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 · Site visit & scope	Job type, client, site, rooms and what goes in each	Records
2 · Bid	Hours on each item, materials, price	Does it — prices from your rates and your people's wages
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

A few 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 rates & burden 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 rates and payroll burden.
Your people. Under Settings → People, add everyone in the shop once: the ones who sign in (tick Can sign in and pick their Access) and the ones who do the work (pick their Labor rate and enter their Hourly wage). A bid prices labor by who does it, so this is where the real wages live. See People.
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. If you pay sales tax on parts at the counter, set Additional Fees there too, so it is recovered on every bid.
Your catalog. Your shop may have been set up with a sample catalog to get you started — sample parts and sample kits (an outlet, a switch, a can light, a ceiling fan install) — and every shop starts with a draft list of the work you offer at the site visit. Those are somebody else's prices from somebody else's supplier. Import your own parts under Settings → Catalog → Import from CSV before you price materials on a real bid (Importing your SKU catalog), then look over the Work (offered at site visit) list in Settings → Catalog: that is what you'll pick room by room at intake (Catalog items, kits and work). 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, email, address and Contractor license number. Those print on the bid your customer sees. A bid can't be sent until the name, phone and email are there, so the customer knows who it's from and how to reach you. The license number is optional; the bid builder reminds you when it's missing.

Pick your Time zone there too. Every time on a bid, its PDF, the customer's link and your emails is shown in it, with the zone named ("10:00 AM MDT"), so the customer and your crew read the same time you do. It starts on Mountain; Arizona is listed on its own because it skips daylight saving.

Step 1 — Site visit & scope

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

Start from Jobs → + New job (or Start a job on a client's page). The form goes big to small: Job, Client, Site, then Work areas.

Job. First, What kind of job? — Remodel or New construction. A remodel is bid room by room, new construction phase by phase. Flow names the job for you from the client and the street — Carla Reyes — 1234 Oak St — until you type a name of your own in Job name.

Client and site. Pick an Existing client, or add a New client: a person (one name — they're their own contact) or a business (its name plus the contact you deal with). Then the site address — or one of the client's sites already on file. 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. See Clients for adding a client before there's a job.

Work areas. + Add work area for each room or location — Kitchen, Garage — with an optional notes box. Inside each area, type in Add scope to Kitchen… and pick the work that goes there, then set how many: eight outlets is one line with 8. Each area can also carry photos and video you shoot on the spot (Take a photo or video); those stay attached to the job as reference.

Pick the scope honestly: on a remodel the bid opens with exactly this work already in each room.

When the checklist is green, click → Build the bid: it creates the job and takes you to the bid. (The job saves itself as a lead as soon as it has a client, a way to reach them and a site, so you can also leave and come back to it.) Build the bid stays greyed until the three requirement pills are green.

The one to watch: there are no site-condition checkboxes. A finished wall or an old panel goes in the room's notes, and you price it on the bid.

Step 2 — The bid, at a desk

Build the bid on a real screen. The builder is a three-panel workspace. It works at phone width, but it's slow going; a laptop or a big tablet in landscape is the right tool.

The bid opens with your scope already in it. On a remodel, each room holds the work you picked there, as kits with their parts priced and a labor row under each one waiting for hours. On new construction, it opens with the work phases your scope runs through.

Labor. Enter the hours on each item (on new construction, on each phase line), then pick who does it: a role prices at the role's top-paid person, an employee at that person's own wage. Need overtime on one item? + OT / DT. Flow adds your burden lines and your labor overhead & profit. That is the whole point of the thing. You put in hours; it puts out money you can stand behind. Labor that isn't tied to an item — mobilization, a permit run — goes in with Add other labor (on new construction, Add a phase). Those hours count in the bid total but don't fill in an item's hours, so an item still reads 0 hrs total until you enter its own. See Building a bid.

Materials. Under Add a material you pick a part or kit from your catalog (on a remodel, pick the Room first), enter a quantity, and Flow applies the waste percentage carried on the part, your Additional Fees if you set them, and your materials markup. A kit asks what it needs first — which fan, does the house have a neutral wire — then adds everything it brings. Flow doesn't calculate sales tax for the customer.

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: Send stays off until every item has its hours. If the job deserves more money for a hard condition, put it in hours, or click + Premium on the part it applies to.

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, emails your shop that the bid is signed (every owner, unless you've picked who in People), and moves the job 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.

Recording the deposit emails the customer a receipt. If it couldn't be sent (no email on the job, say), the card tells you and offers Send receipt.

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, or take a completion photo of it. When they're all done, Foreman sign-off → Closeout appears.
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 automatic premiums. Nothing at intake changes the price. Hard job? Add hours, or a premium on the part it applies to.
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.
A signed bid isn't edited. It's a contract. Extra work after signing is a change order (+ Start change order on the job). Before it's signed, Revise this bid… makes a new version.
No purchase orders. The materials list is read-only.
The bid builder is best at a desk. Intake works beautifully in the field. The builder works on a phone, but it's slow going.
No sales-tax calculation for the customer. Flow can say on the bid whether your prices include tax (Settings → Business), and Additional Fees recovers the tax you pay on parts, but it doesn't compute a tax line for a jurisdiction.

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.