Projects

Quick overview

Everything that costs money or takes time belongs to a project. Create one when you win the work, and it collects the rest by itself:

• Tasks break the job into assignable pieces
• Hours arrive from the clock, attached to those tasks
• Materials are logged as they're consumed
• Files — drawings, permits, photos — live with the job, not in someone's inbox
• Financials tell you, at any moment, whether you're still making money on it

Where to find it

Operations          (admin)
├── Customers
├── Employees
├── Projects            ← here
├── Projects Dashboard  ← every project at once
├── …
└── Wall Canvas         ← Pro plan

Employees don't see the Projects module. They reach their work through To-Dos instead.

The project list

Filter, sort and group to find what you need:

Tip: sort by deadline ascending with the status filter on Active. That's your week, in order.

Creating a project

Click New Project:

By Hour vs Closed Budget

On a Closed Budget job, extra work is not free work. If the customer asks for something outside the agreed scope, raise a Change Order rather than absorbing it. That's exactly what change orders are for.

Materials

The form has an inline materials picker: choose an item from Products & Services, set the quantity, price and a note. Use it to pre-load what you know the job needs; the crew logs the rest as they consume it.

Files & images

Two separate things:

• Files — DWG drawings, PDFs, Word documents. Reference material for whoever works the job.
• Project display images — the photos that represent the job on screen and, if you share it, in the customer portal.

Assigning employees

Use Assign Employee to Project to attach people to the job. Assigned employees see the project in their My Projects count and can be picked as assignees on its tasks.

Assigning someone to the project doesn't give them work — tasks do that. Think of the assignment as "this person is on this crew".

Inside a project

Opening a project gives you a workspace with an overview panel at the top — recent photos and a financial summary — and six tabs.

Tasks

Every task on this job, on a board with Pending, In Progress and Completed columns — drag a card to change its status. Add To-do opens the full task form in a popup with this project already selected (and locked), so you can break the work down without leaving the screen; the new task lands in Pending. Task mechanics — priorities, instruction photos, completion proof — are covered in To-Dos.

Punch list

The small things still left to do on this job, like "touch up paint in the hallway", "call the client about tile colour" or "get the permit signed off". Each item is one line with a checkbox, an optional due date and an optional person responsible. Type in the box at the top and press Enter to add one, then tick it when it's done. Click an item to add notes or change its date or assignee. Open shows what's left and All includes finished items.

Punch list items are not tasks. They don't show up in My Tasks, the scheduler or clock-in, and ticking one off needs no photo. When someone has to go and do real, time-tracked work, use a task instead. Overdue items are flagged in red. Whoever you assign an item to gets a push notification on their phone.

Files

The drawings, permits and documents attached to the job. Tap any file to open it. The mobile app shows the same list, so the crew has the drawing on site.

Specs

The scope of work and specifications you entered. Keep it current — when a change order is approved, this is where the new agreed scope should end up.

Contracts

The contracts covering this project, with their value and status. Full detail in Contracts & Change Orders.

Portal

Per-project customer portal settings — whether this customer sees this job, and how much of it. Covered in sharing a project.

Project financials

The drill-down that answers "are we still making money on this?".

Remaining budget is the budget minus materials minus approved labour.

Read Pending Labor before you celebrate. A job that looks 20% under budget with a week of unapproved timesheets sitting in the queue is not 20% under budget. Approve hours daily and the number stays honest.

Projects Dashboard

Every job on one screen. Where Project financials answers "are we still making money on this job?", the Projects Dashboard answers "which of my jobs needs me today?". Open it from Operations → Projects Dashboard. Anyone who can see Projects can see it.

Filter by status (Active is the default), by project type, or by a project or customer name. The budget already includes approved change orders.

Cost counts approved hours only. Pending labor is shown next to it, not inside it. Approve timesheets daily and the dashboard stays honest.

Reading the chart and colors

Across is how much of the schedule has passed, from start date to end date. Up is how much of the budget is spent. The dashed diagonal is "spend = time": a job above it is burning money faster than the calendar. Bubble size is the budget. Click a bubble to open the project.

Every label comes with its own icon, so you never have to tell colors apart. A project with no budget or no end date can't be placed on the chart, and the chart says how many were left out. Give those projects both to see them.

Wall Canvas

Pro plan. A drawing board for wall take-offs, tied to a project. Use it to measure walls, mark openings and produce a dimensioned sketch you can price from — without leaving Jobmand for a CAD package.

The tools

Save before you navigate away. The canvas is a drawing tool — closing the screen without saving loses the work, the same as any other drawing program.

Elevation view

Alongside the plan view there's an elevation view and a component editor, for detailing what goes on a wall — openings, fixtures, wall elements — rather than just its outline.

Common workflows

Closing a project: Completed and Cancelled

A job ends one of two ways. Completed means you did the work; Cancelled means it fell through. Either way JobmandAI records the date and time you set the status, and shows it on the project.

Both statuses make the project read-only. Once a project is Completed or Cancelled, nobody can add or change anything attached to it — no new tasks, invoices, estimates, change orders, contracts, materials, files, punch list items or time entries, and no edits to the ones already there. The project itself stays fully readable: every figure, document and report is still there, and it still appears in the Projects Dashboard and in reports.

This is deliberate. A finished or dead job whose numbers keep moving is a job you can no longer trust for costing. Closing it freezes the record.

To make a change anyway, reopen the job: edit the project and set its status back to Active (or On Hold). The cancellation or completion date is cleared, everything is editable again, and you can close it once more when you are done. Anyone who can edit a project can do this — there is no separate permission.

Two things keep working on a closed job, on purpose:

• Clocking out. If someone was still clocked in when you closed the job, they can finish their shift normally. Only new clock-ins are blocked.
• Approving timesheets. Payroll can still approve or reject hours that were already recorded, so a closed job can be paid out.

An already-sent estimate or contract signing link also still works — the customer was sent that document before the job closed.

On the phone, a closed project simply shows no + buttons. If a crew member recorded something offline before you closed the job, it still syncs; anything recorded after you closed it cannot be saved, and the phone says so rather than losing it quietly.

FAQ & Troubleshooting

I can't add a task (or an invoice, or anything else) to a project.

Check the project's status. A Completed or Cancelled project is read-only — see Closing a project. Set it back to Active to make changes.

I can't create a project — the customer isn't in the list.

Create the customer first under Customers. Projects can't exist without one.

An employee says they can't see the project.

Employees never see the Projects module. They see the tasks assigned to them under To-Dos. Assign them a task on the job.

The financial figures don't match what I know we've spent.

Check Pending Hours — unapproved labour isn't counted yet. Also check that materials were logged against the task rather than bought off-system.

Can I change a project from By Hour to Closed Budget mid-job?

Yes, edit the project. But the hours already logged don't change — you're changing how you bill from here on, so make sure the customer agreed.

The customer keeps asking for extras on a fixed-price job.

Raise a Change Order for each one. It records the cost and schedule impact and, when approved, updates the project.

Where do photos taken on site end up?

Task photos live on the task; project photos taken from the mobile app land on the project and show in the overview panel.

I don't have Wall Canvas.

It's a Pro plan feature. Below Pro it's hidden from the sidebar.

My Wall Canvas drawing vanished.

It was almost certainly never saved. Click Save before leaving the screen — there's no autosave.

Can two projects share one customer address?

Yes. Several projects can point at the same customer and the same site — a phased job, or repeat work at the same property.

Need help?

For training, access, or feature requests, contact your Jobmand admin. For bug reports include the screen name, what you clicked, what you expected, and what happened instead — with a screenshot if possible.