How to run your whole build on Crewd

What Crewd is

Crewd is an all-in-one construction-management platform for residential builders. Instead of stitching together a CRM, a spreadsheet estimate, a scheduling app, a shared drive and an accounting tool, everything a project touches lives in one place and stays connected — so approving an estimate builds your budget, sending a change order moves your contract value, and paying a bill posts to job cost automatically.

Three groups work in the same workspace, each seeing only what they should:

The lifecycle, at a glance

Every project moves through the same nine stages. Crewd is organized around them, and each stage feeds the next — the estimate you approve becomes the budget you track, the schedule you publish drives the subs you procure. Here is the whole arc before we walk each piece.

You don't have to use every stage, and not every job starts at the top — you can create a job directly and skip the sales pipeline. But the connections are always there: this guide follows the arc left to right, and the end-to-end walkthrough ties it all together with one project.

Create your workspace

Signing up creates your company workspace and makes you its Owner. It takes one form.

1. Register your companyGo to app.crewd.site/register and enter your company name, your name, email and a password. That's it — you're the Owner.
2. Pick your workspace URLCrewd suggests a short slug from your company name (e.g. summit-builders). It's checked for availability as you type and becomes the address your team and clients use.
3. You're inYour workspace is created with a full set of roles already configured, and you land on the Dashboard ready to add people and work.

# Where you and your team sign in
https://app.crewd.site/login   → company: summit-builders

# Clients and subs you invite land in their own portals
Client portal   ·  Sub portal

Signing in

Because many companies share Crewd, logging in needs three things — not two.

• Company URL — your workspace slug (e.g. summit-builders). Without it, Crewd can't tell which company you belong to and returns "Company not found."
• Email and Password — your personal credentials.

Invited teammates must accept their invitation first (set a password from the emailed link) before they can log in. Deactivated accounts can't sign in until an admin reactivates them.

Roles & permissions

What each person can see and do is governed by their role. A role is a bundle of permissions (called scopes) — like "create jobs", "approve bills" or "view reports". Crewd seeds a sensible set of roles the moment you sign up, and you can tune them or build your own.

Two more roles exist for outside people: Client and Subcontractor, which grant access only to their respective portals. You invite people by type — Team Member, Client or Subcontractor — from Settings → Team Members.

How to invite someone

1. Open Team MembersSettings → Team Members → Invite.
2. Choose the typeTeam Member (internal, pick a role), Client, or Subcontractor.
3. Send the inviteThey receive a link to set a password. Client and sub invites automatically connect to their matching contact or sub-vendor record so their portal is populated on first login.

Office, field & portals

There's one Crewd, but it presents itself differently depending on who's signed in — everyone works from the same live data.

The main sidebar

The internal app's left rail is grouped and ordered like this — items appear only if your role has permission:

A command palette (⌘K / Ctrl K) jumps anywhere, and a job switcher in the top bar hops between jobs while keeping you on the same sub-section.

Contacts & leads

Work usually starts before there's a job. The CRM Hub is where you capture demand, qualify it, and move it down a pipeline until it's ready to become a project.

Contacts

A Contact is a person or household — the spine everything hangs off. Contacts are de-duplicated by email and can hold multiple service addresses (with one marked primary), so the same homeowner can have several projects over the years.

Leads & the pipeline

A Lead is a potential project attached to a contact. Every lead sits in a pipeline stage, and you drag it forward as it progresses. Crewd starts you with a standard pipeline you can rename or reorder in Settings → CRM & Pipeline:

Each lead carries a source, an estimated value and a win probability, and keeps a timeline of activities — calls, emails, meetings, notes and tasks — plus email opens and clicks. Moving a lead to Lost asks you to record a reason (price, timing, competitor, ghosted, other) so your source ROI report stays honest.

Capturing leads

Create a lead by hand, let a public lead form collect them from your website, or import a CSV/spreadsheet — Crewd auto-maps the columns and upserts the contacts.

Convert a lead into a job

When you win, one click turns the lead into a live project.

1. Open the leadCRM Hub → the lead → Convert to Job.
2. Crewd builds the jobIt creates a Job from the lead's project name, type and address, links the contact as the client, and connects the two records.
3. The lead is marked convertedThe lead moves to a Converted state and now points at its job, so your pipeline reporting stays clean.

Estimates

An estimate prices the scope of work as a list of line items. Its real power is what happens on approval: it becomes your budget and sets the contract value — so the numbers you sold are the numbers you track.

Build an estimate

1. Start itOn a job, open Estimates and create one. The title is required and starts blank — name it for what it covers.
2. Add line itemsEach line has a description, a cost code, a cost type (labor, material, equipment, subcontractor, overhead, other), quantity, unit cost and a markup. The line total is qty × unit cost × (1 + markup%).
3. Pull from your catalogInstead of typing prices, add lines from your Cost Catalog (a reusable price book) or assemblies — they arrive pre-coded and priced.
4. Set what the client seesPer line, show full detail, quantity + price only, or roll it into a lump sum — useful for fixed-price presentation.

Import an estimate from a spreadsheet

Already have a takeoff in Excel? The import wizard brings it in over five steps:

You can create a fresh estimate or append the rows to an existing draft, and Crewd suggests a column mapping for you to confirm.

Approve → your budget appears

An estimate moves draft → sent → approved. Drafts and sent estimates are editable; approving locks it and triggers the cascade that makes the rest of the platform work:

• Every line rolls up into budget lines by cost code and type — your job's estimated cost column is now populated.
• The job's contract value and baseline are set to the estimate total.

Proposals & e-sign

A proposal is the client-facing, branded version of an estimate — the document you actually send to win the job.

• Send Proposal generates a private, tokenized link the client opens in their browser — no login needed.
• The client reviews scope and price and e-signs to accept.
• Proposals can carry a payment schedule and collect a deposit up front, and those milestones can later generate invoices.

Between the pipeline, the estimate and the proposal, "winning the work" is fully covered before a single day of construction is scheduled.

Create a job

A job is the container for a project — everything from here on hangs off it. You can create one from a won lead (above) or directly.

1. New JobJobs → New Job. Only two things are required: a name and a job type (custom home, kitchen remodel, addition, and so on).
2. Configure itOpen Edit Job to set the contract price and contract type (fixed price or open book), address, schedule dates, work days, job managers, and which clients are attached.
3. Turn features onCore tools (schedule, tasks, logs, files, budget, invoices) are always on. Optional modules — Change Orders, Selections, Warranty, Procurement — can be toggled per job.

A job moves through lead → active → on hold → completed → archived as it runs.

The job workspace

Opening a job gives it its own grouped side-nav. This is where you'll spend most of your time:

Schedule

The schedule is a work-day-aware Gantt chart of everything that has to happen, in order. It's the heartbeat of the job — subs and clients see it, and moving one item can ripple through the rest.

Build the schedule

1. Add itemsEach item has a name, start date and duration in work days, and can be assigned to a sub or crew.
2. Link themGive an item a predecessor so it follows another automatically. Crewd offers the two links you'll actually use — Finish-to-Start (do this after that finishes) and Start-to-Start (start these together) — each with an optional lag in days.
3. Let it cascadeWhen you move or resize a linked item, everything downstream shifts to keep the chain intact — skipping weekends, holidays and non-work days so durations stay honest.

Zoom & baseline

Switch the Gantt between Day / Week / Month / Year, jump to Today, or go full screen. Capture Baseline snapshots the plan so you can later see planned-vs-actual bars side by side.

Draft privately, then publish

When you need to reshuffle a lot without alarming everyone, flip the schedule Offline. While offline it's hidden from client and sub portals and no shift notifications go out — you plan in peace. Bringing it back online with unsaved changes asks you what to do:

Keep & publish commits your edits and notifies affected subs; Discard changes reverts the schedule exactly to the moment you went offline — re-adding anything you deleted and removing anything you created. Subs confirm or decline the new dates from their portal.

Field & documents

Once work is scheduled, the field records progress and the office keeps the paperwork straight — all against the same job.

Specifications

Specifications capture the written scope, materials and standards for a job — rich-text documents you control precisely.

• Write and order them however the job needs.
• Share each spec independently with the client portal, the sub portal, or keep it internal.
• In the portals they appear as a tidy list; clicking one opens the full document in a view modal.

How the money flows

Crewd's financials all feed one ledger: the budget. Each budget line (keyed by cost code and type) tracks five running numbers — estimated, committed, actual, invoiced and paid — and every financial action posts to exactly one of them. Learn this diagram and the rest of the money section clicks into place.

Because these are connected, your budget is always live — no month-end reconciliation to see where a job stands. The Budget screen (per job, or company-wide) shows estimated vs. committed vs. actual at a glance.

Purchase orders

A PO commits money to one sub or one supplier for specific line items.

1. Create itAdd lines by hand, or build a PO straight from approved estimate lines — pick the lines (or a whole cost type) and Crewd drafts the PO for you.
2. Send itThe sub gets it in their portal. Crewd blocks sending to a sub whose insurance has lapsed unless an authorized user overrides.
3. Approve itApproval commits the amount to the budget. POs over your per-job threshold require an elevated approver.
4. Convert to a billWhen the work's done, turn the PO into a bill — in full, a partial amount, or a percentage — which moves the money from committed toward actual.

Bills

A bill is money you owe — a sub's invoice or a supplier receipt. Approving it records real job cost.

• Submitting a bill can open an approval request based on your rules; approval posts the amount to actual cost.
• Ready for payment is a queue for the bookkeeper — approved bills waiting to be cut a check.
• Recording payment is manual (check, wire, cash, ACH). A lien-waiver requirement can gate payment until the waiver is signed.
• Bills can link back to the PO they came from and, for progress work, to a schedule item.

Change orders

A change order (CO) captures a change in scope after the contract is set — and, crucially, moves the contract value when the client approves it.

1. Create itAs line items or a flat fee. Clients can also request one from their portal, which lands as a draft for you.
2. Send itIt goes to your approvers and, if client-visible, to the homeowner to e-sign.
3. On approval, everything updatesThe CO adds to the budget's estimated column, moves the job's contract value by the net change, and shifts projected completion by any schedule impact. If you flagged invoice on approval, Crewd auto-creates a sent invoice for the CO amount.

Costs from a CO can flow into a PO stamped with a variance code, so committed and actual dollars trace straight back to the change.

Invoices & payments

Invoices bill the client and track what they've paid.

• Send posts the amount to the budget's invoiced column and notifies the client in their portal.
• Record a payment (check, wire, cash or ACH) to log what's come in; part-payments mark the invoice partial, full payment marks it paid, and both post to the paid column.
• Generate invoices automatically from a progress draw (percent complete against the budget) or from a proposal's milestones.

Bids & RFQs

Before you commit a PO, competitive bidding gets you the right price from your subs.

1. Package the scopeGenerate bid packages straight from your estimate, grouped by cost code or trade.
2. Invite subs & openOpening the bid sends each invited sub a request; they respond in their portal or via a public RFQ link — flat or line-by-line pricing.
3. AwardPick the winner; Crewd marks the others declined and can auto-generate a PO from the winning bid, closing the loop into procurement.

Selections

Selections are the client's choices — finishes, fixtures, appliances — each with an allowance and priced options.

• The client browses options in their portal, sees the price against the allowance, and approves & e-signs.
• If a choice is over or under its allowance, Crewd can auto-draft a change order for the difference — no manual reconciliation.
• An approved selection can push straight into a purchase order, and can be tied to a schedule task with a lead time so it's chosen before it's needed.

Warranty

After handoff, warranty keeps the relationship tidy. Clients raise claims from their portal and track them to resolution.

The client files a claim (title, location, priority, description), follows its status and any service appointment, and e-signs the resolution when it's fixed. Warranty periods and maintenance reminders are configured per job.

The portals

Clients and subs each get a focused, permission-controlled portal. You decide, per job, exactly what they can see.

Visibility is enforced everywhere: schedule items, tasks, files, daily logs, change orders, selections and specifications each carry flags for who may see them, and the portals never expose your internal cost data unless you explicitly turn it on.

Approvals

Approval rules put money controls in place without slowing everyone down. You define the thresholds once; Crewd enforces them everywhere.

1. Write a ruleSettings → Approval Rules. A rule targets an entity — purchase order, change order, bill or invoice — with a condition (e.g. amount ≥ $5,000) and who's allowed to approve.
2. Crewd opens a requestWhen someone sends a PO or submits a bill that matches, Crewd creates a pending approval request and notifies everyone qualified to decide.
3. An approver decidesThe Approvals inbox lists pending requests. Approving runs the same posting the normal approve would (committing a PO, posting a bill to actual, and so on); rejecting sends it back.

Rules layer on top of the built-in guardrails — per-job PO thresholds, insurance checks on subs, and lien-waiver gates on payments.

Settings & integrations

Settings is where you shape the workspace to your company. The sections:

Seed your catalog

To hit the ground running, one click seeds a standard set of cost codes and a starter cost catalog (a price book referencing those codes). Both are safe to run once — they won't create duplicates.

End-to-end walkthrough

Here's the whole platform in one story — a single kitchen remodel from the first call to the final warranty visit. Every step links to its section above.

1. A lead comes inA homeowner submits your public lead form. It lands in the CRM Hub as a New lead attached to a fresh contact. You call, log the activity, and drag it to Qualified.
2. You price itYou create an estimate on a draft job, pulling line items from your Cost Catalog. It totals $88,000.
3. You send a proposalYou send a branded proposal with a 20% deposit schedule. The client e-signs and pays the deposit online.
4. The lead becomes a jobYou convert the lead; the job is created, the client attached, and the lead marked converted. You set it to fixed-price and invite the homeowner to their portal.
5. You approve the estimateApproving it builds the budget — every line becomes an estimated cost — and sets the contract value to $88,000.
6. You plan the scheduleYou draft the schedule offline: demo → rough-in → cabinets → counters → finish, each linked Finish-to-Start. When it's right, you publish; the plumbing sub gets notified of their dates.
7. You bid and buyYou send the cabinet scope out as a bid to three subs, award the winner, and Crewd drafts a purchase order. Approving it commits the money.
8. The client makes selectionsThe homeowner picks a countertop that's $1,200 over allowance in Selections. Crewd auto-drafts a change order; the client e-signs, the contract value ticks up to $89,200, and an invoice for it is raised automatically.
9. The crew buildsOn site, the crew clocks in, logs the day with photos, and closes out tasks — all in the field tools against the job.
10. Costs and draws flowThe cabinet sub's invoice arrives; you convert the PO to a bill, approve it (posting actual cost), and pay it after the lien waiver is signed. You send the client a progress-draw invoice and record their check.
11. You close outThe job is marked completed. Months later the homeowner files a warranty claim about a cabinet hinge; you schedule the fix and they e-sign the resolution. Done.

That's Crewd end to end — one workspace carrying the project the whole way, with the numbers staying connected at every step.