Handbook / Running the job
Projects, stages and the timeline
Everything else on this page hangs off a project. It carries the contract, the site, the people and the history.
A project has two independent dials, and confusing them is the commonest mistake.
Status is administrative - is this job live at all. Stage is where the work has got to. A job can be active and still in preconstruction; it can sit on hold halfway through construction.
Status - is the job live
Stage - where the work has got to
The timeline
Two things sit on the timeline tab, and they do different work.
Milestones are the checkpoints you decide matter - contract signed, permit issued, demolition complete, rough-in passed. Anyone on the job can tick one off from their phone, and it records who did and when. A new project gets a sensible ten-milestone template; edit it to suit the job.
Underneath sits an automatic event stream: everything dated that has happened, drawn from the records themselves. Proposals issued and signed, work orders scheduled and closed, change orders approved, invoices sent, inspections passed. Nobody maintains it - it is the job's own history, read back.
The Harlow job is in construction, five of ten milestones complete, with thirty-four events on the stream - from the contract being signed in June to the drywall going up last week.
Open the timelineUndoing things
| What happened | The way back |
|---|---|
| Wrong stage | Click the right one on the stage bar. It is a label; nothing is locked by it. |
| Milestone ticked by accident | Untick it. The credit and timestamp are cleared. |
| Job cancelled that should not have been | Set the status back to active. Nothing was deleted. |
| Deleting a project | Everything on it goes: work orders, photos, logs, invoices. There is no way back. Cancel or archive instead unless it was genuinely created in error. |
Approval to move forward
A project can be submitted for approval - typically a lead ready to mobilise, or held work ready to resume. Everyone who can decide is emailed once, the request lands on the approvals board, and the decision - approve, or return with a note saying what has to change - is written into the project discussion with a name on it. Approving a lead makes it an active job in the same motion. A request and its decision are always two people.
Access: Viewing needs project access; changing status or stage needs project management.