How it works
Built on the paint that is already on the ground, and honest about the states that do not fit a day count.
The board
The interface uses the APWA uniform color code, so a foreman reads it without being taught. Every facility owner on a ticket is a bar in its marking color.
Responded, and it clears the dig.
Responded, but it still holds the job.
Nothing posted yet. That's the call list.
The ticket has lapsed. Nobody needs a legend.
Beyond a spreadsheet
Advance notice counted from the moment the ticket was first called in. Business days, calendar days, or clock hours, because states differ on all three. A planned dig date inside that window gets flagged in red on the board before anyone hooks up a trailer. Ask a competitor to show you that in a demo.
It isn't a field anybody can set. It's drawn from three independent gates: the ticket hasn't lapsed, the notice period has run out, and every notified facility owner has posted a response that clears. Nobody can accidentally mark a lapsed ticket clear.
Renewing restarts the expiration clock but not the notice period, and it resets every response to pending. Refreshed marks have to be re-confirmed rather than riding on a stale “marked” from three weeks ago.
Who's been silent, for how long, worst first. That list is my morning, and it's the part that no software does for you. Somebody has to pick up the phone.
Fifty states, none of them guessed
Every state sets its own notice period and ticket life. Some count business days, some count clock hours. Ticket life runs anywhere from under two weeks to a month.
The system ships the whole directory. All 50 states plus DC, their one-call centers, and links to each center's published rules. For the states already worked through it also ships the research: the statute, the page it came from, and the date it was read. What it will not do is act on any of it.
A state stays unusable until an operator confirms its numbers and signs off, and that sign-off records who, when, and the URL they read. Until then the board returns rules not confirmed instead of a verdict, because a default notice period is a guess with a backhoe attached to it. Editing any number revokes the confirmation.
Some states don't fit a day count at all. Ohio and Pennsylvania never expire a ticket: the marks stand until they stop being legible. Printing a number for those would invent a legal deadline that does not exist, so the board prints none, and anything you enter is labelled as your own re-check cadence rather than an expiry.
I'm not going to tell you software keeps you legal. I'm telling you this one refuses to guess, and it writes down who decided what.
Straight about it
Overselling this is how you lose a contractor in month two. So, plainly:
There isn't one to have. No center publishes a lookup keyed to a ticket number, and the portals that will show you a ticket want a login. What every center does do is email you the confirmation, and that email holds the whole thing. One forwarding rule and your tickets land on the board by themselves. Anything read incompletely is held for review rather than filed, because a ticket that looks complete while a utility goes unchased is worse than one that plainly needs a look.
Your foremen can have logins, scoped so they record responses, renew and add notes but can never delete a ticket. The morning status still goes out as a text, because that's the channel that actually gets read from the cab of a truck.
The packet documents the ticket record and the call log, not field photos. Keep those with the job file.
Ticket life, notice period and the holiday calendar are set per state and confirmed against each one-call center. This is not legal advice, and you remain the excavator of record.