Commercial Gasket Services — software for a trade that runs on paper

Commercial Gasket Services replaces the worn rubber seals on commercial refrigeration doors — walk-ins, reach-ins, every major brand. It is an unglamorous trade with a specific property that makes it interesting to build software for: the work is measured, not looked up.

Someone stands in front of a cooler with a tape measure, writes numbers on a sheet, and those numbers become a part that either fits or does not.

That sheet is the whole problem. It is handwritten, it is measured in fractions rather than decimals, it lives in a van, and everything downstream — the cut list, the quote, the invoice — is re-keyed from it by hand at least once. Every re-keying is a chance to turn a ⅝ into a .625 into a gasket that does not seal.

The public surface answers the customer's version of the question: order the exact gasket for a specific unit, or get matched with someone who comes out, inspects, and installs. Behind it runs the part that makes the business work:

• Work orders and a live cut plan — the cut list generates from the doors that actually need gaskets, parts get marked fabricated, and stock draws down as they do.
• Shop units, not decimal units — measurements go in as fractions, the way they are taken. Making the software speak the trade's arithmetic is cheaper than teaching a technician to convert.
• Estimates and invoices on the same spine, seeded from the same doors, so a quote and the job it came from cannot drift apart.
• A field app for capture on site, running on a real phone as a release build rather than a demo.
• QuickBooks stays the books. Invoices are mirrored, not replaced. A field tool that quietly becomes an accounting system is a field tool nobody can audit.

The test for any of this is not whether a clean demo works. It is whether a real, messy, hand-drawn job survives the round trip into software and back out as something a shop can cut from.

Live at commercialgasketservices.com.