About
Obra is project finance for the people who build.
Most crews learn what a job earned months after it ended, the receipts were in a glovebox, the change orders in a text thread, and the profit was a feeling until the accountant closed the year. By then the next three jobs had been bid on the same guess.
Obra closes that gap by making capture effortless. Receipts reach the ledger four ways: each crew member links their own WhatsApp number and simply sends a photo; suppliers' invoices and PDFs are forwarded to a private email address per organization; the web app installs to a phone's home screen for one-handed capture in gloves; and Claude or ChatGPT can file a receipt or answer "how is the Westlake job doing?" against your real numbers. Every route lands in the same review queue, Obra reads the amount, vendor, date, category and sales tax, and nothing posts until a person approves it.
What comes out is a single ledger per project: cash collected, recorded cost, and what's left, in context by project, category, vendor and client. Change orders adjust the contract while the original survives. Category budgets raise a watch mark at 80% and an overrun alert in a Monday email digest. Totals stay bucketed per currency and are never silently converted. Crew capture and office approval are separated by custom roles, so you decide who can see contract values.
Obra also publishes a public page per project — before-and-after photos, milestones, updates — so finished work becomes one link that wins the next contract.
Obra is not accounting software and it is not a messaging app. It is the ledger for the job, kept by the people on the job. It works in English and Spanish, exports everything as CSV with no lock-in, and is free forever for one active project.