10 Ways To Use Katapult Pro Like The Team That Built It

You signed up, you went through onboarding, and now you're in a bit of limbo. Maybe there isn't a specific project on deck right now, or you're waiting to hear back on a bid. Katapult Pro is "set up," your team knows the basics, and the next big job is going to tell you whether the investment was worth it.

That in-between stretch is the best time to build the parts of your workflow that will be critical to success. Katapult has been around since 1991. We leaned hard into photo documentation and software as a way to do the work around 2008, and started selling Katapult Pro in 2016. Our engineering services team still runs all its projects through the platform. This list is our cheat sheet: ten ways our own team uses Katapult Pro, pulled from close to twenty years of workflow and software development, and everything I know about each one.

If you'd like the big picture first, see how Katapult Pro organizes pole attachment work from pre-design through the deliverable.

Why our team gets more out of the same software

Some of it is people. A lot of what we get out of Katapult Pro comes down to who we hire and how much we prioritize an owner's mindset. Our core values are create maximum value, people matter, growth mindset, and fair exchange, and you'll see each of them show up in the ten items below, usually as a reason we built something the way we did.

Some of it is custom implementation. Years of custom exports, configuration tweaks, dedicated testing/development resources, and expert staff.

The rest is about behavior. Most items on this list take something that used to live in a person's head, an inbox, or a forked spreadsheet and puts it on the job, where Katapult Pro can track it, act on it, and show it to the next person working on the project. Most of it takes real setup time in the Model Editor, and that time is easier to find during the calm before the storm.

1. Keep every job on the rails with Workflow Management

Workflow Management is in open beta right now, and it's available at every subscription level. At its simplest, it's an overview page that represents your projects by type, current status, timers, who they're assigned to, and any other attributes you care about. Underneath that page is a project management tool where you set up a specific workflow for each scope of work.

Here's what one scope can look like for an OSP engineering firm doing data collection through permit submission for a pole owner in the Midwest. The job comes in from an attacher, maybe an internet service provider, a cable company, or an ILEC, and they send you a route. You upload that reference file and turn it into nodes on a map, then pre-design it based on where you think you'll need to add guying, cross the street, or go underground. Then you assign it for field collection, collect it, and upload the photos. Then the photos get processed. For us that's our photofirst team, who can process and calibrate Katapult Pro photos faster than basically anybody alive. (It isn't hard to do, but it takes practice to gain mastery and speed.) Then you extract the heights, propose the new attachment, and get the deliverable ready. That last stretch might be a custom QC step, generating a specific deliverable or map print, and uploading it to the pole owner's online portal.

Every one of those steps ends in a handoff, and handoffs are where work gets dropped. The field and the office are often disconnected, and sometimes the people processing a job are remote. A workflow puts each status and each handoff on the job itself, with timers and attribute changes that fire as it moves, and it logs the times. We use that log to answer so many questions. We did the spreadsheet thing, and we did the Monday.com thing. For work in progress, we need it all linked, and we think our customers do too.

Workflow Management has become a big part of how we keep up with billable requests, like customers who want a custom export or deliverable. It's also the engine that runs our joint use management platform, and managing joint use is all about keeping up with timelines, making sure things don't get dropped, and answering status questions somewhere other than an email client or a chat thread. You can do the work without leaving the application, or know you don't need to be in it and that you'll get an email when it's your turn to check again.

Each status gets action buttons that change with the status, so people only see the next valid move. Statuses can run actions automatically as a job enters them, like sharing the job with a contractor, setting an attribute, starting a timer, or sending an email, and access for outside contractors can change status by status. Start from the default data collection and engineering design workflows. Our getting started guide for Workflow Management recommends trying them in a throwaway sandbox model first, because importing a whole catalog into a model your team uses every day can overwrite attributes and tools on live jobs.

Our recommendation is to set up a clear workflow before you need it. Or take an existing process you think is on the rails, before you start having issues or dropping things, and codify it with custom statuses and custom logic. Then see where you can add more value for your customer, or just lower your costs because nobody is digging through email or forked spreadsheets. For a look at this at scale, read how SQUAN configured workflows for more than 150 users across clients and thousands of poles a month.

2. Track actions to know whether you had a good week

There's a difference between attribute tracking and action tracking. Attribute history records every change on a job: what changed, who changed it, from what, to what, and when. But a specific attribute on your job isn't always going to tie directly to what you invoice for. An action is usually tied to a step, or a combination of steps, that shows something has actually been done.

Go back to the steps in that workflow. Say you invoice for simple make ready, complex make ready, and a PE stamp. You might not have attributes explicitly called any of those things, and even if you did, you'd want to run a custom action report to see what you'll be able to invoice when your jobs close. Katapult Pro doesn't do your billing, but an action report tells you what's done and ready to bill.

We've used Action Tracking for a long time to balance two questions every week: whether we did enough work to make the week a win, measured by revenue per hour worked, and whether we invoiced enough. Say your crews field 20,000 poles in a week. That might theoretically be enough revenue to make the week a win, and it's good progress, but nothing is ready to deliver yet. Flip it around: if all you did was deliver 20,000 poles, and nobody fielded, processed, or called make ready on anything new, that's a great week for invoicing and a bad week for the invoices you need a few weeks from now.

We hold those two things in tension on purpose, and it's part of our secret sauce. We want to know we worked hard enough this week and tied up enough bows on finished work to get paid. It's about cash flow. Cash flow was huge in the early days of our business, and measuring it in the system is one of the ways we avoided taking on investors. It's one of the reasons Katapult is employee-owned today.

You set up actions on the Project Management page. Each configuration applies to the job models you choose and can be filtered further with custom logic. Each action fires off a job or node attribute, either when it hits a specific value (an "Extracted" action when someone checks Done on a pole) or whenever it gets any value, and you decide whether a repeat overwrites the first action, prompts the user, or records every time. Because actions are built on attribute history, you can also backfill them over a past timeframe, so a configuration you build today can still show you last quarter. The complete guide to Action Tracking covers every setting. We also use it to recognize people for their week's work, with one caution: people who take on slow, messy cleanup work look less productive on a weekly count, so use the numbers to start conversations and don't rank people by them. Our guide to attribute history and Action Tracking goes deeper.

3. Use Feedback to resolve issues where they happened

Feedback is in-app messaging. You open a thread on a pole, on an attribute, or on a tracked action, and you assign other users in the system, who click a notification in Katapult Pro and jump straight to the thing you're asking about. We use it for PE review and for questions between designers and fielders. It's an unbelievable way to resolve issues asynchronously without ever leaving the platform.

If you aren't using Feedback, you're missing a way to strengthen communication across your team and tighten the feedback cycle for new staff. A PE or an EIT can do random sampling and performance checks on new designers, and on senior designers too. Redlines often get addressed this way. When you want somebody to look at several designs, being able to pull them to the exact photo, the exact attribute, and the exact pole you're wrestling with is enormous.

We'll be honest: we launched Feedback poorly when it first came out. It remains fundamental to the way our team uses the system.

Feedback comes in two kinds. A message is an FYI that asks nothing of anyone, and an issue is an action item that stays open until someone resolves it. When you leave feedback on a tracked action or an attribute change, the person who did that work is pulled into the conversation automatically; anywhere else, you tag them with the @ symbol. Everyone's threads collect in a Feedback widget on their Home page. Before you roll it out, agree as a team on who resolves issues and when they get reopened. The Feedback manual walks through the full flow.

4. Learn your data structure and let custom logic do the work

Katapult Pro has a custom logic editor embedded in a lot of different places: map styles, pole filtering, custom QC, and Workflow Management, among others. It's almost like coding. Our manual compares it to building functions in Excel, and if you have developers on your team, or people who are technical and have worked in databases, they're going to excel here. It lets you write if-then statements that decide what displays, what triggers what and when, and which data you pull for a specific deliverable.

There's a lot of power in it, but you do need a solid understanding of the data structure. Once you have that, you'll get a ton of value out of a system that is, at heart, presenting data in different ways.

I'm convinced one of the reasons Katapult is successful is that we have data geniuses. The way they think about data structures and solving problems so often comes down to a decision tree, or a way to represent the data that other people haven't thought of. So when there's a problem and we're trying to figure out the scale of it, or how to estimate it, there are quick ways in the software to filter down, sort, and trigger actions and data checks based on that structure.

Statements are built from four kinds of blocks: expressions like Equal or Count If, data blocks that pull values from the job, literals for fixed values, and procedures that break a long statement into named steps. A good first exercise is one rule your team currently checks by eye, like a pole with no SCID. Our Custom Logic Editor manual covers each block type with examples.

5. Tell the story on the map with map styles

Map styles are how you represent your data on the map. You can upload custom SVG icons and build custom line styles, but even with the built-in options in the Model Editor, there's endless opportunity for telling a story visually.

People in our industry are already fluent in this. Almost everyone in GIS-related work, and especially in poles, pole attachments, and construction, is used to looking at symbols on a map. It's an abstract concept for almost everybody else in our lives, but those of us used to aerial imagery, 3D models, tombstones, and CAD prints read a map the way other people read a paragraph. Size, styling, and color give you so many ways to point your client, your team, leadership, contractors, vendors, and construction teams to where their focus needs to be.

Styles can be driven by any attribute in your model, and with custom logic you can style by combinations of them. The example in our Map Styles manual marks addresses as verified or unverified and as residential or commercial in the same layer. You can save a style as a template, set a default style for a job model so every new job opens with it, apply a style to a whole folder of jobs, and use the Calc MR Violations button to update map styles in bulk during make ready.

Most of this is easier to set up between projects than in the middle of one. Our team configures workflows, actions, QC modules, and map styles for customers through continuous improvement hours, so the way your best people already work ends up built into your model. Book a call with our team or read how continuous improvement hours work.

6. Extend Katapult Pro with the API

I'll admit the API is not my area of expertise. But in the post-agentic world we're living in, you can pull data out of Katapult Pro with the API and then do whatever you want with it. If you want to work with Katapult Pro data in an app you made, in a database you have, or in an external business system, you can. And if you need to take action in an external system but never want to leave Katapult Pro, there are ways to do that through map buttons and other tools.

Our introduction to extensibility is written for people with little or no API experience. Add the API Resources widget to your Home page and you'll find links to the documentation, guides for building your own web tool on a hosting service like Render or Cloudflare, and a place to test API calls against an example job. The API widget generates your personal key, and your company admin grants API access. From there you can build map tools that run an API call, open an endpoint in a new tab, or show it in an embedded window, and you can add custom pages to the App Tray that link to the next step of your workflow, inside Katapult Pro or out. The full API documentation lives on GitHub, with version 3 current. Your GIS stays the system of record; Katapult Pro is the work-in-progress layer between the field and your enterprise systems, and the API keeps the two in step.

This is going to be a key differentiator. A lot of teams across the country use Katapult Pro, so what you do differently, what you do outside the system, and what you connect to your own external systems is going to matter more every year.

7. Do more of the process yourself, including pole loading

One of our biggest clients is an IOU in our backyard. We started by providing field data collection and data processing for them, and over time have taken on more and more of the pole attachments engineering process. Today, we rarely do fielding on its own. We want the pre-design and the fielding and the back-office design and the make ready and the pole loading and design package entry and the post-construction inspections, too.

As a vendor for IOUs, we think solving one problem for a utility, especially a messy one like pole attachments, power make ready, or right-of-way permits, sets you up to be the vendor they call when they have another issue. There's also an intensely practical piece. If you have to subcontract part of the work, you lose a lot of your margin there, and when you keep it all together, you get to build on your own efficiencies. You take on more liability and more responsibility, but you get all of the pie.

We see this in some of our exceptional customers who even have their own construction teams. Construction is volatile and risky enough that we've chosen to keep it out of our own workflow. We dabbled in it as a younger company and decided engineering and design packages were our limit. So when we say turnkey, we don't mean we're sending a bucket truck. We mean we'll tackle everything from pre-design through pole loading and packages.

Integrated pole loading is a big part of why that's practical. We put it in every engineering design make ready license because we don't want you paying $25, 500, or $1000 more per seat to run loading. You know what per-seat software costs, and you know the workarounds: a shared desktop, remoting into the one machine with the license, deciding who gets a seat. None of that behavior is good, and you end up loading poles fewer times. We want lots of people at a company running loading analysis, looping someone else in through Feedback when they need help, and growing. That's growth mindset. Nobody should have to graduate to seeing the PLA results. You have access to everything, and as you get exposure and work alongside a project PE or a senior designer, more of it makes sense and you can do more of it.

The engine runs in real time as you design, calculates ruling spans automatically, and can use specs imported from a SPIDAcalc client file or an O-Calc Pro catalog. On those projects where the client hasn't accepted IPL results yet, our team uses integrated loading as a fast feedback loop during design and exports to the owner's tool for the deliverable. How to get pole loading right in Katapult Pro covers both setups.

8. Train and certify more of your team

When we started building a certification program for outside companies, the goal was our vendor list. The vendor list is where we direct people who have work or are looking for it, because it's really hard to refer firms without playing favorites and becoming a kingmaker. A pole owner in Texas reaches out and asks if we know anybody who can do power make ready. We love working with a lot of the firms we support in Texas, and even if we listed ten, we'd still leave out some great ones. So the Katapult Pro vendor list is a place where companies opt in and show they've cleared a minimum bar for using the software. We can't vouch for a firm's safety program or its people. We can say they've demonstrated they understand the software mechanics and how to do the work in the system.

When we launched the program, we stress tested it by having every Katapult employee go through it. You might be surprised to hear there were people at Katapult who didn't know how to use Katapult Pro at all. That turned out to be the real value: every employee's ability to interact with and solve problems in the platform went up.

Everyone on our team knows how to use Katapult Pro at least well enough to do their timesheets, because we do our timesheets in Katapult Pro. That lets us see revenue, profit, and units per hour on our projects, and a lot of our company-wide metrics come from hours reported, especially overtime. It's one of the ways we keep operations tight and projects financially healthy.

There's a huge benefit to having lots of people on your team who know how to do lots of different things in the platform, because that's how you increase revenue per hour worked: more people who can do more hard things. Our options include the three-day OSP Field Bootcamp in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, which we originally built to get our own new field hires productive, the OSP Office Apprenticeship for the back office, on-site training built around your own projects, and self-paced training that's free for every user. On-site training starts with a diagnostic of where your team is and what problems you're facing, then covers the tool mechanics, then maps those tools to your actual scope of work. If you want us to support your training team, we'd love to do that. Katapult Pro training, from new scope to healthy rhythm lays out every format side by side.

9. Let QC hand a person the five things that need a human to look at them

QC can happen at every step. With data sanitization steps built into Workflow Management, it's easy to run QC as you advance each step of the process. Custom QC comes down to knowing enough about the data you're supposed to hand off to flag the situations where somebody needs to double check.

Computers are very good at looking at a massive amount of data and saying, we've got an issue here, or we didn't expect this here. So use the logic editor, make mapping buttons that run QC, or utilize QC checks built into Workflow Management to find ways to make sure you don't have a human being looking at a million pieces of data. You want a human looking at the five things that came back with an error from the QC module.

In the Model Editor, a Quality Control module has a warning type (job, node, connection, or section), the warning text your team will see, an optional filter, and a warn condition written in the Logic Editor that fires the warning when it's true. Keep the rules sharp, because a module that throws forty warnings on every job teaches people to close the window without reading it. A good source for new rules is your Feedback history: if the same issue gets opened twice, it's probably a QC rule waiting to be written. We can help you build that, or you can build it yourself. The important thing is that you're finding a way to do it.

10. Use map prints to hand permit offices the format they expect

My last category is map prints, especially for permits. One of the things we've found is that a lot of right-of-way departments, like a DOT or a railroad, expect data in a specific format. Finding ways to take your existing pole attachment or make ready job and turn that data into a map print you can submit or upload is huge. Our guide to pole permitting covers where permits sit in the attachment process.

Workflow Management does a lot of the permit tracking. It makes sure you don't drop permits, that you're reminding the right entities at the right interval, that you're predicting where some of the hiccups are going to be, and it can show you visually where the permit hangups are in your buildout. The print itself comes from the Map Print Generator, which can produce more of a construction-style print using your project and your map styles, which is another reason map styles matter so much.

Map prints are a great way to take your most current, up-to-date workflow and translate that data into a cartographic format. Some of the third parties you work with, like contractors, vendors, and permit reviewers, are used to looking at a CAD print with tombstones, and a good map print meets them there.

The Map Print Generator turns a job into a multi-page, print-ready PDF package. You draw print areas on the map, one per page, and each page gets your base map, nodes and connections, a legend, a scale bar, and a title block with whichever job attributes the reviewer needs. You can apply a Saved View and a map style that's separate from the one your team works in, seed annotation callouts filtered with custom logic so only the relevant poles get them, and add your logo from the Files section of the Model Editor. Optional pages include an overview sheet of every print area and a node details table after each map page listing SCID, lowest power, highest comm, and any attributes you add. When a department expects its own sheet layout, SVG masks let you rebuild the whole page around your template; they're enabled per account, so ask support to turn them on. Save each configuration as a template and it's available to your whole company. We'd build one template per permitting audience, because a railroad packet and a municipal packet shouldn't look the same.

Frequently Asked Questions About Getting More From Katapult Pro

Is Workflow Management available on my subscription?

Yes. Workflow Management is in open beta and available at every subscription level. A company admin turns it on under Company Options on the Project Management page, and the Workflow Management section then appears in the Model Editor.

Does Katapult Pro handle billing?

No, Katapult Pro doesn't do billing. Action Tracking reports show which steps are complete on each job, which tells you what's ready to invoice in whatever system you bill from. We can always help you build a custom export for invoicing.

Do I pay more per seat for integrated pole loading?

Integrated pole loading is included in every engineering design make ready license, so there's no added per-seat charge for running loading analysis. Anyone on your team with that license can load poles as often as the design needs.

How do we get on the Katapult Pro vendor list?

Your team completes Katapult Pro certification, which shows you understand the software mechanics and how to do the work in the system. Certified companies can opt in to the vendor list that pole owners and primes check when they source work.

The best time to plant a tree...

If you'd like help picking the one that'll matter most for your team, book a call with our team and bring a recent project. If you'd rather start on your own, the Workflow Management getting started guide is the place to begin.