Private estimates, purchasing and job costs

How to use it

1. Open Company workspace, attach or create the project, and grant financial access explicitly. Company membership and homeowner ownership alone do not grant access to private costs. In the project’s Job costs & purchasing section, open Builder financials & purchasing.
2. Add cost categories. Review category budget establishes the original budget or records an approved revision and its reason. Create estimate supports quantities with three decimal places, unit costs with four decimal places, markup, allowances and configured tax rates. Amounts use USD. Each line rounds direct cost, then markup, then tax to cents; totals are calculated by PostgreSQL decimal arithmetic.
3. Review the saved estimate totals. Accept estimate preserves the revision. Create budget from direct costs establishes original category budgets from that accepted estimate, excluding markup and customer sales tax. Existing budget categories require an explicit revision. Create estimate revision copies the earlier revision into a new draft without altering the accepted record.
4. Review customer summary shares only the estimate title, scope summary, revision and customer total. Unit costs and margins remain private. A shared estimate is preserved and must be reviewed by the homeowner before acceptance. This application acknowledgment is not an electronic signature.
5. Create purchase order records supplier, reference, quantities, categories, prices and expected dates. Link existing product selections or material records. Record order as issued confirms an order already issued to the supplier; it does not send or place an order. Linked selections need approval and move to ordered. Installation is verified separately.
6. Record delivery enters actual received and rejected quantities. Explain damaged or excess deliveries. Partial receipts remain visible; Update delivery records revised dates, backorders and supplier delays. Reverse receipt preserves the earlier receipt and its correction. Review customer delivery update publishes only reviewed narrative and delivery status.
7. Record actual cost saves an approved expense with a unique vendor/invoice reference, date, phase and equipment association. For a purchase order, use Record line cost from its detail to reduce the same line’s open commitment. Attach private supplier quotations or invoices under Private supporting files; uploads are encrypted, limited to 10 MB, and excluded from homeowner handoff and recovery packages.
8. Current budget equals original budget plus approved revisions. Actual costs are recorded expenses rather than payments. Open commitments equal issued purchase-line totals less active actual costs on those lines, with no negative commitment. Available after commitments equals current budget minus actual costs minus open commitments. Reverse actual cost preserves the correction history. An order can close only after delivery and actual line costs are recorded.
9. Draft change order separates customer contract and calendar-day schedule impacts from private category cost impacts. Review customer change publishes the customer summary through the existing project change-order workflow. Only homeowner approval updates the contract and target date. Apply approved change records private budget adjustments once and preserves the already applied schedule impact.
10. Financial activity retains authorship and prior header values; estimate revisions retain their own lines. Supporting files stay private even after construction handoff. This ledger does not send payments, reconcile bank accounts, or provide an accounting or Buildertrend synchronization connector.