Your first job, start to finish

This walks one real job all the way through Flow. Not a demo — a job you are actually going to do, for a customer who is actually going to pay you.

Read it once before you start. It takes about ten minutes, and it tells you exactly where Flow does the work for you and where it just writes down what you did. There are more of the second kind than you might expect, and knowing which is which up front is the difference between a smooth first job and an afternoon spent wondering why nothing happened.

The short version:

Stage	What you do	Does Flow do it, or record it?
1 · Intake	Customer, site, measurements, scope	Records
2 · Bid	Hours by phase, materials, price	Does it — prices from your rates
2 · Send	Email the bid with a PDF	Does it
3 · Sign	Customer signs on their phone	Does it
3 · Deposit	Collect the money	Records — you collect it
3 · Pre-lien	File the notice	Records — you file it
4–7 · Run the job	Order, schedule, work, close	Records

Before you start

Three things, once, before the first real job. If you skip them the job still runs — it just runs on somebody else's numbers.

Your labor rates. Settings → Labor roles ships pre-filled with a starter set of Utah wages. They are not yours. Put your own base wage on every role you use, and check the burden lines underneath. See Labor roles and payroll burden.
Your markup and deposit. Settings → Business holds Labor overhead & profit, Materials markup and Deposit — all three ship at placeholder values (20%, 20%, 50%). Set them to your numbers.
Your materials. Your shop may have been set up with a sample parts catalog to get you started. Those are somebody else's prices from somebody else's supplier. Import your own CSV under Settings → Catalog import before you price materials on a real bid — and make sure the unit prices you import are what the part actually costs you landed, tax included, because Flow does not add tax anywhere. See Importing your SKU catalog. No catalog at all? You can still bid — you just bid labor only, which is a perfectly legitimate bid.

While you are in Settings → Business, fill in your business name, phone, address and Contractor license number. Those print on the bid your customer sees. Leave them blank and they simply don't appear — nothing breaks, the bid just looks like it came from nobody.

Step 1 — Intake, at the site

Do this on a tablet, standing in the customer's basement. Intake is built for it.

Start from Jobs → + New job. The form has three sections: Customer, Site assessment and Scope.

Customer. Name, contact name, address. Email and phone are both marked optional, but you need at least one of them before Flow will let you build the bid — and you need the email specifically if you want Flow to send the bid for you later. Put the email in. The State box defaults to UT.

Flow names the job for you from the customer and the street — Reyes Residence — 1234 Oak St. You don't type it.

Site assessment. Three toggles: Existing finished surfaces, Pre-1980 panel, Insulated ceiling. Tick what you see.

Be clear about what these do today: nothing to the price. They carry forward to the bid builder and sit there in a panel called From the site visit so you remember them. Flow does not add a premium for a finished-wall retrofit or an old panel. If a condition makes the job harder, you put the extra hours on the bid yourself. There is no premium field.

Then + Add measurement — one row per room or area, with a free-text notes box for dimensions. You need at least one measurement to move on. Each measurement can carry photos and video you shoot on the spot; those stay attached to the job as reference.

Scope. Pick the work items. These carry into the bid builder and pre-seed the phases the bid opens with, so pick honestly.

Save, then Build the bid. The button stays greyed until the job is saved and the three requirement pills are green.

The one to watch: the site-condition toggles are a note to yourself, not a price adjustment.

Step 2 — The bid, at a desk

Build the bid on a real screen. The builder is a three-panel workspace and it is genuinely unusable on a phone — panels hide, and you can lose the totals rail entirely. A laptop or a big tablet in landscape. Not a phone.

The bid opens already seeded with the work phases your scope runs through.

Labor. Under Add a phase you pick the phase, pick the role, and enter hours — split across ST, OT and DT. Flow prices those hours at that role's loaded rate: the base wage plus your burden lines, plus your labor overhead & profit. That is the whole point of the thing. You put in hours; it puts out money you can stand behind.

Materials. Under Add a material you pick a SKU from your catalog, enter a quantity, and Flow applies the waste percentage carried on the part and your materials markup. Flow adds no sales tax — whatever tax you pay at the supplier has to already be inside the unit price in your catalog.

Optional items. Any labor phase or material row can be flagged with the Optional? toggle. An optional row shows up on the customer's bid as a line they can Include or Skip when they sign, and the total moves with their choice. This is how you offer the extra circuit without having to write two bids.

Prices freeze when you add a line. A line is priced from your rates at the moment you add it. Change a wage next week and this bid does not move. That is deliberate — a bid you sent is a number you promised.

Hit Preview to see exactly what the customer will see.

The one to watch: there is no premium or adjustment line. If the job deserves more money, it goes in as hours or as materials.

Step 3 — Send it

Send bid does four things: freezes the totals, generates the PDF, mints the customer's private link, and emails it.

Your customer gets an email — Your bid from [your shop] — $X — with the PDF attached and a Review and accept your bid button. The button opens their own private page. No login, no app, no password. It works on a phone.

If the send fails — usually because the customer has no email on file — Flow tells you and the bid is still sent. Copy the link yourself from the Customer link panel on the Stage 3 screen and text it to them.

The one to watch: the link is a bearer link. Anyone holding it can open the bid. Send it to your customer, not to a group thread.

Step 4 — The customer signs

On their page, under the total, they see Approve this bid.

If you flagged anything optional, they decide each one — Include or Skip — and watch the total move. They can't sign until every option is decided.

Then they tick the consent box, type their full name, and press Sign and approve.

That's an e-signature. Typed name, timestamp, their IP address and browser recorded, consent captured separately. There is no drawing pad — a typed name with consent captured is what makes it binding.

The moment they sign, Flow emails them a signed copy of the PDF, marked as executed, and the job moves to signed. You don't have to do anything.

The one to watch: their page says "Sign & deposit" in the progress strip, but they cannot pay on that page. There is no card field. Signing is where their part ends.

Step 5 — Deposit and pre-lien

Open the job's Stage 3 — Approval screen. Three cards, three gates. All three must be green before the job moves on. This is the hard stop between "they said yes" and "we're buying material."

Signed bid — already green if they signed on their phone. If they signed paper in your truck instead, use Record signature on the card.

Initial deposit — you collect the money yourself. Check, card reader, whatever you use now. Flow does not process payments. When it clears, come back here: the card shows the job total and what your deposit percentage works out to, pre-filled in the Amount cleared box. Add a check number if you have one and press Record deposit.

Nothing is emailed to the customer when you record a deposit. If they want a receipt, send it the way you do now.

Pre-lien filed — you file the notice yourself, at the Utah Construction Registry, exactly as you do today. Flow does not generate the notice, does not submit it, and does not track the 20-day clock. When it's filed, enter the State (UT is pre-filled from the job address), paste your Filing reference, and press Record filing.

If a job genuinely doesn't need one, tick Not required in this state — that clears the gate the same as filing. Flow does not decide this for you. You do.

Once all three are green, → Advance to provisioning appears.

The one to watch: file the pre-lien before work starts, not on day 19. Miss the preliminary notice and you lose the right to lien at all. Flow will not remind you. Nothing in the product watches that clock.

Step 6 — Running the job (Stages 4 to 7)

These four stages are deliberately thin. They keep the job moving and keep the history straight; they are not a purchasing system, a crew calendar, or a filing portal.

Stage 4 · Provisioning — a read-only Materials list rolled up from the signed bid, then two buttons: Mark materials ordered, and Confirm materials received → Schedule. Flow does not order anything or track a supplier.
Stage 5 · Scheduling — set a Start date, tick Customer has confirmed this date, Save start date. The job won't advance without that tick. Then ↓ Download .ics calendar event drops the day into your own calendar. Nothing is emailed to the customer here — "confirmed" means you confirmed it with them.
Stage 6 · Field execution — a checklist of the work phases from the signed bid. Tap each one done. When they're all done, Foreman sign-off → Closeout appears. No photos here yet.
Stage 7 · Closeout — record the Final payment (again, you collect it; Flow records it), advance the Lien release, then Close job ✓.

Full detail: After the sale — provisioning through closeout.

The one gate Flow will not let you past: it will not close a job with money still outstanding. Contract total minus what you've recorded as collected has to be zero or better. That check runs on the server, not just in the screen.

Step 7 — Find out what it really cost

While the crew is working, record hours on Labor actuals (linked from the Stage 6 screen). At the end you get estimate-versus-actual on the job you just did.

Do this on the first job even though it's a chore. One job's variance tells you more about whether your rates are right than a month of guessing. See Labor actuals and variance.

What's not in v1 yet

Straight, so nothing surprises you mid-job:

No payment processing, anywhere. No card, no Stripe, no ACH, no invoice. Every dollar figure in Flow is you writing down that money arrived. Deposits and final payments both.
No deposit receipt email. Recording a deposit sends the customer nothing.
No premiums or adjustments. Site conditions are captured and displayed, and change no price. Hard job? Add hours.
No pre-lien tooling. No template, no generated notice, no registry submission, no deadline reminder, no place to upload proof of filing. Flow stores the reference number you type.
No lien release document. Stage 7 step 2 says "upload" and there is no upload. The button advances the status; you handle the paperwork.
No change orders after signature. Once a bid is signed there is no supported way in Flow to revise it or add to it. This is the biggest open question in the product. If it comes up on your first job, call — don't improvise in the data.
No photos from the field. Intake takes photos; the Stage 6 checklist does not.
No purchase orders. The materials list is read-only.
The bid builder is desk-only. Intake works beautifully in the field. The builder does not.
No job search or filter. Jobs is a plain list. Fine for your first job; it will not stay fine.
No sales tax. There is no tax field and no tax line. Material prices in your catalog have to be tax-inclusive or every bid comes in light.
No logo on your paperwork. Settings → Business has a Logo URL box. It saves, and today nothing prints it. Your business name, license number, phone and address do print.

If something goes wrong

Text or email Paul the same day — don't work around it quietly and don't retype the job to make it look right. A wrong number that got there through a real workflow is more useful to us than a clean one you fixed by hand.

Worth reporting even if it seems small: anything you had to do twice, anything you expected to happen that didn't, and every place you reached for the spreadsheet instead.