Most PI software was built for big agencies or law-firm investigations teams. If you're a one- to ten-person shop, it's overkill, overpriced, and still doesn't fit your workflow. We build the tools that actually do.
If three or more of these are true on a normal week, there's real time we can give back to you.
Notes in a notebook, photos in your phone's camera roll, documents in Dropbox, contacts in Gmail, hours tracked from memory at the end of the week. Pulling together a final report takes a whole afternoon.
You did the work — five hours of database searches, two phone calls, a 90-minute surveillance — but by Friday you can't fully reconstruct it. You round down out of caution and lose real money every month.
Half the calls you take are "any news?" from anxious clients. You don't have a clean way to give them a status snapshot, so every update is a 15-minute conversation that interrupts the actual work.
Field notes get typed up later — sometimes days later — with photos and video attached manually by timestamp. Court-ready reports take more time than the surveillance itself.
You know what real chain-of-custody documentation looks like, but for most cases the workflow is too cumbersome to bother with. Then comes the case where it matters and you're scrambling.
When you bring in a second investigator or an assistant, getting them up to speed on a case means a phone call and a folder share. Coordination is friction, and friction kills margins on shared work.
Several of these are direct adaptations of tech we already run in production — court-records ingest, voice-driven query, mobile field capture. The rest are scoped builds on the same stack. Pick one to start; first build is usually live in 4-6 weeks.
Same scraper engine we run for law-firm clients pulls court filings across Arizona Superior Court e-filing systems — useful for skip tracing, asset checks, litigation history, prior-criminal review, family-court background on a subject. Adaptable to PACER, county recorder portals, business-registration sites, and other HTTP-reachable public-records systems. We've tested it in production on cases with 150+ filings.
One command kicks off the dozen open-tab session you do today — court filings, county recorder, business registrations, FAA / boat / vehicle records, OSINT — and assembles the results into a single structured report per subject. Source citations preserved for every data point so the report is defensible.
Phone-first surveillance capture: tap to log an observation with auto-timestamp and GPS, snap a photo that's cryptographically hashed and bound to the log entry, dictate a voice note that gets transcribed. Sync to the case hub when you regain signal. Court-ready report generates with one click. Built on the same offline-first mobile-capture stack we use in production public-safety field apps.
One screen per case: client info, subject(s), retainer balance, hours-to-date, notes timeline, document vault, photo gallery, billable activity log. Everything in one place. Replaces a folder, a spreadsheet, and three other tools.
Ask your case file in plain English from a chat window, the CLI, or a voice assistant: "what did we observe at the Henderson location on Tuesday," "every photo of the silver pickup," "hours-to-date on the Garcia retainer." We've built this kind of natural-language interface over case repositories in production — saves real time when you're driving, on stakeout, or trying to brief a client by phone.
Templated case reports — surveillance summaries, background packets, due-diligence write-ups — auto-assemble from the field log and case hub. Photos and observations cross-referenced by timestamp. Defensible chain of evidence for every document, photo, and observation cited. Court-ready output, attorney-friendly format.
Each client gets a login. They see status, milestones, hours remaining on retainer, downloadable interim reports. Auto-emails when there's a real update. Time captured as you work auto-deducts from the retainer; refill request fires when the balance hits threshold. End-of-month invoice generates from the time log. Stripe / QuickBooks integration. The "any news?" calls drop ~70%.
Share a specific case (or specific assignments within a case) with a contracted investigator. Time-bounded access, redacted as you choose. They see only what they need; everything they capture rolls back into the master case file. Pay them off the same hour tracking that bills your client.
Our background is hands-on systems work — building applications used by public-safety dispatchers, building evidence and records workflow for sworn personnel, and integrating the back-office systems that small agencies rely on. The same mental model applies to PI work: most of the work happens in the field, billing is the difference between profitable and not, and the deliverable is a defensible report someone may need to testify to.
We're not pitching you on AI and machine learning. We're proposing to build the boring, specific, undramatic tools that quietly remove an hour from every case — the kind of software a working PI can describe in a sentence and use without training. If that's interesting, the next step is a 30-minute call where you describe your worst case-management moment of the last month and we'll tell you honestly what we'd build to prevent it.
Tell us what your week looks like and where the friction is. We'll come back within one business day with a concrete first-project idea — and an honest take on whether we're the right fit.
solutions@optimizedworking.com