Business Operating System · for businesses that move real things
Every day, facts about your business get typed, forwarded, screenshotted and re-explained on their way from the person who knows to the person who needs to know. That trip is the most expensive thing you pay for, and it never shows up on an invoice. BOSS HQ ends the trip. One app, one set of books, and every person who needs the fact is already looking at it. You know now, not in March.
By now the only real question is how you keep running the business without it.
BOSS HQ. We thought of everything, so you don't have to.
Two weeks, no card · No per-user fees · Set up in an afternoon · Your data in a file you can copy, any day
The problem nobody names
Not accounting. Not inventory. Not payroll. The thing every business pays for and nobody budgets is the friction between moving data, sharing it, analyzing it, and telling the manager, the crew and the vendor what it means. By now you feel it every Monday. Here is what it looks like in the wild, and what happens to it the day you sign off on the switch.
Hop 1 · The group chat
A customer complaint lands in a chat with 14 people in it. Three react with a thumbs-up. Nobody owns it. Two weeks later it is a chargeback.
Hop 2 · Monday morning
The POS exports a CSV. The bookkeeper types it in. Payroll gets the hours from a screenshot of the schedule. By Wednesday the numbers disagree and everyone is sure it is someone else's.
Hop 3 · The owner's inbox
Stock that does not add up, a customer 90 days late, a card on file about to expire, a bill that outruns cash. Each lives in a different app, so you find out when the accountant does.
Hop 4 · The vendor
Their statement, your bills, the credit they promised on the damaged pallet, the rebate you are owed for last quarter. Four facts, four places, one phone call that goes nowhere.
Hop 5 · The manager
The manager asks the bookkeeper, who asks the system, who emails a PDF, which is out of date by the time it is read. Analysis is a favor you request, not a screen you open.
Hop 6 · The audit
Somebody did. It was on a sticky note, or a text, or a nod across the counter. By now the register is short and the story has three versions.
The hidden bill
Researchers have been measuring this for years. The numbers below are theirs. It just is not labeled. The three situations after them are where the bill arrives all at once, with a calculator you can set to your own payroll. Set it, read the number, and decide whether you can afford another year of it. By now you know the answer.
| Trade | Owner pay, typical | Revenue, typical firm | Owner pay per hour | Revenue per owner hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT services | $114,000 | $1,400,000 | $44 | $538 |
| Plumbing | $95,000 | $1,480,000 | $37 | $569 |
| Electrical | $105,000 | $1,440,000 | $40 | $554 |
| Retail | $78,000 | $910,000 | $30 | $350 |
| Hospitalityrestaurants and small hotels | $80,000 | $750,000 | $31 | $288 |
| Five-trade mean | $94,000 | $1,200,000 | $36 | $460 |
Owners pay themselves about $36 an hour. The business turns over about $460 for every hour they work. Add the average 6% net profit a trade firm keeps and an owner's hour costs the business about $65 in pay and profit, which is the calculator's default. When a decision waits on the owner, what waits is the $460 side. Hours: 52 a week, 50 weeks, from the Wells Fargo/Gallup and NFIB owner surveys.
Set it to your business
Examples, not a quote. Every assumption is written next to its number.
Every week, quietly
$116,000 a year
12 people × 5.3 hours a week waiting, chasing and re-keying × 48 weeks × $38 an hour.
About $2,400 every week you stay on the old way. The trial is free. The wait is not.
In BOSS HQThe fact is entered once, where it happens, and everyone who needs it is already looking at it. The 5.3 hours go back to the work you hired them for.
The day they hand in notice
$138,450 for a key person
On a $65,000 salary: $21,450 to replace a typical worker (33%), $32,500 to $130,000 for a skilled one (50% to 200%), $138,450 for a key person (213%). Then 8 months before the new person is fully productive, and 42% of how the job was actually done left with the last one: which vendor to call, what that customer was promised, where the file is.
In BOSS HQThe promises are on the customer's record. The vendor terms are on the vendor. The tickets, notes, contracts, duties and who-does-what are in the system, not in a head. The replacement reads the record on day one.
Two weeks off the grid
$4,280 per absence
Ten working days away. Four people lose 1.5 hours a day waiting on a decision only you make (60 hours at $38). You spend 20 hours catching up at your own rate ($65). One job goes to the competitor who answered first ($700 margin).
In BOSS HQApprovals route to a named delegate with limits you set. Delegation chases the person who has it. The Daily Brief lands in your inbox at 6 am wherever you are, and the two-person gates keep the money honest while you are out.
Sources. Hours: Panopto and YouGov, Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report (2018), for the 5.3 hours and the 42%; McKinsey Global Institute, The social economy (2012), for the 19% and 28% of the week; Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine (2008), for the 23 minutes; shown on a 40-hour week. Replacement: Work Institute Retention Report, 33% of base pay; Center for American Progress, Boushey and Glynn (2012), 20% of salary for jobs under $50,000 and up to 213% for executives and highly specialized roles; SHRM, 50% to 200% of salary and about $4,700 direct cost per hire; Gallup (2019), one-half to two times salary; Allied Workforce Mobility Survey (2012), 8 months to full productivity. Owners: Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index (52 hours a week) and NFIB National Small Business Poll (median 50); owner pay from Glassdoor, Salary.com, Payscale, Indeed, Housecall Pro and Sera industry guides; firm revenue from U.S. Census Bureau SUSB, IRS Statistics of Income (6% net margin for trade contractors), Datto State of the MSP and POS Nation retail benchmarks. Ranges were averaged to one figure per trade; your numbers will differ, which is what the calculator is for.
What "Business Operating System" means
An operating system is the layer every program runs on, so programs do not have to talk to each other: they share the same memory. BOSS HQ is that layer for a business. Every module writes to the same ledger, reads the same people and customers, and leaves the same paper trail. Communication stops being a separate app, because the information was never anywhere else.
The competitor who answered the customer first already runs this way. That is why they answered first.
The sale is the ledger entry. The timesheet is the payroll. The delivery is the bill. The complaint is the ticket. The ticket is the invoice. Nobody carries anything from app to app, so nothing gets dropped on the way.
Fourteen subscriptions become one. And the real prize is not the subscriptions.
Double-entry, balanced or refused. Every module posts to it. There is no month-end close because nothing is waiting to be closed.
Switch on the trades you run. A yard, two hotels, rental property and a law practice can share one set of books and one login.
Roles decide what each person sees. Staff who clock in and read their schedule are free, without limit.
Need You flags, delegation that chases both sides, and the Daily Brief decide what gets attention today.
Documents, signatures, photos and proof live with the record they belong to, and can stay on a disk in your building.
2FA, breach-checked passwords, tamper-evident audit chain, sealed backups, and a read-only mode if the license lapses. Your books stay yours.
Ground-breaking, not ground-up
Features you only get when the books, the people, the jobs and the paper trail live in one place. Your competitors will have them eventually. The question is whether you have them first.
01
Hand a line from the Daily Brief to anyone. It reminds them, then reminds you, and the resolution comes back to the person who asked. No follow-up meeting required.
02
Reads every current MSA, SOW and SLA for a client and tells the tech whether the ticket in front of them is covered, out of scope, or billable. Tracks allowances, flags windows, and drafts the change order itself.
03
Ten accounting invariants run every night: unbalanced entries, orphan lines, overpaid invoices, sub-ledgers against the ledger, stock value against the shelf. A failure opens a flag with the rows, and closes it when the books are repaired.
04
Preview and rewind a batch of changes, or undo a single one, up to six months back. The "who changed this and can we put it back" question gets a button.
05
Continuous copies to a drive or NAS in your building, from every five minutes to monthly, integrity-checked before they count. Sealed copies need a passphrase only you hold. Ten-year archives readable without BOSS HQ.
06
Click Support and an AI assistant answers from the manual, using whatever model you choose. What it cannot solve becomes a ticket, routed to the manager with the fewest open escalations who is enabled for tier two.
07
Health and legal clients get a notice by email and the content behind their portal sign-in, with read receipts, recall and expiry. "Encrypted email" without the plug-ins.
08
Branded remote desktop, terminal and file transfer through a native agent on Windows, Linux and Mac. Local admin passwords rotate themselves. Client logins fill without the tech ever seeing them.
09
Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub and OpenTable orders settle to a platform receivable, facilitator tax stays out of your liability, and each payout reconciles line by line.
10
Every card presentation is recorded. A fallback swipe on a damaged chip is flagged. A card on file cannot be charged until the wording the customer agreed to is on file, word for word.
11
Rosters, SLA alerts, unannounced drills and dead-man checks prove that someone is actually watching, and score them on it.
12
A lumber yard sees yards and loads. A property manager sees tenants and units. A firm sees matters and trust. Same system, and it never sounds like it was written for somebody else.
13
Four home screens and four color sets, chosen per person: a phone-style launcher with folders, a command deck with a quick-action wheel, a keyboard workbench with a hotbar, or the classic dashboard. Dark and Night for the late shift.
14
From a managed Windows PC's page, a tech clicks RDP and sees the whole picture: edition, on or off, policy, Network Level Authentication, port, listener, firewall, who can connect. One click fixes each finding, and a connection test runs from that PC. Settings are backed up first and every change is in the audit log. Nobody drives out. We found our own forgotten port change on the first run.
15
Decoys no person ever touches, but bots and prompt-driven AI agents do. Touch one and the address is banned: 24 hours, then 7 days, then for good. The evidence is sealed in the tamper-evident audit chain, operators are alerted, and an FBI IC3 evidence file is one click away. Every customer gets it.
In action
Real screens from a demo company, no mock-ups. Click any one to open it full size, and check out the register.
Your BOSS HQ, your way
Every person chooses their own first screen and their own colors, and the choice follows them to any device. The sidebar and every page stay exactly where they are. A bookkeeper on a big monitor, an owner on a phone and a tech on a shared tablet can all run the same company and never see the same home.
The full list
Switch on what you run. Every module posts to the same books. Prices are per month, per company, and the whole suite never costs more than the cap.
A register that posts its own ledger entry, works offline, and reconciles against the card terminal. Gift cards, returns with an approval chain, loyalty, loss prevention.
Tables, checks, a kitchen display, printed menus, a floor map with a revenue heat map. Splitting a check and firing a course.
FIFO costing, multiple locations, serials and lots, bins, blind receiving, purchase orders, cycle counts, label designer, reorder planning.
Supplier price files, contract pricing, house accounts, rebates and billbacks, special pricing agreements, delivery routing.
Bills of material, build orders, work-in-progress and absorbed labor.
Fleet check-out and return, damage, utilization and revenue per unit.
Jobs from sold to signed off, sites, scheduling, SLAs, statements of work, photos and proof, on-site sign-off.
Budgets, milestones, AIA-style progress applications and retainage.
Tenants, units, rent roll, maintenance and owner trust accounting.
Reservations, folios, lodging tax, housekeeping, rate plans, calendar sync with Airbnb, VRBO and Booking.com.
Geofenced clock, auto-filled schedules, time off, commissions, US payroll, credentials, 941/940/W-2 worksheets, hiring.
Pipeline, promo codes with ROAS, loyalty with recorded consent, customer portal, tickets.
Loan and buy-now-pay-later partners (Klarna, Affirm, Wisetack and more) at the point of sale.
Ticketing, site visits, network audit, the Contract Alignment Engine, vault, Remote, endpoint agent, script library, hardware health.
Matters, conflict checks, time and rates, IOLTA trust, contract library and compare, court dockets, post-mortems.
Multi-company consolidation with eliminations, multi-currency with FX posting, financial ratios, break-even, working capital.
An honest comparison
Three products that are not really competing for the same job. The useful question is not which is best. It is which one was built for the business you actually have. The sure sign: it speaks your trade without a consultant.
One app, you own it
BOSS HQA complete business operating system for owner-run companies, across several industries at once. No per-user fee. Hosted and run for you; your data stays in a file you can copy out any day.
Modular ERP
OdooAn enormous catalog of apps you assemble into a system. Mature accounting, strong manufacturing, real eCommerce. Per user, per month, per tier, plus an implementation partner.
Workforce platform
RipplingEverything that happens to an employee, automated from one hire event. Exceptional at that, and not an accounting system. Per employee, per month, per module.
| Capability | BOSS HQ | Odoo | Rippling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Double-entry accountingReal ledger, balanced or refused | Built in | Built in | Syncs out to QuickBooks |
| Multi-company consolidationRoll-up with eliminations | Built in | Enterprise tier | No |
| Point of sale and restaurantScanner, drawer, floor map, courses | Built in | POS apps | No |
| Inventory at real FIFO costMulti-location layers, blind receiving | Built in | Built in | No |
| Time clock, scheduling, US payroll | Built in, geofenced | Country dependent | Built in, excellent |
| Payroll tax filing | W-2, 1099 and new-hire files ready to upload | Country dependent | Full filing service |
| Benefits and device management | Via your broker | Country dependent | Best in class |
| Hotel, property, construction billing, legal | Built in | Third-party apps | No |
| Managed IT servicesTickets, contracts, remote, vault | Built in | Helpdesk app | Device side only |
| Remote Desktop repair from the ticketCheck, fix and test RDP through the agent | Built in | No | No |
| Delegation that chases people | Built in | Activities | Workflow automation |
| Point-in-time rewindPreview and undo to a checkpoint | Built in | Restore from backup | No |
| AI attacker tripwireDecoys ban bots and rogue AI agents, sealed evidence | Built in | No | No |
| Manufacturing planning | BOM and build orders | Full MRP, PLM, quality | No |
| Online shop and website builder | Storefront | Both, and good | No |
| Your data in a file you can copyExport everything, any day, no ticket | One database file + sealed archives | Database dump | Export only |
| Cost of adding a user | Nothing | Another seat | Another seat |
So you can decide with the whole picture. For some businesses one of these settles it, and we would rather you know now.
Read the full comparison, including who should buy what. Competitor details are from published information at the time of writing; both change often.
Knowledge base
Every article says who does it, what it is, when and where it happens, why it matters and how, with screenshots of the exact buttons. Every tooltip in the app links to the article it came from. The manual opens inside BOSS HQ under Help, so it always matches the version you are running.
What it costs
Only the people running the business are counted. Staff who clock in and read their schedule are free, without limit. Add up what you pay the fourteen apps today. Then add the friction tax above. BOSS HQ costs less than either.
Your trade's bundle
$199–$549 / moEverything your trade needs, one location, five people on the books. Bundles are 10% under the modules bought separately.
The Suite
$399 / moEvery module, unlimited users and locations. The usual answer for an owner with more than one kind of business.
The cap
$999 / moNo single company ever pays more than this, whatever it switches on. Additional live companies in the same install are half price.
How it runs
Hosted by usWe run it, patch it and back it up. You open a browser. Updates roll out without taking you offline, and your books are one file you can copy out any day.
▸ Free trial of the Suite: two months with a card on file, two weeks without one. A guided setup asks about your trade and sets the system up to match. Import what you have, run it alongside what you use now for a month, then say bye to the rest.
▸ Change your plan yourself, any day, prorated. Withdraw a module and the unused part comes back as credit.
▸ If your license lapses, BOSS HQ goes read-only. Export, print and archive keep working. Nobody holds your books hostage over an invoice.
Before you go
Nobody buys an operating system for their business from a screenshot. Run BOSS HQ beside what you use now, through at least one month-end, and decide with your own numbers. By then you will know. By now you suspect.
Two months, card on file
60 daysThe full Suite, every module, unlimited users. Your card is charged only when the trial ends, and you get a reminder at day 50 and two days before, each with a one-click cancel. Cancel any day and nothing is charged. You take charge of the date; we only remind you.
Sign up free, 60 daysTwo weeks, no card
14 daysSame Suite, same everything, no card and nothing to remember to cancel. If two weeks is enough to know now, it is enough.
Sign up free, no cardEither way: import what you have, run it beside the old tools, and keep your data in a file you can copy out any day.
Referral program
Two programs, one rule: we pay on the modules a customer actually keeps, not on card processing or one-off fees.
Accountants, bookkeepers, IT shops, consultants. A recurring share of every workspace you bring in, for as long as they stay. Your own portal with clicks, signups, paid months and payouts. Payouts are reviewed by a human before they go, so you can see what you are being paid for. W-9 collected and 1099 produced in the portal.
Open the partner portalAny customer can send a referral link from inside the app. When the friend's first paid month clears, you both get a credit on the next bill. No forms, no waiting on a check.
Commission is calculated on the subscription net of tax, from the platform's own records, with clawback if a referred customer is refunded. Rates and terms are shown in the portal before you accept them, and you re-accept if the terms change.
Support
Click Support anywhere in BOSS HQ. Most questions end there. The rest reach a person who can actually fix it.
An AI assistant that answers from the manual and knows which screen you are on. Bring your own model: it works with any OpenAI-compatible chat API, not just one vendor.
Anything the assistant cannot solve becomes a ticket and goes to the manager with the fewest open escalations who is enabled for tier two. You see who has it and when it moved.
Need a person on your screen today? Paid support by the quarter hour, with a remote session started from a pairing code you read out. $39.99 per 15 minutes or $119.99 per hour, billed only for time used.
Get support nowSomething broken? A server error shows a reference code. Quote it and we see the request, the workspace and how many times the same bug has hit this week. Is it us or you? Check the status page.
Decide
Without BOSS HQ
The group chat fills up. The bookkeeper re-keys the weekend. A vendor calls about a credit nobody applied. You find out about the overdue invoice when the accountant does. The key employee who knows where everything is gives notice, and 42% of how the job gets done walks out with them. Same as last Monday. Same as next Monday.
With BOSS HQ
The sale posted itself. The delivery became the bill. The complaint is a ticket with a name on it and a clock. The Daily Brief told you at 6 am what needs you and what does not. Everyone who needs the fact is looking at it. You are running the business, not the paperwork.
The only real question is how you keep running it the first way.
Free trial of the full Suite. Import what you have, run it beside what you use now, cancel the rest when you are ready. No per-user fees, ever.
Contact us
Tell us what your business does and what hurts. We will tell you straight whether BOSS HQ is the right fit, and if another product fits better, which one. A straight answer, right now.
info@getbosshq.comCompany
BOSS HQ · Miami, Florida
Demo
Thirty minutes on your own numbers. Bring the three apps you hate most.
We run on it too
BOSS HQ runs on BOSS HQ. Our own books, payroll, tickets, email, partner payouts, sign-ups and the support desk behind this site all run inside the same app you are reading about. We're not only the president. We're also a client.
Before you go
You can try the whole Suite for two months with a card on file, charged only at the end with reminders first. Or two weeks with no card at all.
No thanks, I like flushing it