# How OpsLight works | OpsLight Canonical: https://opslight.app/how-it-works/ > The five intake channels, the four modules, and the system of record. How OpsLight turns messy human messages into structured operations data, without an app to install. How it works # AI does 80% of the work. A human supervises the other 20%. Every signal that comes into your business, a property manager's voicemail, a sub's check-in text, an RFP forwarded from your inbox, a contact-form submission, flows through the same pipeline. Claude parses it. A real human tunes the classifier as your business evolves. Your Sheet stores it. Your morning briefing reads it back to you. The architecture ## Configured for your business, not configured by you. OpsLight runs entirely on infrastructure you already trust: your phone number, a Google Sheet, and Claude's API. There's nothing for your crew to install and nothing for you to maintain. A real human configures the classifier for your trade up front, then tunes it as your business evolves. ### Signals come in Twilio phone number Forwarded email Website form → ### The brain Powered by Claude API Hosted on Cloudflare Workers, no server to provision, no API key for you to manage, no cold starts. → ### Stored & sent #### Your Google Sheet The system of record. You own it. Append-only logs, never overwritten. #### Outbound email + SMS Owner alerts, daily Game Plan, monthly status emails, sent from your brand domain. The intake channels ## Five ways a signal becomes a structured row. Each channel takes raw human input, a voicemail, a text, a forwarded email, and turns it into a typed record with classification, urgency, and a callback target. ### Voicemail Property manager calls your Twilio number, leaves a voicemail. Twilio transcribes it. Claude reads it, identifies the building, the surface, the urgency, and writes a structured record. You get a text within 2 minutes if it's urgent. POST /voicemail ### SMS Same number, but as a text. Same parser, same Sheet. Useful for the property managers who never leave voicemails and the GCs who only ever text. POST /sms ### Inbound email Forward your bids@ or info@ inbox to OpsLight. Quoted replies, mobile signatures, "Sent from my iPhone" footers, all stripped before parsing. Auto-drops mailer-daemons and noreply senders. POST /email-in ### Crew SMS Your crew texts `IN nob-hill` on arrival and `OUT nob-hill polished, locked up` on departure. Sheet logs timestamps automatically. Owner-alert if anyone texts `ESCALATE`. POST /crew-sms ### Website form The "Request a quote" form on your site. Bot honeypot baked in. Routes by client. Falls into the same Sheet as voicemails, so a web lead and a phone lead are tracked the same way. POST /form-in The four modules ## Configured for your trade. Same engine underneath. Stone restoration, painting, glass, finishes, mechanical: every service trade has the same operational shape underneath the vocabulary. OpsLight's vertical configs adapt the field names and report templates. The engine stays the same. ### Intake Every voicemail, text, email, and form submission lands in your Sheet, structured, classified, routed. Urgency-tagged. Auto owner-alert on emergencies. ### Crew Tracker SMS check-in/out. Timestamps. Optional break logging. ESCALATE keyword for trouble. Daily field status pulled into the Game Plan automatically. ### Documents SOWs, change orders, lien waivers, photo releases, closeout packets. Auto-generated from your project Sheet. Brand-styled. Render to PDF and Word. ### Reports Daily Game Plan. Weekly digest. Monthly property-manager status emails. Quarterly capex review. Every report shows up where it's supposed to. The daily report ## The Game Plan. The single most-asked-for artifact in every trade business we talk to: a morning briefing that pulls together everything that happened yesterday and everything that's scheduled today. Printable. Forwardable. Run your morning meeting off it. From: OpsLight 7:00 AM · 2026-05-18 GAME PLAN: Coastal Stone & Surfaces · Monday, May 18 ───────────────────────────────────────── ### Active projects today (5) 1. Russian Hill landmark: Carrara floor, week 4 of 6 on schedule Crew: Ben + 2 · Today: south-quadrant polish, final pass · PM: Lauren Hayes (last contact 2d ago) · Next milestone: lippage QA Thu 2. Financial District tower: limestone facade, week 2 of 4 weather watch Crew: Phil (4) · Today: north face cleaning, scaffold day 3 · Rain Friday, buffer day built in 3. Mission District brass: solo, half day Crew: Mateo · Today: handrail polish + lobby brass · PM: Reggie Owens (yesterday) ### Today's open items - COI expires 2026-05-21 for Phil's crew needs action - Change order pending sig from Lauren Hayes (3 days) - New RFP from the Hotel hospitality account, response due Friday ### Crew roster today Ben team: Russian Hill (full day) · Phil crew: Financial District (full day) Mateo: Civic Center (half) · Wood team: SoMa hotel overnight, starts 9pm ### Week ahead Tue: Russian Hill lippage QA · Wed: Financial District scaffold day 5 · Thu: Hotel walkthrough · Fri: rain day, indoor work only Why we built it this way ## The philosophy. ### A spreadsheet is not a database. That's the feature. Every enterprise ops platform locks your data inside a system you have to pay to access. OpsLight's system of record is a Google Sheet, one you create, one you own, one you can export, audit, share, and walk away with. If you stop paying us tomorrow, your data doesn't go anywhere. It was already yours. ### If your guys won't use it, it doesn't exist. We've watched a decade of "operations platforms" fail in the field because they assumed contractors would download an app, log in every morning, and tag their location at every site visit. They won't. OpsLight only uses tools your crew already uses: their phone, text messages, voicemails. Nothing new to learn. ### The brain stays the brain. You keep the body. Claude does the parsing, the classification, the report drafting. But your phone number is yours. Your email forwarding is yours. Your Sheet is yours. Your website is yours. We're a smart middle layer, not a walled garden. ## Want to see this configured for your trade? A 20-minute walkthrough with a sample of your real intake. We'll wire up a Twilio number, set up a sample Sheet, and show you a real Game Plan generated from real signals. [Book a walkthrough](https://opslight.app/contact/)