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About SmartBarrel

Time tracking from the field up. Built to end excuses.

“Necessity is the mother of invention” - Plato
We love construction. We build for the field. We don't f*** around.

Company History

In life, when the need for something becomes imperative, you are forced to find ways of achieving it. This is exactly how SmartBarrel was born.

Albert Bou Fadel, founder and CEO of SmartBarrel, worked in construction for over 10 years. His last job in construction (before turning to Construction Tech) was a project manager for a Glass and Glazing Contractor in Miami, Florida.

Tracking worker time in construction is not an easy task. While most people assume this is because the construction industry isn’t open to tech, it’s mostly because the traditional methods just aren’t designed for our industry.

When Albert was managing multiple projects across Florida with over 300 workers across the job sites, he tried every solution for better time tracking, including mobile apps,  fingerprint scanners, ID cards, and even went as far (and crazy) as iris scanners. 

With every solution brought to the field, there was always an excuse not to use it:

  • “I don’t have a phone” 
  • “My phone died” 
  • “There was no internet connection”
  • “The fingerprint scanner didn’t recognize my finger with gloves on and the union told me I shouldn’t remove PPE”
  • “I welded off my fingerprints” 
  • “No one registered my finger”
  • “I stood in front of the Iris Scanner for 30 minutes and then punched the device and it stopped working”

 

The excuses never stopped.

Albert’s team finally settled on a fob in/out hardware solution which seemed like it would be the easiest to use. No one had to have a smartphone;  a device was kept on site, and people had to just use their fobs to check-in/out. Finally, there would be no excuses.

Until one Friday, when Albert got a call from the GC yelling that there was no one from his team on the job site. He checked his time tracking app, where it showed he had 30 workers onsite. 

Albert drove 3 hours to the job site, where he found one lone worker sitting on a bucket with a keychain full of key fobs.

Despite catching this individual in the act, labor laws prevented him from taking action because the time tracking system indicated that the employees were on site.

So Albert decided to build his own solution: a time clock designed specifically for the conditions of a construction job site. That meant it needed:

  • A power source
  • It’s own Internet connection
  • An easy mounting system
  • An intuitive user interface
  • A verification method that actually worked on the job site

SmartBarrel - Founded 2018

Today, SmartBarrel is dedicated to creating technology that wins over the field. We understand that for the office and payroll team to get accurate data, the field has to be happy and actually using the solution.

SmartBarrel doesn’t require training for the field team. We know that workers want to come to the job site and just get to work, without wasting time on admin tasks. Every worker needs to be accountable to enter their own time. We provide them with an easy solution to do just that. 

The SmartBarrel device is durable, weatherproof, LTE-connected, and can be powered via electricity or solar. Our time tracking solution uses AI-powered facial verification to automatically verify employee times, coupled with a dashboard that provides foremen the ability to review time cards and assign cost codes. SmartBarrel has been designed from the start as an excuse-free solution.

Fun Fact: The original time clock was designed to be mounted on the top of a construction safety barrel, hence the name: SmartBarrel. Super Creative, we know 🙂 The inside joke was that we turned a “dumb” Barrel into a “smart” Barrel. 

Our Vision

Our Vision at SmartBarrel is to bring workers and companies together. We believe in providing a collaborative and transparent approach that will benefit both parties. We work hard to create a solution that construction will welcome.

Our Motto

Our motto is We Don’t F*** around.  We maintain the essence of construction when it comes to innovation. Anyone can build cool technology, but in construction, it has to be simple – because otherwise it won’t get used. We have made it our mission to transform the way time is recorded and managed on construction sites.

At SmartBarrel, we believe in being approachable, knowledgeable, and passionate about the work we do. Our aim is to build trust and understanding with contractors and laborers, providing them with reliable solutions that make a tangible difference in their day-to-day operations.

SmartBarrel in Action

We're on the ground at industry events, learning from contractors and sharing what works. You'll find us at AGC conferences, Specialty contractor trade shows, Regional construction events and Technology demonstrations

NECA 2025 - Chicago, IL
Procore Groundbreak - Houston,TX
IEC SPARK - Phoenix,AZ
ABC Construction EXPO - Orlando,FL
AWCI BUILD - Charlotte, NC
Tilt-Up Expo - Nashville,TN

Want to see SmartBarrel in person? Check our Events Page or book a demo, and we'll bring it to your jobsite.

Upcoming Events

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Meet the SmartBarrel Team

Built by construction people, technology experts, and folks who understand that great software requires both.

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Albert Bou Fadel

CEO & Founder

Albert is founder and CEO of SmartBarrel. He spent 10+ years in construction—co-founding a glazing factory and managing crews with clipboards, watching time theft drain projects. After testing every timekeeping solution and finding nothing that worked, he taught himself coding and electronics to build SmartBarrel. He’s obsessed with giving contractors clarity on labor hours. When you’ve dealt with the same BS for a decade, you don’t stop until it’s solved.

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Yana Tcharnaia

VP of Growth

Yana leads the company’s expansion across North America. She spent eight years at Jonas Construction Software, one of the industry’s leading ERP providers, working with hundreds of contractors – from small specialty trades to enterprise GCs—solving workforce management and job costing challenges. She’s seen what works (and what fails) when contractors modernize time tracking. At SmartBarrel, Yana helps contractors find solutions that actually work in the field.

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Britton Bauer

Director of Sales

Britton leads SmartBarrel’s sales team with over 18 years of experience building revenue engines and scaling sales organizations. With 7+ years in SaaS sales and leadership, he’s developed a track record of exceeding targets by focusing on what actually matters: understanding customer pain points and delivering solutions that solve real problems. At SmartBarrel, he helps contractors cut through the time tracking chaos and find workforce management that works in the field – not just on paper.

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Shiloh Hoggard

Director of Customer Success

Shiloh ensures contractors actually use the software and see results. She believes successful implementations bring people, process, and technology together on jobsites. Her team focuses on adoption, training, and solving problems before they derail productivity. Whether onboarding a 100-person crew or helping a contractor’s rollout, she’s driven by clients thriving because their tools work for them, not against them.

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Karen Tara Bourbié

Head of Marketing

Karen leads go-to-market strategy and growth initiatives. With 15+ years driving marketing for technology companies – from startups to enterprise organizations – she’s built GTM strategies, sales enablement programs, and demand generation engines that deliver results. At SmartBarrel, she focuses on solving business problems that matter: helping contractors find workforce solutions that add real value, not just features.

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From Jobsites to Dashboards

Founded in 2018, SmartBarrel serves specialty contractors managing operations from 50 to 5,000+ workers across North America.

What started as a solution for one frustrated PM managing 300 workers is now the time tracking system for mid-market and enterprise contractors running multi-site, multi-state operations.

The technology: Biometric facial verification. Built-in LTE. Self-learning AI. Zero training required. Easy to use software makes validating punches and assigning cost codes a 5 minute a day task.

The architecture: Zero-touch data flow from field to payroll to ERP. 70+ data points captured automatically. Real-time labor cost visibility across your entire operation.

The integrations: Procore, Foundation, Viewpoint Vista, CMiC, PowerBI – SmartBarrel feeds clean, structured data to the systems you already use.

Your crew performs an easy punch in and out. Your foreman spends 5 minutes a day on payroll. Your CFO sees real-time labor costs across all jobsites. Your PM sees accurate job costing without manual entry. Your IT team sees zero-configuration ERP integration.

That’s the SmartBarrel difference: engineered sophistication delivering field simplicity at enterprise scale.

See SmartBarrel in Action

Book a 15-minute demo and we’ll show you the time tracking solution that actually works on construction sites.

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Stop Fixing Time. Start Trusting It.

Watch the 4-Minute Product Tour and learn how to:

  • Stop buddy punching with AI-verified clock-ins
  • Easily manage cost codes and productivity
  • Automate per diem, mileage, and expenses
  • Approve time from the field and sync it with your ERP
  • See the Verified Time Framework™ thousands use to get 100% accurate time from the field