I sold and installed office furniture for a decade before I started building Cleat. Every project had the same last 5% problem: the work was 95% done, the crew was packing out, and the closeout package was nowhere near ready. Retention money — usually $20K to $40K on a mid-size corporate fit-out — would sit on the client's desk for another six to eight weeks while somebody tried to assemble the proof.
Where the $40,000 goes
On a typical dealer project, retention is 5–10% of the install value. So a $400K job means $20K to $40K hanging in the air. That money doesn't disappear — it just sits, un-invoiceable, while the punch list drags. Every week it drags is a week of cash flow missed. For a small installer, two or three dragging closeouts is the difference between making payroll and calling the bank.
Why the punch list drags
In my experience, it's never one thing. It's usually all of these:
- Photos are scattered across three installers' phones and two personal Google Drives.
- Nobody can produce a floorplan marked up with "which workstations needed rework."
- The client wants a PDF with signatures. The installer has a WhatsApp thread.
- The dealer PM is chasing everyone because nothing is in their system of record.
- When a MAC ticket comes in six months later, there's no record of what was installed vs. what was rework.
The tools people use to not solve this
Most installer-dealer pairs I worked with used some combination of: WhatsApp, Excel, Google Drive, email, a clipboard, and hope. A few tried Procore because a GC required it — but Procore kicks you out 30 days after substantial completion, and even while you have access, it's built for GCs tracking RFIs and concrete pours, not for installers tracking a BBF pedestal that needs swapping.
The tool these projects actually needed was one specifically built for pinning photos to floorplans, assigning fixes, and producing a signed PDF at the end. That's three features. It doesn't need to track submittals, it doesn't need to integrate with Primavera, it doesn't need a $200/month enterprise sales motion. It needs to run on the phone in an installer's back pocket and cost $29.
What Cleat does
Cleat is those three features. Installers walk the space, tap to add items, drop pins on the actual PDF floorplan, attach photos. Dealer PMs review on desktop. Clients sign on their phone. The PDF generates itself. When a MAC ticket lands eighteen months later, the record is already there — timestamped, geotagged, signed off.
None of this is revolutionary. It's just software shaped around the actual workflow furniture installers run — not construction software repurposed for them. The $40,000 punch list problem has a $29 solution.
If you want a structured walkthrough of what a real closeout package looks like, grab our free FF&E closeout checklist — the same six-phase process Cleat automates, in a print-friendly format you can use today.
Or try Cleat on your next project. It's free for 14 days, no card required.