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Quick tour

The four screens you will actually live in, and what each one is for.

In short

Four screens carry almost all the work: the job list, the budget, the inbox, and project costing. This is what each one is for.

You do not need to learn the whole app. Four screens carry the daily work, and the rest of the guides are detail you can come back for.

Where jobs live

Jobs is the front door. Proposals are work you have not won yet, jobs are work in progress, and templates are structures you reuse.

The jobs list showing proposals and active jobs side by side, each with its client name, contract value and progress.
  1. 1Proposals: drafts you have not won yet. No spending is tracked against them.
  2. 2Live jobs, each showing its contract value and how much of it you have spent.
  3. 3Templates. Start a job from one to inherit a whole category structure.

A job starts as a draft, which is the proposal stage. Drafts stay deliberately plain: there is no spending to track yet, so the page is only the estimate. Once the client signs, or you approve it yourself, the job becomes active and grows tabs for transactions, payments and project costing.

Where the estimate lives

Inside a job, the Budget tab is the estimate. Categories nest as deep as you like and parents add up their children, so you type a number in exactly one place.

A job's Budget tab showing nested cost categories with estimated, spent and remaining columns, and a total row at the bottom.

Categories roll up to their parent automatically.

  1. 1What you expect the work to cost. Type it on the category, or build it up from line items.
  2. 2Real charges you have filed against this category, updating as you categorize.
  3. 3Every category rolls up into this total. You never add the column yourself.

Where spending lands

Everything you spend arrives in the inbox first, whether it came from a bank feed, a file, a paste, or your own typing. The daily habit is working this queue down to empty.

The transaction inbox listing bank charges that have not been assigned to a job yet, each row offering a job and category picker.

Everything you spend lands here first.

  1. 1Who you paid. Link it to a vendor once and later charges match themselves.
  2. 2Pick the job here. Choosing a category is an optional second step, not a blocker.

Assigning a job is the important half. Picking a category is a useful second step, but it never blocks you, and there is a whole tab for charges that have a job but no category yet.

Where the money question gets answered

Project costing is the contractor's schedule of values: what you originally budgeted, what it is now after changes, and what you have actually spent. It is also where draws come from. See project costing and draws.

Tip

If you only ever do two things in this app, make them these: send the proposal, and keep the inbox empty. Everything else is computed from those.

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