Product walkthroughs

See the software doing the work

Screen by screen, on a real workspace: measuring a plan, sending a bid the customer signs, scheduling the crew, invoicing it and chasing what is owed. Every one starts with the short version, explains the words as it goes, and every picture is the software actually running.

10 walkthroughs

Estimating
Blueprint Takeoff: Measuring a Plan and Pricing It
Measuring off a PDF instead of a paper roll is normal now. What decides whether it was worth doing is whether the number you measured ever becomes a quote, a job and an invoice without anybody typing it again.
Take the walkthrough 8 min 6
Working together
Two People, One Takeoff: Multiplayer Blueprint Takeoff
Estimating is usually a job one person does alone with the door shut. That is not because it suits the work. A 200-sheet set and a Thursday deadline is obviously a two-person job. It is because the software only ever let one person hold the drawing.
Take the walkthrough 8 min 7
Bidding
From Estimate to a Bid the Customer Signs
A bid sitting unread in somebody’s inbox looks exactly like a bid you never sent. The fix is not a nicer PDF. It is knowing it was opened, and making saying yes take one thumb.
Take the walkthrough 7 min 3
Running jobs
The Job Pipeline: One Number From Sold to Paid
Most contractors do not have a job management problem. They have a re-typing problem: the same job lives in a spreadsheet, a calendar, a text thread and QuickBooks, and by Thursday the four disagree.
Take the walkthrough 8 min 4
Change orders
Change Orders, and the Gate That Stops You Invoicing Without Them
Change orders are rarely lost in a negotiation. They are lost because the job got billed at the original contract amount while the change was still sitting in somebody’s head.
Take the walkthrough 9 min 2
Getting paid
Invoicing, and the Screen That Tells You Who To Chase
An aging report tells you an invoice is sixty days late. It cannot tell you that one of them has been chased five times and another has never been chased at all, and those two need opposite things from you.
Take the walkthrough 7 min 2
Scheduling
Scheduling the Crew, and What They See on Site
The schedule is not the calendar. The calendar is where a job ends up. The schedule is the question of which crew has room on the 9th, and most software cannot answer it.
Take the walkthrough 6 min 3
Your team
What Each Person on Your Team Actually Sees
A platform where everybody sees everything is a platform where the crew can read your margins and the office can reassign your jobs. Roles are not a nice-to-have. They are the reason people will actually use it.
Take the walkthrough 6 min 4
Reporting
Reporting: Rep Production, the Customer Book, and the Audit Trail
Every platform has reports. The ones worth having answer a question somebody in your office was already arguing about.
Take the walkthrough 7 min 5
More than one trade
Running Two Trades Without Running Two Systems
Our own operation sells insulation and concrete to the same builders, out of one sales team. This is how that runs on one platform instead of two, and what has to be true underneath for it to work.
Take the walkthrough 9 min 4

Guides

The written half

Walkthroughs show what the software does. The guides are about the parts of the business it is doing it to — written from the same jobs, and useful with our product removed from them.

All guides

Glossary

The words, in plain English

Every term these walkthroughs use, and what it means on a job. Each one is also explained on the page that uses it — this is the whole list in one place.

Account: A company you work for. The builder, the GC, the homeowner.
Aging: How long an invoice has been sitting since you sent it, usually grouped into 30, 60 and 90 days.
Applied: The change has been approved and its money has been added to the job’s total. Until it is applied, the job is still worth what it was sold for.
Audit log: The permanent record of who did what and when. It can be read and added to. It cannot be edited or deleted.
Bid pipeline: The list of every bid you have out, grouped by what has happened to it so far. Your whiteboard, kept up to date by the software instead of by you.
Bill check: A standing check that compares the rows on each job to the amount that was bid, and reports the ones whose math does not hold.
Billing identity: The business name, letterhead, bank details and payment terms a bid or invoice goes out under. A company can have more than one.
Booked: Work that has been sold. A different question from work that has been finished, or billed, or paid.
Calendar routing: The rule that decides which calendar a job lands on when it gets scheduled, and who gets invited to it.
Calibrate: Telling the software how long one line on the drawing really is, so every measurement after that comes out in real feet.
Capacity: How much work a crew can take in a day. The board shows what is already on them against it.
Change order: Work added to or taken off a job after it was sold, with a price on it. Rock where the plan said dirt. An extra bathroom. Two more inches of foam.
Company trades: The list of trades your company sells. You set it once, and the rest of the platform is built out of that list rather than a fixed one.
Condition: The thing you are measuring, named in your own words: exterior walls, garage ceiling, the slab, a footing. Pick one and the software knows whether it is an area, a length or a count.
Contact: A person at that company, with the job they do on it: the one who approves prices, the one who pays the bills.
Contract arithmetic: Three numbers instead of one: what the contract was, what this change is, and what the contract becomes.
Converted: A signed bid that somebody turned into a real job with a schedule. Signing does not do this on its own. A person does it.
Crew: A named team with people on it. A person needs a name and a cell number to be on a crew, and most crew members never sign in to anything.
Dispatch board: The screen showing every crew and every day at once, with jobs drawn across the days they actually take.
Edit together: The other setup: everybody draws at once and the work shows up on each other’s screens as it happens.
Held: The job is finished and is not allowed to be billed yet, because a change on it is still unresolved.
Intake: The short set of questions that turns a signed bid into a real job on the calendar.
Itemized: The bid is broken into rows the customer can read, instead of one lump sum. Description, quantity, unit, rate, money.
Job total: What the job is worth right now: the amount it was sold for plus every change that has been applied. Every document reads this one number.
Line item: One row on the quote: what it is, how much of it, the rate, and the money. The same rows the customer reads on the bid.
Live cursor: Your teammate’s mouse pointer, on your screen, with their name on it. It is how you can tell what they are looking at.
Money at risk: The balance multiplied by how late it is. It is what decides who gets called first here, because $90,000 at forty days beats $400 at ninety.
Multiplayer: More than one person in the same takeoff at the same time. Borrowed from video games, and it means exactly what it sounds like.
No response: A bid that was sent and never answered. After six months the software moves it here so it stops counting as live work.
Note: A sticky note pinned to a point on the drawing. Text only, and it travels with the takeoff.
Online acceptance: A web page the customer opens from the email to read the bid and sign it. It works on a phone and needs no password.
Past due: How late it is against the terms you gave, which is a different number from aging. On net 30 those two are thirty days apart.
Pending approval: The crew finished it and the rep who sold it has not signed off yet. Nothing can be billed until they do.
Presence: The little colored circles with initials in them. One per person in the takeoff right now, and each person keeps the same color everywhere.
Promise to pay: The customer told you a date. The software holds the reminders until that date goes by, then escalates if nothing arrived.
Queued: Signed off and waiting on the office to send the invoice.
Quota: The sold-work target a rep is carrying for the month.
Receivable: Money you have billed and not been paid. Your AR.
Reminder ladder: The sequence of reminders on one invoice (polite, then firmer, then a final notice) that gets firmer as it climbs and then stops.
Role: Sales rep, operations, billing and office, administrator, crew member. It is the job somebody does, and the software follows it.
Scope sheet: The page the crew works from: what the job is, where, and what has to happen.
Seat: One person’s login, with a role attached to it that decides what they can see and do.
Share: Giving a teammate permission to open one of your takeoffs. Without it they cannot see it at all.
Sign-off: The rep who sold a job confirming the finished work is right before anybody bills it.
Stage: Where a job is right now: scheduled, done, waiting on sign-off, approved, ready to bill, billed, paid.
Stale: You told the crew a plan, and then the plan changed. The job stays flagged until somebody tells them the new one.
Take turns: The starting setup: one person edits and everyone else watches until somebody presses Take over.
Takeoff: Measuring a set of plans to work out how much material and labor a job needs. Same job you already do. This is it on a screen instead of on a paper print.
The pipeline: All your jobs, laid out by stage, so "where is everything" is a screen instead of a meeting.
Trade scope: Some people only work on one side of the business. A seat scoped to concrete does not see the insulation jobs at all.
Waste factor: The extra you order because you never place exactly what you measured. On concrete the software adds it to the quantity and says so on the line.

If a word on any of these pages is not on this list and you had to stop and work it out, that is our mistake and we would like to hear about it.

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