Organizing your projects

Once you've run a few dozen jobs through BidCraft, the Projects page has a lot on it — won jobs, dead proposals, and half-started drafts all sitting in the same pile. The Pipeline view, the filter chips, and the search box exist to cut that pile down to whatever you actually care about right now.

The Pipeline view

Projects opens in Pipeline view. Instead of one long list, your jobs are stacked into the stages of a sale:

Each stage header shows how many jobs are in it and, when there's a proposal attached, what that stage is worth in total. It's the fastest way to answer "how much am I waiting on right now?" without opening anything.

Tap a stage header to collapse or expand it. Completed starts collapsed since it's usually the biggest pile and the least urgent. Stages with nothing in them don't show up at all.

[!tip] The Waiting on Client total is the number worth watching. If it's big and it hasn't moved in a couple of weeks, that's your follow-up list.

Three ways to look at it

The toggle at the top right switches between three layouts:

• Pipeline — the default. Stages stacked down the page, each one collapsible.
• Board — the same stages side by side as columns. Scroll sideways to move down the funnel; on your phone the columns snap one at a time. Every stage shows here, even the empty ones, so you can see the whole shape of your funnel at a glance.
• Grid — the old flat wall of cards, newest first.

BidCraft remembers your choice on that device, so if Board is how you think, you'll land there next time you open Projects.

[!note] You can't drag a job between stages. Stages move on their own as the work moves — build a proposal, send it, the client signs — so the board is always telling you the truth rather than whatever somebody last dragged.

Shelving a job you're not chasing

Not every job deserves to sit in your pipeline. A client who went quiet, a bid you know you lost, a job the homeowner wants to start next spring — those clutter the view and skew your totals.

You have two shelves for that:

• Not Ready — real job, wrong timing. Park it and come back.
• Lost — you didn't get it, or it died.

Shelve a job from the ··· menu on its card, or from the Actions menu on the project screen itself.

[!note] Shelving is not deleting. Nothing is thrown away — not the photos, not the measurements, not the proposal. The job just steps out of your active views. Shelving is available to owners, admins, and sales.

Finding shelved work again

The three chips above your projects — Active, Not Ready, and Lost — control what you're looking at. Active is the default. The other two show a count so you can see at a glance how much is parked.

Tap Not Ready or Lost and you'll get a flat list of what's on that shelf, each card badged with which shelf it's on and how long it's been there.

To bring one back, open its ··· menu and pick Back to Active. It returns to exactly the pipeline stage it was in before — a lost proposal that was already sent lands back in Waiting on Client, not at the beginning.

Search

The search box filters by project name, client name or the client's address (street, city, state or ZIP), in whatever view and whichever chip you're on. Type a last name and you'll see that client's jobs and nothing else; type a street or a town to find the job at that address. Clear it to go back to the full view. The search box on your dashboard's Projects card opens this page with your words already filled in.

[!tip] Search only looks at what the current chip is showing. If a client's job isn't turning up, check the Lost and Not Ready chips — somebody may have shelved it.

What's next

Shelved jobs also drop off your dashboard, so the stage counts and the total in play on the Projects card reflect live work only. For more on what those numbers mean, see Generating your first proposal and Tracking views and signatures.