Your projects rely on a specific mix of gear: skid steers and backhoes for the site work, and a high volume of specialized assets like scissor lifts, compressors, welding rigs, and concrete pumps for the install. If a scissor lift is missing or a generator breaks down, your high-value labor is paralyzed.

When you rely on whiteboards and rental portals to track equipment, you lose sight of where your money is sitting. To protect your margins, you have to stop treating equipment as an isolated expense and start seeing it for what it is: Equipment is the engine that keeps your crews productive and your budget on track.

Top equipment challenges for the trades

Maximizing equipment uptime is a challenge – idle equipment, downtime for repairs, and tracking locations are even more difficult when you’re managing manually.  

1. The idle asset tax 

Nothing kills a project’s ROI faster than paying twice for the same resource. Many firms front cash for owned assets that sit idle in a yard or on one site, while another project team — unaware of what’s available internally — pays expensive rental rates for yet another lift or compressor. 

"If you have machinery on-site and a JCB is costing five or six hundred dollars a day, you have to make sure it’s not idle. You have to make sure you're getting the use out of it. The last thing you want to be doing is hiring a machine for two weeks and only using it for two days."

– Daniel Kavanagh, Senior Solution Specialist, Procore Technologies

Companies pay an “idle tax” when a machine sits unused for days because of a scheduling shift, but the office keeps paying the daily rate because they have no eyes on the field.

Without real-time utilization data, you're throwing money away on rentals you already own or don't currently need.

2. Reactive maintenance and financial blind spots 

A shop manager might know when a skid steer needs service, but if that data doesn't reach the PM, you’re headed for a disaster. When maintenance is reactive, a mechanical failure on a concrete pump during a critical-path pour doesn't just cost a repair fee — it can cost you an entire day of crew labor. 

With rented gear, a lack of oversight leads to "re-rental" fees and damage disputes because there was no digital record of the machine’s condition when it arrived or left the site.

3. The jobsite scavenger hunt 

For trade contractors, time is your most expensive resource. Too much of it is wasted on scavenger hunts, calling around, or driving between sites to find a specific bender, loader, or testing rig. Without location visibility, accountability disappears. 

Too often, missing equipment is only "found" after you've already paid for a last-minute, premium-priced rental to fill the gap.

“Being able to track assets is critical. Where is that machinery at any one time? Where is it going next? I don't want that machinery sitting in the yard for six weeks. I need it being used.”

– Daniel Kavanagh, Senior Solution Specialist, Procore

Total asset visibility with Procore

connects your gear directly to your project schedule and labor. It helps ensure every machine – from the largest loader to the smallest compressor – is in the right place and ready to work.

  • 100% utilization certainty: By pulling GPS and telemetrics data from providers like Caterpillar, John Deere, and Samsara directly into Procore, you see exactly what your assets are doing. You can plan equipment and labor side-by-side, helping make sure your owned gear is fully utilized before you sign another rental agreement.

  • Predictive maintenance & machine health: Stop waiting for things to break. Procore gives the office and the field a shared view of maintenance logs and rental return dates. You can plan service around the project schedule, helping prevent downtime from halting a critical install.

  • Tailored accountability: Not all gear is managed the same way. Procore lets you add custom fields to track what matters to your trade. Whether that’s tracking hours on a high-value rented rig or assigning a specific specialized bender to the right foreman.

The force multiplier: connected resources

With Procore Resource Management, your equipment, labor, and material data are all tied to the project’s financials. When a foreman logs a few hours on a scissor lift or a skid steer in a Daily Report, that data flows directly into the budget. You can see the true cost of a rental or the overhead of an owned machine against a specific cost code, as it happens.

By having utilization, location, and your ledger all connected, you can identify the financial blind spots that plague trade contractors. You gain the granular job costing needed to help bid more accurately, protect your profit, and ensure that every resource on the jobsite is actually moving the project forward.

Ready to stop the guesswork and start optimizing your assets? Turn your equipment from a cost center into a strategic advantage

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