A new chapter for defect management
Today we are announcing IssuesID, a construction defect, snag and quality-management platform we have been building for the team behind DefectID. It is the ground-up successor to that software — same hard-won understanding of how sites actually run, rebuilt as a modern, offline-first platform for the way field teams and project managers work in 2026.
The brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: no paper registers, no missing photos, one tamper-proof record from first capture on site to compliance handover. This post is a quick tour of what we built and the engineering decisions behind it.
The problem with how defects get tracked
On most jobs, the defect process is held together by spreadsheets, camera rolls and email threads. A super walks the site, takes photos on a phone, and later tries to reconcile them against a register that lives somewhere else. By the time an issue reaches the contractor responsible, half the context is gone — which room, which drawing revision, who flagged it, what was agreed.
That gap between what happened on site and what got recorded is where close-out times blow out and compliance evidence quietly disappears. IssuesID closes that gap by making the on-site capture and the system of record the same thing.
What IssuesID does
The platform covers the full quality lifecycle, not just snagging:
- Defects — capture, assign and close out site issues with photos, annotated drawings, correspondence and a complete audit log on every status change.
- Inspections — reusable QA checklists, digital sign-off, and signed PDF handover packs generated on demand.
- Work orders — cost-coded line items, contractor assignment and backcharge tracking.
- RFIs and NCRs — threaded design questions tied to drawings, and non-conformance records with their own formal review lifecycle, kept separate from day-to-day defects.
- Locations — a structured tree of buildings, levels and rooms that everything else hangs off, so every issue is anchored to a real place on the project.
- QR codes — print location-scoped codes on site; scan one and land directly in the right defect list.
Every photo, comment and assignment is recorded and reportable. Reports are role-filtered and generated asynchronously so a large quality or cost export never blocks the person who asked for it.
Offline-first, because sites have no signal
The single most important technical decision was to build IssuesID as an offline-first progressive web app. Construction sites are basements, lift shafts and steel-framed buildings — places where connectivity is unreliable at best.
Field teams install IssuesID to the home screen like a native app. They can capture defects, photos and annotations with no signal at all; the work is stored locally and syncs automatically when the device reconnects. There is no separate app to download from a store, and no moment where a worker loses an hour of captures because the network dropped.
Built for multi-tenancy and auditability
IssuesID is a multi-tenant SaaS platform, so a single deployment serves many construction businesses with their data strictly isolated from one another. We enforced that isolation at the database layer using PostgreSQL row-level security rather than relying on application code alone — the safest place to guarantee one tenant can never see another's data.
Auditability was a first-class requirement, not a feature bolted on later. Documents and drawings use immutable revisions and a withdraw-not-delete model, pins are anchored to specific revisions, and every meaningful change is logged. When a project reaches handover, the evidence trail is already complete.
Automation and integrations
Quality processes are full of repetitive steps — assign this trade, notify that manager, escalate if nothing happens in 48 hours. IssuesID handles those with event-driven workflow rules so teams configure the process once and let it run. Notifications go out in-app and by email, with per-organisation templates and deliverability the business controls.
For teams already living in Aconex, IssuesID offers bidirectional defect sync with encrypted credentials and per-project configuration, so it fits into an existing document-control stack rather than replacing it.
The stack
For the engineers reading: the API is built on NestJS and Fastify, the web app is a React and Vite PWA with Tailwind, and data lives in PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM and row-level security for tenant isolation. Background jobs run on BullMQ and Redis, file storage is S3-compatible (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 or MinIO) using presigned URLs, and offline support is powered by Workbox service workers with IndexedDB via Dexie. It is a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo, deployed with the web app on Cloudflare Pages.
See it in action
IssuesID is live now. You can explore the platform at issuesid.com, or request a demo to see how it fits your projects.
If you have a defect, inspection or quality process that still runs on spreadsheets and camera rolls, this is the kind of platform we build. Get in touch to talk about a custom build of your own.
