Free toolbox talk PDFs, and what they leave you with.
There are hundreds of free talks online, and plenty of them are good. If you're printing one every Monday and it's working, keep doing that. This page is about the part that comes after the talk.
Side by side
This is what you get from each, once the talk itself is done.
| Free PDFs | Tailboard | |
|---|---|---|
| The talk itself | Hundreds available free, on most topics | Over 120 topics written for nineteen trades, English and Spanish. |
| What it costs | Nothing. | From $29 a month; most start on Company at $89 for six user accounts. Unlimited crew either way. |
| Getting it to the crew | Print it, or read off your phone. | Send a link, or read it off your phone. |
| Proof it happened | A sheet of paper with signatures on it. | Every signature is recorded on the meeting as it is given. |
| Where the record lives | A truck, a binder, an office drawer. | Searchable, and one page with every signature on it. |
| Proving it wasn't written later | You can't. | Every record is sealed when it is filed, and anyone can check the code. |
| Knowing who covered what | You go through the binder. | Topics used in the last six months are grayed out automatically. |
| Certification expiration | A spreadsheet, if someone keeps it up. | Tracked per person, with an email before it lapses. |
| When a GC asks | Find the sheet, scan it, email it. | Email them the record, or send the code they can check themselves. |
Where the free ones win.
They cost nothing
If you run three people and everyone is in the same truck every morning, a printed talk and a clipboard are a perfectly honest system. Paying for software to replace it would be foolish.
There are more of them
Free libraries run to hundreds of topics. Ours is over 120, plus whatever you write yourself on Company and Fleet. If you need a talk on something unusual this week, the free libraries will have it and we might not.
Nothing to sign up for
There's no account, no card, and no dashboard. Download and print. That genuinely matters if you only run a talk now and then.
They work with no signal
Paper works in a basement, an elevator shaft, or a site with no bars. Tailboard needs the crew's phones to reach the internet to sign.
The honest summary.
The talk is the easy part, and it's free. The hard part is being able to prove, two years later, that a specific person sat through a specific talk on a specific day - before someone got hurt. A PDF and a clipboard can't do that. That's the whole difference, and whether it's worth $89 a month depends on whether anyone ever asks you for it.
If a general contractor has never asked you for training records, and your insurer has never asked either, the free PDFs are probably enough. Come back when someone asks.
Read a full topic before you decide.
One of ours is on the home page, in full, with nothing held back.