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.

Project search matches the address as well as the name, for the jobs everyone refers to by where they are rather than by what they are called.

The team

Four roles are assigned to a project and shown to the client in the Client Portal:

Role	What they do
Project Planner	Owns the financials of the project — pricing, procurement, margin, and change orders
Design Manager	Owns the design process through its phases
Site Manager	Runs the work on site
Interior Designer	Produces the design

Two naming traps. The role that owns project financials is the Project Planner; the Admin Portal and Client Portal still display Planning Manager, which is a known defect rather than a second valid name. The Design Manager is sometimes called the Design PM; Design Manager is the name to use.

The client is the fifth party to a project, and vendors and subcontractors are counterparties reached through the Vendor Portal.

Employee records

An employee’s payroll detail is kept in the Admin Portal: division, job title, ADP ID, pay type, burdened cost rate, rate of pay, hire and termination dates, whether they are a non-project employee, the GL (general ledger) codes that apply, and weekly hours. Legacy KI is no longer where this is edited.

The GL code picker is searchable and lists codes in alphabetical order, which is what makes a chart of accounts too long to scroll usable.

The burdened cost rate is what makes a timesheet into a cost, so this screen is upstream of every labour figure in cost control.

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.

A company record shows its full street address, not just the city and state.

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.

Company compliance

A company record is a set of tabs: Details and Contacts, then Compliance, Cost Codes, Notes, Documents, Accounting and Company In Use. Everyone can read them; editing takes the companies permission, which in practice means accounting.

Compliance is the one that decides whether a subcontractor can be paid. It opens on a completion figure, being the proportion of the required items that are in order, and four counts beside it: Complete, Expiring, Expired and Missing. Expiring is the useful one. It catches a certificate inside thirty days of lapsing, which is the window in which somebody can still chase it.

Underneath, the requirements are grouped:

• Agreements & Contracts — the Master Agreement date, the signed Master Agreement itself, the Independent Contractor Agreement and Attachment D. The last two can be answered N/A, because they do not apply to every company.
• Insurance — the certificate of insurance, and under it the five coverages it may carry: general liability, workers compensation, auto liability, umbrella liability and pollution liability. Each is ticked as carried or not, and each carries its own expiry date. The main certificate has no separate overall expiry field; record expiry against the individual coverages. Where a coverage arrives on its own certificate rather than the main one, upload it under Additional Certificates and say which coverages it covers.
• Tax & Licensing — the W-9, the sales tax number and the contractor’s licence number.
• Financial Approval — whether the credit application is approved.

Answering yes to an item asks for the thing itself: a file for the document items, a number for the licence and tax ones. An item answered yes with nothing behind it does not count as complete.

Anything uploaded here also lands in the company’s Documents tab, with who uploaded it and when, so an audit can be answered from one place rather than by reopening every requirement in turn.

The remaining tabs answer the questions that come up while looking at a subcontractor. Notes holds the running commentary, newest first, each one recording who wrote it and when. A note cannot be edited or removed once posted. Each carries a Show on report switch, which puts that note on the subcontractor compliance report described below; the switch is the only part of a note anyone can change. Accounting lists that company’s invoices with their number, date, project and amount, credits shown in parentheses. It is searchable and sortable on every column and shows open projects by default. Company In Use lists the projects the company is on, whether through a contract or an invoice, current ones by default.

The subcontractor compliance report

Reports → Subcontractor Compliance Report answers “who is not covered” across every subcontractor at once, instead of one company record at a time. Each company shows how complete its requirements are and which items are missing, expiring or expired. Filter it by status, group it by company or by project, search it, and export it to CSV. Notes switched to Show on report appear alongside the company they were written about.

The report has its own permission, so it is in the Reports list only if your role includes it.

What the client sees

A client is a contact on the project before they are a login. Access to the Client Portal is a deliberate step: the contact record is sent an invitation, and accepting it turns them into someone who can sign in.

Once in, they see the team assigned to the project and the roles they hold, so they know who to ask about design and who to ask about the site.

A client with more than one project switches between them with the project selector in the top-right corner of the portal, next to their initials. It used to hide behind the initials themselves, and enough clients never found it that it was moved into the open.

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