Project details and permissions

The Project details tab holds the job’s own details; People controls who can open it and its estimates; and an open estimate’s Settings sets which cost code lists it uses.

Project details

Edit on the Project details panel opens the job’s name, code, site address and GST. All of them can be changed at any time.

The site address is four fields — street, suburb, state and postcode — and Find the site address fills them from Google. An older project opens with its suburb, state and postcode picked out of the second address line; check them and save once. The postcode matters beyond the paperwork: it is where the weather on the Schedule, Bookings and Site Diary comes from.

The job status, supervisor, house size and contract price belong to each estimate, not to the project — open them with Edit details in the estimate’s menu on the Estimates tab. Two are worth revisiting as a job progresses:

• Job status drives the status filter on the Projects list. Keeping it current is what stops your live-jobs view filling up with finished work.
• Contract price (inc GST) should be filled in the moment the job is won. Until it is, the claimed-against-revenue metric has nothing to measure against, and contract stages set as a percentage come to $0.

House size

Each estimate has a House size (m²). It feeds the $/m² figures — budget, contract and actual per square metre — and nothing else. No price anywhere changes because of it, but a rate per square metre is often the first number a client or a builder compares between jobs, so it is worth filling in.

People

The People tab lists the people in your company, with a switch for the job and one for each of its estimates. Switching one on gives that person edit access. Someone marked View only can open the job but not change it; Allow editing upgrades them.

A few rules protect you from locking a job:

• You cannot remove your own access — ask another editor.
• The last person who can edit a project or estimate cannot be removed. Give someone else edit access first.
• An estimate can only be given to someone who can already open its project.
• Turning off someone’s project access also removes their estimates on it.

A user who has been granted the module but not the project can open Projects List and see nothing. That is the usual explanation for “the module is there but it’s empty” — it is access, not the module.

This is also how you let an estimator work on the tender estimate while keeping the signed contract estimate to a few people, or hide a sales estimate from people who only need the production one.

Cost codes

Open an estimate and go to Settings: Cost codes lists your company’s cost code lists. Switch one on to use it on the open estimate; Other estimates shows which other estimates use it, and lets you stop one of them using it. Manage lists creates, renames or deletes the lists themselves - they are shared by every project - and its sitemap button edits a list’s levels.

Switching a cost code list off (here, or for another estimate) when some of the estimate’s items are filed only under it asks first. It says how many items and how much money. Those items stay on the job and keep counting in its total, but they’re in no cost code until you file them. The BOQ lists them under Not in a cost code, and you can switch the list back on at any time.

A list ticked Switch on for every new estimate automatically (in its Edit form) is switched on for each new estimate, so new jobs start with the right structure rather than an empty one. See Cost Codes.

The two kinds of access

These are separate systems and they fail in different ways. When someone cannot get to something, work out which one it is first:

Symptom	Cause	Fixed under
Menu item greyed out, no padlock	No module access for that user	Users
Menu item has a padlock	The company’s plan excludes it	Change plan in the Admin panel
Module opens but no projects listed	No project access	The project’s People tab, by someone who can edit it
Project opens but an estimate is missing	No estimate access	The People tab, in that estimate’s column