Projects, teams & contacts

What this covers

Before anything can be estimated, scheduled, or billed, a project has to exist, have people attached to it, and share a vocabulary with every other project in the business.

This area is that setup — the Project Record, the team on it, the contact directory behind it, and the Cost Code library everything else refers to.

The Project Record and its Division

A Project Record is the container for one client’s project: team, phases, documents, contracts, and financials. It is created when a lead in the CRM, our customer relationship management system, reaches the job walk stage, and it is the same record for the life of the job.

Every project belongs to exactly one Division, and Division is not just a label. It is how projects are grouped, searched and reported on, it is the level financial reporting rolls up to, and it is the same thing as a Class in QuickBooks — every cost, every dollar of revenue and every payroll journal posts in the Class matching the project’s Division. Get it wrong and the figures land in the wrong place.

Open a project by searching projects within its Division.

The team

People are assigned on the Team Members screen in Legacy KI, which covers the subcontractor side as well as our own.

Roles and permissions — around ninety granular permissions — are administered in Legacy KI for both entities.

Some screens call the client the owner. It is the same party, and the word comes from construction convention, where whoever is paying for the work owns the building.

The Cost Code library

A Cost Code is the classification that separates framing from plumbing from tile. It is shared across the whole company — set up once in Legacy KI Admin Setup rather than created per project, and unrelated to the other company’s — and that is the point: a line on an Estimate, a Cost Code budget, a line on a purchase order or commitment, an hour of labour, and a coded vendor invoice all carry the same code, so what was priced and what was spent are directly comparable.

It is what makes “are we over on tile?” a question with an answer.

Custom codes can be added to an individual project where a job needs a classification the shared library does not cover. They behave exactly like standard codes for budgeting, commitments, and cost recording.

Because the library is shared, projects can also be compared to each other. Estimating a kitchen is easier when the last four kitchens booked their costs under the same classification.

Contacts and companies

Clients, vendors, trade partners and everyone else on a project live in one directory of Contacts and the Companies they belong to. A contact is recorded once and attached wherever they are needed — as the client on a project, the recipient of a purchase order, the person accountable for an answer. Recording a person once means an updated phone number or address updates everywhere it appears.

Companies carries compliance. Insurance certificates, W-9s and signed Master Agreements are held at company level rather than per project, so one signed Master Agreement covers that subcontractor on every job. A subcontractor providing labour must have both on file before its invoice is paid.

Related

• Part 1 — Orientation — how the company, Divisions and projects nest
• Part 4 §17 — Company-wide tools — Contacts, Companies and the rest
• Budgets and cost control — Cost Codes doing their main job
• Glossary — roles, Cost Code, Division, Master Agreement