The software
KI is the spine
Section titled “KI is the spine”Kinetic Intelligence, KI for short, is the ERP — enterprise resource planning — system that runs the business. Nearly everything in these docs describes some part of it.
KI is one product, and two companies run it separately. Story and Bristlecone Construction are each a customer of the same software in their own right: their own database, their own configuration, their own QuickBooks company, their own set of interfaces switched on. The software is what they share. The data is not — nothing entered in one appears in the other.
Within a company, KI is several interfaces over one database rather than a single application — the same definition of what a project is, how cost is classified, how money is committed and spent, and how work gets billed, whichever screen you open. A change made in one place is immediately visible everywhere it matters, nothing is re-entered, and nothing has to be reconciled between interfaces. All of that holds inside one company’s KI and stops at its edge.
Use the Story / Bristlecone switch in the header to pick which one these pages describe. It is remembered as you move around, and most pages here are written twice — once for each company — so you get the one about your own software rather than a shared page with caveats in it. This page describes both, because comparing them is what it is for.
The interfaces
Section titled “The interfaces”| Interface | Who uses it | What they do there | Story | Bristlecone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Admin Portal | Most employees | Set up projects, move them through their phases, manage them financially | Yes | Not yet |
| Legacy KI | Accounting, estimating, project controls, admin | The older admin portal, and the one being ported | Some modules | Everything |
| Client Portal | Clients | See their project, review and approve packages, sign contracts, pay invoices, log issues | Yes | Not set up |
| Vendor Portal | Vendors and subcontractors | Receive purchase orders and approve changes to them | Yes | Not set up |
| Field App | Field teams | Post project updates and issues from site, and read the current plan set and the project’s financial record | Yes, installed from TestFlight rather than visited | No |
The Client and Vendor Portals are the same application: a vendor signs in at
/vendor, a client at the root, and the account decides what they see. Each
company runs Legacy KI at its own address: Story’s is the
knottyiron.com link above, which is the older name showing through rather
than a different system, and Bristlecone’s is
bristlecone.knottyiron.com.
The KI system guide is the full reference on all of them: how KI is organised, the objects and financial rules, the interfaces, and a project walked end to end. Like the pages below it, it is written twice — once per company — and the header switch decides which you get.
Legacy KI is an admin portal, not an old name
Section titled “Legacy KI is an admin portal, not an old name”Legacy KI is the older admin portal. It points at the same database as everything else, so work done there is live data rather than a separate copy or an archive. Calling it “legacy” says where it is headed, not that it is switched off.
It is the interface the new Admin Portal is being ported from, one module at a time. That port is the reason these pages exist: as a module moves across, the page describing it changes, and the release notes say when.
Story runs mostly in the Admin Portal. Three things still happen in Legacy KI: construction pricing proposals, Admin Setup (Standard Codes, the Cost Code library, company and Division setup), and all of Accounting. See §18.
Bristlecone works in Legacy KI. It is the admin portal for this instance — projects, budgets, cost control, commitments, submittals, pay applications and accounting all run there, and none of it has moved to the new Admin Portal yet. Field work runs in Autodesk rather than in KI.
One product, two companies
Section titled “One product, two companies”Story and Bristlecone Construction are sibling companies. Neither is a division of the other. They run the same software and share nothing else: not a database, not a chart of accounts, not a user list.
| Story | Bristlecone Construction | |
|---|---|---|
| Work | Renovation and remodelling, design-led | Construction across several lines of business |
| Runs on | Its own instance of KI | Its own instance of KI |
| Admin portal | The Admin Portal, plus Legacy KI for the modules listed above | Legacy KI |
| Books | Its own QuickBooks company | Its own QuickBooks company |
That separation is the part worth understanding before you rely on anything you read here. Work done in one instance does not appear in the other, and the two do not have the same modules switched on. Nor have they stayed identical underneath: the instances started from the same product and have diverged as each company’s work pulled on it, which is why a claim about how KI behaves is always a claim about one of them.
The differences are not cosmetic. Bristlecone commits subcontractors through Commitments where Story issues Purchase Orders; Bristlecone prices a change as a Change Estimate before it becomes a Change Order, and Story creates the Change Order directly; Submittals, RFIs, Punch List and Work Orders are on the Bristlecone menu and off Story’s. The feature matrix lists them area by area.
Inside an entity
Section titled “Inside an entity”Within an entity sit Divisions. Each company sets its own up, and they do not mean the same thing.
Story’s are its offices, split by discipline — Dallas, Denver and Scottsdale today, with more to be added, each carrying a Design, a Construction and an Overhead Division.
Bristlecone’s are its lines of business. It builds across a wider range of work than Story does, and the Division is how the lines are kept apart: Bristlecone GC and Bristlecone Concrete, which self-performs, are the two carrying projects today.
Every project belongs to exactly one Division, and Division is the level financial reporting rolls up to. It is not just a label: get it wrong and the figures land in the wrong place.
Story Design Studio
Section titled “Story Design Studio”Story Design Studio is not part of KI, and it belongs to Story only. It is a marketing tool on the public website: a prospective client uploads photos of a room, describes what they want, and gets AI-generated design images back — a way to see what a space could become before talking to anyone. It is open to anyone at storyrenovations.com/design-studio, with no KI login involved.
“Story Design Studio — Reimagine Your Space” “Upload photos of your room, define your goals, and get personalized design concepts before you meet with your Story Designer.”
It is deliberately narrow. It does not touch projects, cost codes, or money, and it creates nothing in KI. A lead that arrives through it enters the same way as any other, through the CRM — our customer relationship management system.
It sits ahead of everything else here, at the widest part of the funnel.
Where the vocabulary changed
Section titled “Where the vocabulary changed”Legacy KI’s vocabulary came from commercial general contracting:
Request for Information · Submittal · Transmittal · Invitation to Bid · subcontract · CPM (critical path method) schedule · Job Hazard Analysis · retention · certificate of insurance
Bristlecone still uses those words daily, because that is the work. Story’s side of KI uses residential language instead, and a few objects were renamed outright: a Legacy “Lead” is a Project Record, a Legacy “Project” is a Contract, a Legacy “Proposal” is an Estimate.
Those three are the ones that cause trouble, because the old word and the new word describe different things rather than the same thing renamed. The glossary maps them, and §4.1 explains why.
The letters KI stand for Kinetic Intelligence. Expand them that way in code, in the interface, and in prose. On where the name came from and why an older one still turns up in emails and footers, see the FAQ.