Managechat, time, schedule and site visits
The team-operations layer around the QS work: where the practice talks, tracks the time it spends, schedules its people, and records what it saw on site.
Four things a practice does that are not the bill
Stages and Measure are the production tools. Manage is the layer around them: where the firm talks, tracks the time it spends, schedules its people, and records what it saw on site.
Chat
Public and private channels, direct and group messages, threads, reactions, @-mentions with autocomplete, presence, typing indicators, unread and mention badges, and permission-scoped search.
Time
A running timer, a week grid, timesheets to submit and approve, a team view, and profitability — five views over one table, each answering a different question a firm asks of its hours.
Schedule
Team timeline, project timeline, capacity, leave and planned-versus-actual, all reading the same window of days so no two views can disagree about who is free.
Site visits
Visits with attendees, typed and status-tracked observations, travel logs with distance and GPS, and photos — plus an open-queries view that cuts across every project.
Built around how a QS firm actually charges
Time tracking borrowed from agency software gets this wrong in a way that is hard to undo. Manage is built the other way round.
No hourly billing, anywhere
A QS firm bills milestones, not hours. So there is no billable switch on any screen, no rate beside a duration, and no currency outside Profitability — where the money is cost, what the firm pays.
Cost is frozen when the timer stops
The cost rate is snapshotted at stop time and never looked up again. Changing what somebody costs next year does not rewrite the cost of hours already worked.
One running timer per person
Enforced by a partial unique index in the database, so having the app open on two devices cannot produce two clocks.
A public holiday is not somebody's leave
Organisation-wide availability is stored once and subtracted from everyone's capacity, rather than as a row per employee that somebody has to remember to add.
A seat is an access decision
Manage opens when the organisation is paying for it and the member holds a seat — both, not either. The two refusals are told apart, so a member is sent to their administrator and an administrator is sent to Billing.
A failed card does not lock a surveyor out of a conversation mid-tender: a past-due subscription still grants access, while a cancelled or paused one does not.
A companion app for the site
The mobile app signs in through the surveyor's real browser, so their password manager and MFA work and the app never sees a password. It is Manage-only, and refuses to sign in at all without a Manage seat.
One seat runs on one device at a time. A second phone is refused rather than stealing the claim from the first.
What Manage does not do yet
Worth knowing before you buy a seat. These are tracked, not hidden.
Notification fan-out
Mentions raise an in-app badge. There is no worker service, so nothing sends email or push, and scheduled messages have schema but no delivery.
Accounting connector
Connector storage exists. There is no OAuth, no sync and no push — because the fee model it would need is still undecided.
Fee structure and milestone billing
How the firm actually invoices — percentage of construction cost drawn down by stage, fixed lump sum split across milestones, or both — is not yet decided or built.
Add Manage to the practice
Manage is priced per active seat, on its own or in the Bundle with Stages and Measure.