipeline.

From walkthrough to Xero

Once the documents existed, the obvious next step was getting them into the tool the business and I already uses. Walkflow connects to Xero and pushes the quote or invoice as a draft, so nothing goes out until you've checked it.

I have made the connections infrastructure reusable, so other connections simply define their own adapter, onboarding flow, UI and CRUD/sync logic and the rest is handled. I'm planning on making many more connections to other useful services as Walkflow is positioned as an app that works with your existing tools rather than trying to replace them.

The Outcome

Walkflow is live at walkflow.app and in use at C-linx Marine and for my own sole contracting. I've still got a bit of iteration on the UX for the connections and generating job documents, but all-in-all I am saving myself more than an hour a week in paperwork and admin. Plus, I am able to send detailed and professional walkthroughs to my clients and other contractors to explain the job and its scope.

Limitations

The documents are drafts. The AI gets most of the way and you still read and edit them before anything goes to a client.

It is a PWA, not a native app. Recording works well in the browser, but a native capture app would give better camera control and access to background processing, meaning that you could exit the app and the upload would continue in the background