Job Setup

Key Concepts

Every project your company works on should be created as a job in Job Book. Jobs tie together clients, offices, project managers and line items, and every DWR, expense and invoice must be tied to a job. One job record carries the client the work is for, the sites it happens on, the people to contact, the billing configuration invoices are built from, and its own set of line items. What a central job database does for a surveying business is on the Job Database product page; this page is how to build a job.

• Client: every job belongs to one client record, so the client comes first and the job points at it. Nothing else on the job form can be filled in until a client is chosen.
• Locations: the sites the work happens on. A job can carry as many as it needs, each with a street address, legal addresses and GPS coordinates.
• Contacts: people from the client’s contact list, attached to this job. A contact can be marked to appear on the job’s DWRs and invoices.
• Line items: what staff pick from when they record work, and what invoices are built from. A job’s line items start from a rate sheet and are then adjusted for the job.
• Phases: a job can be split into phases, each with its own line items and rates. See Splitting a job into phases.
• Status: Status tracks the job through the product’s fixed list of stages, from Estimating to Lost to Others, and it shows on the Active Job Dashboard and in Job Maps. Best practice is to set the status and update it frequently, so staff know where jobs are in the workflow. The full list, in dropdown order, is on Job and Client Attribute Tags.

Only an Administrator or a user with the Job Coordinator role can create jobs. For a Manager without that role, the Edit, Clone and Delete buttons are hidden on a job, so such Managers read and export jobs rather than maintain them.

Performing Common Tasks

Opening the Jobs list

On the dashboard, in the Jobs card, click Explore.

The Jobs list opens on the Active saved view. The Inactive view shows the inactive jobs and the All view shows every job in the system.

• Type into the search box and press Enter, or click Search, to narrow the list.
• Create opens a blank job form and Export to Excel downloads the list. Both buttons appear above and below the cards.
• A view with more than 50 jobs shows the first 50, with a Next link to the following page.
• Each card reads Client:, Job Number: and Project Name:. Click a card to open that job.

Narrowing the Jobs list

Filter Settings, the grey bar between the views and the search box, is collapsed when the list opens. Click it to expand it.

• Office:, Project Manager: and Client: each narrow the list to one value.
• The panel also carries an Advanced Job Search button, under the three pickers.

Viewing a job

Clicking a job opens its display view, which is read-only. The buttons above and below the record are Edit, Export to PDF, Clone, Delete and Back, which returns you to the list.

• The Reports: row under the buttons holds the links Job Charge-Out Rate Report, Summary Report and History Report. See Job Reports.
• Manage Task Plan, under Project Name, opens the job’s task plan. See Task Plans.
• The display view labels the client Client (Linked to CRM): and renders the client’s name as a link back to the client record. The create and edit forms label the same field Client (Selecting a Client will allow entry of Job details).
• Status History: near the bottom is a table of Date, User and Status, one row per status change.
• Active: at the bottom shows whether the job can still be picked when staff create DWRs.

Creating a job

There are two ways in:

• On the dashboard, in the Jobs card, click Create New.
• In the Jobs list, click Create.

The form opens titled Create. Any field with a red star is required, and Save and Cancel sit at the bottom of the form and apply to the whole job.

The first field is Job Number, which is required. Job Book generates a number for you, but you can overwrite it with your own company’s numbering system.

Next to the Job Number is the Job Number Counter. Click the blue lock button to unlock the counter so you can set it. Click the blue lock button again to lock the counter in, and the Job Number then defaults to the Job Number Counter.

Next is the Client (Selecting a Client will allow entry of Job details) field. Here you can either create a new client, with the Create New Client button under the picker, or pick one from the dropdown list of clients you have already created. See Clients.

Basic configuration

Choosing the client opens the rest of the form.

• Client Location: the client’s own address, not a job site. Either pick one of the addresses on the client’s record from the dropdown, or fill in the Client Address when you create the job. The sites the work happens on are added with Add Location, below.
• Client Address: picking a Client Location auto-populates the address with the one set when the client was created. You can manually edit the address.
• Project Name: the name of your job. It appears on reports, and it is what staff search on when they pick the job on a DWR or an invoice.
• Status: required. Pick the stage the job is at; the values are listed on Job and Client Attribute Tags.
• Add Location: where you set the job location. A job can have more than one location. See Locations.
• Add Contact: adds a person from the client to the job. See Contacts.
• Project Shared Folder holds one field, Folder Link. Some of our customers keep project data on cloud storage or a share drive. Paste a link to the job’s folder so staff can get to it.
• Project Manager: required. Every job needs a project manager. Best practice is for the job’s project manager to approve DWRs and sign off on invoices for the jobs they are responsible for.
• Salesperson / Representative: like Project Manager, you pick an employee here. It is not a required field.
• Office: required. This is a dropdown with all your offices or departments. Every job must be tied to an office, and reports can be filtered by it. If your company has multiple offices, select the one this project is running out of.
• Client Project #, PO # and Subcontract #: your client’s reference numbers for the job, and your own.
• PO Amount: the value of the client’s purchase order for the job. It shows as PO $ on the Active Job Dashboard.

Locations

Clicking the Add Location button adds a location to the job. A job’s locations appear on its invoices and are searchable in Job Maps.

• Location Name: the name of the site.
• Municipal Address: the address the system tries to find on a map.
• State / Province and City: once you pick a state, the city list is filtered to that state. If your city or town isn’t in the list, type it in.
• Legal Addresses: click Add Legal Address to record a legal land description. Each legal address holds Lot, Block, Plan #, LSD, Section #, Township #, Range # and Meridian, and a job can carry more than one.
• GPS Coordinates: you can also manually set the GPS coordinates of a job, as Latitude and Longitude.

Map Display

Map Display is the collapsed grey bar at the bottom of a location row. Click the Map Display bar and the system tries to find the municipal address and fills in the GPS Coordinates. To move the pin, left click anywhere on the map; the pin moves there and the GPS coordinates update.

Contacts

Below the Add Location button is the Add Contact button. Like the Add Location button you can add multiple contacts. Clicking the Add Contact button adds the Contact dropdown and the Add to DWR/Invoice checkbox.

The Contact dropdown contains all the contacts created on the client, each listed as a name, email, position and phone number. You can pick an existing contact or create a new one. The Add to DWR/Invoice checkbox adds the selected contact to the DWR and Invoice.

Choosing NEW CONTACT at the top of the dropdown opens the same fields as a contact added on the client, described under Adding contacts; First Name and Last Name are the required ones.

Billing configuration

The next block is the billing block. Its first three fields are required.

DWR Billing Type

Required. In Job Book there are four different billing types:

• Overhead: an overhead job is typically work done for internal business operations. Think administrative tasks, training, vacation, and similar work.
• Non-Chargeable: non-chargeable jobs often support client work but cannot or should not be billed to the client. Examples include equipment maintenance, internal project work, rework or fixes, and bench time.
• Fixed Price: a fixed price job, sometimes called a lump-sum job, is a job with a set price. Its DWRs are never invoiced; the invoice is created by hand, as described in Invoicing a Fixed Price Job.
• Time & Materials: a Time & Materials (T&M) job is one where you bill the customer for the time and materials spent on the job. Its invoices are built from its DWRs, as described in Invoicing a Time & Materials Job.

Invoice Type

Required. The options here are Ticket / Invoice or Invoice. Most of the time you will set your job to Invoice.

Some clients want to approve the work before they are billed for it. For them, set the job to Ticket / Invoice: a ticket is created from a set of DWRs and shows the hours worked without the money, and once the client approves it the ticket becomes the invoice. Invoice creates the invoice without that approval step. See the Ticket Queue.

Invoice Line Item Type

Required. Detailed will show an individual breakdown of all the line items on the invoice. Summarized will combine identical line items together into one line.

For example, say you did a T&M job where two CAD technicians worked on it, one for 10 hours and one for 8 hours, and a survey party chief worked 8 hours. If the job is set to detailed the invoice will have 3 labour lines, one for each person’s work, with the date and the description from each daily work record. If the job is set to summarized it will have 2 lines: CAD, 18 hours, and survey party chief, 8 hours. The date and description columns are dropped, because a combined line no longer belongs to a single day or record. The totals are the same either way. The choice applies when the invoice leaves Job Book, on Export to PDF and on the export to your accounting system; on the invoice form itself every DWR line stays a row of its own.

This is what the same work looks like on a detailed invoice:

And on a summarized one:

Coding, categories and dates

• GL Code Prefix: used with accounting systems like Sage when companies want to code jobs for import.
• Job Categories: like client types, you can tag this job with multiple categories and then filter jobs by category. The values are listed on Job and Client Attribute Tags.
• Job Scope: more tags you can add to the job, like job categories.
• Job Scope Details: if the scope you need isn’t on the list, type it in here.
• Order Date and Due Date: both are date pickers. The due date will be visible on the Active Job Dashboard.

Taxes, Fees and Additional Fields

Each of these three rows is an Add button that opens a row of its own.

• Taxes: a job can carry more than one tax.
• Fees: a job can carry more than one fee, each a percentage. Each fee is calculated on the labour, equipment and fixed price totals, and tax is then charged on the fee as well as on the work. An example of a fee would be a percent fee for administration, or a discount percent.
• Additional Fields: each field you add here appears on the invoice.

Below Additional Fields is a Notes box. Use this to store any internal notes about the job.

Adding line items

Next is the Rate Sheet. A rate sheet is already selected: the client’s default, set when the client was created. To use a different rate sheet, click the dropdown and select another one to apply to the job.

You can select individual line items to add to the job by hand, or click the blue Replace Job Line Items With Rate Sheet button, which imports the rate sheet template. The panel’s note reads “Applying will replace this job’s line items with the selected rate sheet.”, and applying it asks you to confirm first. See Rate Sheets.

The Billable Line Items section holds the job’s line items on tabs. Labour Costs and Equipment and Materials are line items your staff can pick from when creating daily work records. Fixed Price line items are used when creating invoices. After importing you can add or remove line items by hand.

Adding a line item by hand

Click + Add new line item.

The row is the one a rate sheet uses, described under Adding a line item, with Unit $ the price you adjust for this job. A job’s row adds two columns of its own:

• Bdgt Qty: the budget quantity, your estimate of the time or quantity this line item will take on this job. Every job, whether fixed price or T & M, should have an estimate, so best practice is to fill this in for each line item.
• Archived: a checkbox. See Archiving and Removing Line Items.

Reading the line item grid

Once a job has line items, each tab lists them in a grid with the same columns you filled in on the row.

• The numbers on the left, in the # column, are the order your staff will see when creating DWRs. To change the order, click the arrows to move the line items.
• Every column carries a filter funnel, and the # column sorts.
• Show Archived, above the grid, brings archived rows into view.
• In the edit view each row carries Edit and Delete buttons at its right.
• Below the grid on the Labour Costs and Equipment and Materials tabs there is a second Additional Fields: section with its own Add button. A field added here is extra information your staff fill in on that line item when they record it on a DWR. It is separate from the Additional Fields in the billing block above, which go on the invoice.

Splitting a job into phases

Under the Notes field are the job phases. A job can be split into multiple phases, each with its own line items and its own rates on them, so both can change by date.

A new job starts unphased. The panel reads Phases DISABLED, with the note “This job is using one unphased set of line items.”, a Learn more link, and a + Enable Phases button.

Clicking + Enable Phases replaces the disabled note with “Organize job line items into phases for rate changes, billing buckets, or overlapping work streams.” and adds a first phase, 1000 - Phase 1, marked Active phase.

What else changes on the form:

• Each phase carries PREFIX, NAME, START DATE, END DATE, DESCRIPTION and its own RATE SHEET, plus an Active checkbox, up and down arrows, and a delete icon.
• + Add Phase at the top right of the panel adds another phase.
• Editing line items for: chooses which phase the Billable Line Items grid below is editing, and the grid gains an EDITING PHASE chip naming that phase.
• The rate sheet button inside a phase reads Replace Line Items With Rate Sheet, and its note reads “Applying will replace line items only in this phase and preserve all other phases.”

On a DWR, the Date: decides which phase’s line items are on offer: the form lists the items of every phase whose START DATE and END DATE cover that day. When one phase covers it the items read as usual; when more than one does, each item carries its phase’s PREFIX, as in 1000-Survey Party Chief and 2000-Survey Party Chief. See DWR Entry.

Archiving and removing line items

You can remove a line item by clicking on the Delete button on the right of the line item. If the line item is already on a DWR or an invoice, it is archived instead of removed.

To take a line item out of use without removing it, click Edit on its row and tick Archived, then click Done. An archived line item cannot be picked on new DWRs. The grid then reads Yes in that row’s Archived column, and the row is hidden until you tick Show Archived above the grid.

Editing and cloning jobs

To edit a job, open it from the Jobs list and click Edit on its display view. Any field can be edited, including the Job Number. When your edits are complete, click Save. You return to the job’s display view.

Clone creates a copy of the job with a new Job Number. The Status of the job, the PO number and the PO Amount are not set; all the other data is copied. Cloning a job is useful when a project has parts that need to be invoiced separately, for example projects with multiple phases or different scopes.

Delete removes the job. Because the system does not allow referenced data to be deleted, best practice is to deactivate jobs instead of deleting them.

Activating and deactivating jobs

At the bottom of the job there is an Active checkbox, ticked by default.

Once a job is completed and invoiced, best practice is to deactivate the job:

• Open the job and click Edit.
• Clear the Active checkbox at the bottom of the form.
• Click Save.

A deactivated job cannot be selected when creating DWRs. You can reactivate a job if it becomes active again, or if you need to assign time to it. All jobs are still visible in the All view of the Jobs list and in Job Maps.

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