Mission Our mission at include is to delight our customers. Together, we are creating a product and service that empowers everyone in a business to collaborate, execute and celebrate successes. Everyday we get closer to fulfilling our vision to help all small and medium businesses to achieve their full potential.
Description Like any good software startup, we started in a garage, in California, in 1988, over 30 years ago. Our first product was estimating software. It was the first PC based estimating software designed exclusively for landscape companies. It used an operating system called Microsoft DOS. Interesting note, we actually still have a client using that product to this day. We’re proud of that.
We all know, the world doesn’t stand still. And it wasn’t long until our clients wanted more from us. We have always been focused on what our clients want, and we began to deliver more. We recognized we needed to innovate and create more, so we did. Adding scheduling, then billing, payables, receivables, vendor collaboration tools, payroll, point of sale, and ultimately, fully integrated GAAP compliant accounting, including financial reporting.
From day one, our software was project oriented to its core. So much so that it was impossible not to job cost. Simply using Asset to do your work created job cost automatically. You have always been, and still can to this day, get a full profit and loss statement not only for your company, but for every single job.
We were the first Green Industry software company to release a Windows version starting in 1996. It was a big shift, and we managed to do it while keeping the data our clients had created online and available. We called it a ‘migration’. The Internet was just getting rolling and there were no true web applications.
During the next ten years, we became the leading software vendor in the Green Industry, and continued to improve and expand our windows products, including adding the first mobile field data collection app on a Palm Pilot, Minnow, and although it was a little ahead of its time, we deployed it to a few clients and continued to work to develop better mobile apps. iPhone and Android did not exist at that time. In 2011, we released the first iOS mobile app for the industry, iCREWtek, and it, too, was ahead of its time, although we did start seeing it adopted more widely.
Over the years we listened and took notes. And we realized that the future was going to have much more to do with visual, easy to use software that delivered on demand answers to users. And we built a roadmap that we shared with clients at our user conferences. We took a careful look at what we were doing. And we made some big changes.
We restructured our company into a centralized, role based corporate structure that we fondly call our TEAM. The TEAM is every one of us at Include. And we began to work together in ever more collaborative ways that highlight and amplify each other’s strengths.
In 2021, we committed deeply into the realization of a bold vision, Include Cloud, a scalable web and mobile platform built to serve our current client base in the outdoor services industry, as well as additional markets in both the small business and enterprise markets. We’ve targeted 2022 for the initial product release, and plan to deploy ever improving versions of this product well into the future.