Finding your way around
Every page in SmarteBuild is laid out the same way. Learn it once and you will never be lost in a module you have not opened before.
The module menu
Section titled “The module menu”The first entry, Dashboard, is where you land after signing in: your recently opened projects, this week across every job, the next claim dates and a handful of charts. See The Dashboard.
Down the left. Company-level entries sit at the top: Dashboard and Projects List. Below them the modules are grouped in the order you meet them on a job, and each group opens and closes with a click:
| Group | Modules |
|---|---|
| Pre-construction | Leads, Project Settings |
| Estimating | Documents, Take-Off, Cost Centers, Bill of Quantities, Colour Selection, Tenders & Quotes, Purchase Orders |
| Construction | Variations, Progress Claims, Expenses, Schedule & Booking, Site Diary, Timesheets, Checklists & Safety, Defects, Messages |
The group holding the page you are on is open when the page loads; the others stay folded so the menu stays short.
Some of these may be greyed out or carry a padlock — see What is in each plan.
The hamburger button at the top left collapses the menu when you need the width, which is worth knowing on a wide Bill of Quantities.
The top bar
Section titled “The top bar”Across the top, from left to right:
- The page title, which tells you which project and costing you are in. Check it when a number looks wrong — being in the wrong costing is the most common explanation.
- Activities (the pulse icon) — notifications and recent activity across your projects.
- Integrations — Xero settings, and connecting Outlook or Office 365.
- Your account menu — your profile, the Help Centre, the Admin panel if you are an administrator, and Logout.
The Admin panel
Section titled “The Admin panel”Your plan, your invoices and your card live in a separate site, not in the module menu — which is why people hunt for them. It opens from your account menu, and only administrators can get in.
That is where you change plan, update the card, download invoices and cancel. See The Admin panel.
Choosing a project and a costing
Section titled “Choosing a project and a costing”Most modules need to know which job you mean before they can show you anything. Open one without a project selected and you get a “Select a Project to open” screen.
Modules that work at the costing level — Bill of Quantities, Take-Off, Cost Centers — will then ask you to Select a Costing. If that surprises you, read Company, project, costing; it is the hierarchy asking which priced version of the job you want.
Once you have chosen, SmarteBuild remembers. Moving between modules keeps you in the same project and costing until you change them.
Project filters
Section titled “Project filters”The Project Filters panel narrows the project list down to the jobs you care about — by status, by client, by who is on the team, by date. It is worth setting up properly if you carry more than a dozen live jobs, because it applies everywhere the project picker appears.
List views
Section titled “List views”Several modules come in two flavours: a detail view for working on one record, and a list view for seeing everything at once.
Look for the floating List View button at the bottom right of a detail page — on Purchase Orders, Progress Claims, Variations, Expenses, Tenders and Quotes. It switches you to a grid of every record in that module, which you can sort, filter, group and export.
Going the other way, clicking a row in a list view opens that record in the detail view.
Column pickers
Section titled “Column pickers”Some grids let you choose which columns you see — Colour Selection and the Projects list among them. Look for the column or settings icon in the grid header. Your choice is remembered against your login, so it follows you between sessions without affecting anyone else.
Getting help
Section titled “Getting help”The Help Centre link in your account menu opens this site at the article for the module you are currently in.