Releases

What a release is

One weekly batch of changes, promoted to production together and identified by a single number that means the same thing in every system. Story runs across several codebases that used to ship independently, which meant a piece of work could be live in one place and still waiting in another. A release is the unit that stops that.

The number is the date it goes to production, as year, month, day. 2026.08.20 shipped on 20 August 2026. There is nothing to increment and no counter to keep track of, and it is the number to quote when reporting a problem.

Release notes

Newest first.

2026.10.01

Your access now follows your role

Since 29 September every account has a role, and most people hold Project Management. Screens your role does not include have left your menu, and projects you are not on have left your list. Contact Sarah Gonzales for access (sarahgonzales@bristleconeconstruction.com) if you need something back. Roles and access

• 🛡️ See every subcontractor’s compliance in one report. Missing, expiring and expired items across all companies, grouped by company or project, with CSV export. Company compliance
• 🧭 Invoices is in the menu. Anyone whose role approves vendor invoices finds it in the left navigation; no bookmark needed. Approving a vendor invoice
• 📤 Approving hands the invoice to accounting. It moves on only when accounting exports it to QuickBooks, the same rule as Legacy KI. Approving a vendor invoice
• 🧾 Accounts Payable opens again in Legacy KI for people who see only their own projects’ invoices. An invoice with no project shows to its delegate. Vendor invoices

Beta

• 📝 Design Brief (beta). Capture the job walk’s notes, photos and videos in the Admin Portal, then record what the client wants, area by area, and export it as a PDF. The Design Brief

Don’t use “Analyze Notes with AI” on the Design Brief

It fills the brief with sample content, including a $850,000 budget and a “Living Room” area, instead of reading your notes. If you have pressed it, put back what the client actually said. The Design Brief

2026.09.24

• 🧮 Find past estimates through Claude. Search across jobs, including older versions and templates, then open stored cost codes, quantities and markups. Estimate lookups

Try it in Claude: “List our reusable estimate templates. Open one and show its cost codes, quantities, general items and markups. Tell me if there are more pages to read.”

• 🧾 Code one invoice to several projects. Switch on Code to multiple projects and give each line its own project and cost code, as in Legacy KI. Approving a vendor invoice
• ✅ Approve waits for complete coding. It stays greyed out until every line with an amount has a general ledger code, and a cost code where it has a project. Approving a vendor invoice
• 🗂️ Completed Visioning forms are back on their projects. They had dropped out of the project’s Visioning area. Visioning
• 🧮 New Owner and Internal Billing Items save again. Creating one failed on every project from 17 to 24 September; nothing wrong was saved. Progress billing

2026.09.17

• 🧮 Lines carried forward between Billing Items are back where they belong. Saving a Billing Item could drop lines it had carried forward from the previous one, understating the contract balance with nothing on screen to mark it. Ten projects across twenty-one Billing Items were repaired on 15 September, recovering $120,986.93 of contract value. No billing was wrong — pay applications were correct throughout, so nothing invoiced, paid or exported to QuickBooks drew on the lost values. Progress billing
• 🛡️ And saving a Billing Item no longer drops them. The Admin Portal now works out each line’s adjusted value itself instead of accepting whatever the browser sends, and a line missing from a save is no longer read as a line you deleted. Deliberately removing a line still works. Progress billing
• 🛡️ Legacy KI has the same fix. It went out the same day, so a Billing Item can be edited in either interface. Progress billing
• 📎 Add documents to a purchase order after it is issued. Quotes and signed copies can go on an issued or approved order or change order; the lines stay locked. Purchase orders
• 🔒 Clients can see when a Visioning form is closed. A locked or completed form shows as read-only in the Client Portal, with a lock on its card. Visioning
• 👤 The change order log says who, not just when. Who created each change order, who published it and who approved it. Change orders

• 🎯 Claude reads the job you asked about. A job and a contract are numbered separately and the ranges overlap, so a job number could be read as a contract number and answer about a different job under that job’s name. Claude now names the job and lists its contracts instead of guessing. Ask again if you acted on a cost or WIP figure from Claude before this release. Asking Claude about KI
• 💵 Billed to date is no longer $0.00 on a contract that has billed. The figure came from a running total KI does not maintain on every contract, which stayed at zero on contracts written since early 2026 even where billing had gone out and been paid. Claude now adds up what each pay application billed, reports the certified total alongside it, and names the difference where the two disagree. Asking Claude about KI
• 🏗️ Ask about a job, not one of its contracts. A job with several contracts under it reads whole — cost, invoices and WIP across all of them in one answer. Asking Claude about KI
• 🔝 Ask for the largest cost line, not the latest. Rank cost lines by amount, narrow them to an account such as subcontractor or materials, and filter to what is approved but not yet exported to QuickBooks. Asking Claude about KI
• 📊 A division’s WIP totals in one answer. The totals cover every contract the question matched rather than the page on screen, and say how many of them could and could not be calculated. Contracts with incomplete inputs contribute nothing rather than counting as zero. Almost no contract can be calculated yet — see Known issues. Asking Claude about KI
• 💰 The Fee is on the contract answer. No longer something to add up by hand from the budget lines. Asking Claude about KI
• 📄 Save several original invoice PDFs at once. Find the invoices you need and have Claude save their original attachments in groups of up to ten, under your own invoice permissions. Groups too large to return name the invoices to retry rather than dropping any. Asking Claude about KI

Known issues

• 📊 Almost no contract can produce a WIP figure. A contract is classified from the Contract For value on its latest pay application, which has to read exactly Design or Construction. It is a free-text field nothing requires you to fill in, so most contracts cannot be classified, and an unclassified contract returns no WIP at all. Asked for one division on 18 September 2026, none of the 129 matching contracts produced a figure. The costs behind them are present and correct; only the classification is missing. Claude names each blocked contract and why, so the answer doubles as the list of Contract For values to set. Asking Claude about KI

2026.09.10

• 🧾 Code an invoice to its project. The cost-code selector on vendor invoice approval now shows the selected project’s codes. Approving a vendor invoice
• ↩️ Unapprove an invoice approved by mistake. It goes back to Needs approval to be corrected. Approving a vendor invoice
• 📅 Record insurance expiry on each coverage. The main certificate no longer has a separate overall expiry field. Company compliance
• ➖ Post negative Billing Item adjustments. A negative adjustment associated with a change order is no longer rejected simply for being below zero. Progress billing
• ✏️ Type the margin directly. The margin field’s up/down arrows have been removed. Estimating

• 🔎 Ask Claude to find a job. “The Shane job”, an address, a job number or the client’s name brings back the Project Record with its contracts, and a list of candidates rather than a guess when more than one matches. Asking Claude about KI
• 💵 Ask Claude what a job has cost, line by line. Cost to date by project and cost code, since inception or for a period, down to the individual cost lines with the vendor invoice behind each one. Reclasses show on both jobs. Asking Claude about KI
• 🧾 Ask Claude where a contract stands. Billed, received, outstanding and retention, with the pay applications and change orders behind them, and cost control per code on the same answer. Asking Claude about KI
• ✅ Ask Claude to check a contract’s books. Schedule of values against the contract sum, budgets plus fee, the pay-application chain, unmapped cost and export state, reported as findings with a severity — for one contract or a whole division. Asking Claude about KI
• 📊 WIP without a comparison first. Ask for the WIP schedule directly. Asking Claude about KI
• 🔑 When Claude turns you away, it says why. A refusal now names the reason — no KI account matched, more than one matched, a shared account, or a permission you do not hold — instead of a blank error. Asking Claude about KI

The Claude connector is experimental

Caisson AI is new, it runs on Story only, and it is not yet something to rely on. Treat every answer as a lead rather than a result: check it against the screen before you act on it, and do not close a month or pay an invoice on its numbers alone. It may be unavailable or answer differently from one day to the next while it settles. Tell us when an answer looks wrong — that is what this stage is for.

2026.09.03

The Claude connector is experimental

Caisson AI is new, it runs on Story only, and it is not yet something to rely on. Treat every answer as a lead rather than a result: check it against the screen before you act on it, and do not close a month or pay an invoice on its numbers alone. It may be unavailable or answer differently from one day to the next while it settles. Tell us when an answer looks wrong — that is what this stage is for.

• 📄 The grouped Change Estimate log shows every status again. Any project with fewer than six numbered Change Estimates was dropping whole status groups from the log and its PDF, with nothing to mark the gap — a log pulled before 3 September cannot be assumed complete. Contracts and change orders

• 🤖 Ask Claude about Story’s KI. Connect the Caisson AI connector and put questions to Story’s numbers in plain English, signed in as yourself and under your own permissions. It reads, and it never changes anything. Asking Claude about KI
• 🧾 Ask Claude to find a vendor invoice. Search every invoice by vendor, project, number, amount, status or date rather than the last seven days, open its coded lines, see who has approved it and pull up the scan. Asking Claude about KI
• 📊 Ask Claude about the accounting close. Compare KI’s job costs against QuickBooks, ask why one project differs, calculate WIP, and export the workpaper. Asking Claude about KI
• 🧭 Clients can see the project selector. It now sits in the top-right corner of the Client Portal next to their initials, instead of hiding behind them — a client on two projects can actually find the second one. Project setup and admin
• ✍️ Visioning forms say who filled them in. Each completed questionnaire records whether the client answered it or an admin completed it on their behalf, so you know whose words you are reading. Design
• 🔎 Find a project by its address. Project search matches the address as well as the name, for the jobs everyone refers to by where they are. Project setup and admin
• 🔢 GL codes are searchable, and in alphabetical order. Putting a general ledger code on an employee no longer means scrolling the whole chart of accounts. Project setup and admin
• 🏢 The full company address on the company record. The street address, not just the city and state. Project setup and admin
• ⚠️ Approving a vendor invoice warns you when the amount does not tie. If the coded lines do not total what accounting entered, approving says so before it goes through, as Legacy KI does. This is on the invoice screen that is still switched on for a test group only. Billing and accounting

A new switch on company notes

Every note on a company’s Notes tab now carries a Show on report switch. It marks that note for the subcontractor compliance report, and marking is the whole of what it does: there is no subcontractor compliance report to read in the Admin Portal, so turning it on changes nothing you can see. It is also the only part of a note anybody can change — a note cannot be edited or removed once it is posted.

2026.08.27

• 📋 Company compliance is tracked on the company. A Compliance tab on every company record holds the Master Agreement, the certificate of insurance and the five coverages under it, the W-9, licence numbers and credit approval — each with an expiry date, and a completion figure at the top that turns amber before a certificate lapses. Project setup and admin
• 📊 Bill design hours against the contract. Mark an executed design contract billable or hourly, set its included hours, and draw the time coded to it into a Billable Report — or an invoice once the included hours run out. Billing and accounting
• 📧 Your digest email leads with issues. New issues you were made responsible for, copied on or tagged in yesterday, urgent first, then a count of what is still open and what you closed. Project communication
• 🤝 Share a project with an employee who is not on the team. Grant one employee access to a single project without putting them on the project team. Roles and access

Vendor invoice approval is being tested

Approving vendor invoices in the Admin Portal is switched on for a small group, who are checking it against live invoices. The screen has no navigation item either. Everyone else works invoices in Legacy KI as before. What the screen does

2026.08.20

• 🦺 Safety inspections. Record a jobsite inspection in the Admin Portal or on an iPad, track the Safety Concerns it raises until they are resolved, and export or report across past inspections. Field operations
• 📦 Archive a purchase order. Take an order you no longer need — including one already approved — off the project’s committed cost without deleting it. Purchasing
• 📊 Pick your columns on the Financial Report. Including margin last month against this month, and the movement between them. Accounting and finance
• 👷 Employee records moved to the Admin Portal. Pay rates, general ledger codes and weekly hours are edited there, not in Legacy KI. Project setup and admin

• 📚 These docs. How KI is organised, the money rules behind a project, and how a job runs from intake to completion. Start here

Your access is about to change

Roles are now built into the Admin Portal, but every account is still set to full access, so nothing is enforced yet and nothing looks different today.

When roles are switched on, each person gets the access their role needs and loses the rest — screens you open today may close. Check Roles and access for what your role covers, and raise anything you need before then.

Switched on 29 September 2026 — see 2026.10.01.