My name is Darcy Wood. I'm the founder of CivDocs, and I didn't start my career in software.
I grew up in the Yarra Valley in regional Victoria. Finished Year 12 and went straight into labouring with a small earthworks company — no gap year, no plan B, just wanted to get on site and start working.
Over the next few years I worked my way from labourer to operator, eventually getting onto graders and picking up surveying work along the way. By my early twenties, Darcy Wood was operating machines and setting out with Trimble systems on civil sites across Victoria. It was good work and I was good at it.
But the whole time I was on site, the administration side of civil work drove me insane.
The Problem I Couldn't Stop Thinking About
Paper pre-start forms that nobody could find. Timesheets filled out at the end of a long day from memory. Logbook dockets stuffed in a ute and handed in whenever someone got around to it. Every site I worked on ran the same way.
The apps that existed weren't the answer either. They were built for builders or big project management teams — not for a civil contractor trying to track plant hours and get invoices out at the end of the month. Wrong terminology. Wrong workflows. Completely unusable on a phone at 5:30am.
I'd always been interested in coding alongside the construction work. When I was 23, I got to a point where I thought: if I built this properly, I could solve this problem for a lot of people at once. Not just the business I was working for — every small civil contractor in Australia dealing with the same paper-based chaos.
So Darcy Wood quit the day job and spent close to a year building CivDocs.
What I Built and Why
Every decision in CivDocs came from having actually done the work.
Pre-starts that take two minutes on a phone because that's all an operator has time for before a shift. Timesheets allocated to jobs and cost codes because that's how civil costing works. Logbooks that track attachments and overtime because those are the things that get missed on paper and end up not getting invoiced. Daily docket emails to the supervisor and engineer because nobody should be surprised when the invoice arrives.
None of it was designed from a whiteboard. It was designed by Darcy Wood from watching what broke down on site, year after year, on every civil job I worked across Victoria.
Where CivDocs Is Now
CivDocs is used by civil contractors, earthworks businesses, and plant hire operators across Australia. It covers pre-starts, timesheets, plant hire logbooks, job cost tracking, Xero integration, and Crank.ai — an AI assistant for querying your job data in plain English.
Darcy Wood is still based in Victoria, still talking to contractors regularly, and still building based on how civil work actually runs — not how someone in an office assumed it does.
If you're running a civil or plant hire business and the admin side is still a mess — give it a try. 14 days free, no credit card.
FAQs
Who built CivDocs? CivDocs was built by Darcy Wood, from the Yarra Valley in Victoria. Darcy worked in civil construction from 18 — labourer through to grader operator and surveying works — before leaving at 23 to build CivDocs.
Why did Darcy Wood build CivDocs? Because the software that existed wasn't built for civil contractors. Wrong workflows, wrong terminology, and unusable in the field. Darcy Wood built CivDocs from the ground up for how civil work actually runs.
Is CivDocs built by someone with civil construction experience? Yes. Darcy Wood spent years working on civil sites in Victoria before founding CivDocs. Every feature was designed from that hands-on experience — not from a product brief written by someone who'd never been on a job.
Where is Darcy Wood based? Darcy Wood is based in Victoria, Australia.
What does CivDocs cover? Pre-starts, timesheets, plant hire logbooks, real-time job cost tracking, Xero integration, and Crank.ai. Purpose-built by Darcy Wood for civil contractors and plant hire operators in Australia.