Glossary of os.construction terms

These docs use a handful of product terms in a specific way. This page defines them. For construction and accounting terms (retainage, WIP, commitment, SOV and the rest), see the construction glossary.

Core

Financials: Project-scoped tools for budgets, contracts, commitments, changes, direct costs and payment applications.

Accounting: Company-scoped books, ledger, AP, AR, banking, payroll, fixed assets and reports, with separate company and entity permissions.

Data core: The single data model that every part of os.construction reads and writes: project tools, project financials, company accounting and reporting. Each workflow owns its records; supported relationships connect them. Agents are planned. See Key concepts: one data core.

Record: One thing that happened or exists on a job, stored once: an RFI, a daily log, a change event, a change order, a commitment, a sub invoice, a pay app. Records have a type, a status, an owner and links; supported tools also keep a change history. See Projects and the record model.

Link: A stored connection between two records: an observation raised an RFI, a change event records the RFI as its origin, a change order was created from the change event.

Job: A project with a contract, a budget structure and records. Also called a project. Riverside Medical Center, Job #24-118, is the sample job used throughout these docs and loaded into every trial.

Tool: One of the 47 project apps, such as RFIs, Submittals, Daily Log or Budget. Tools can be turned on or off per project, and each has its own permission level.

Workspace: Your company account in os.construction: its projects, directory, permission templates and settings.

Trial: Preview. A 14-day free workspace. When it ends, the workspace becomes read-only: you can view and export, but not create or edit. See Start your free trial.

Sample project: Preview. The Riverside Medical Center project loaded into every new trial workspace, with RFIs, submittals, budget, commitments, change orders and pay apps already in it.

Cost structure: The cost codes and cost types a job’s budget, commitments and actual costs share. See Cost codes and budgets.

Status: Where a record is in its life: draft, submitted, approved, posted, void and so on. Each record type has its own statuses. On tools that record history, status changes are written to the audit log.

People and permissions

Permission template: A named set of permission levels, one per tool, applied to a person on a project. New workspaces start with Project Admin, Project Manager, Standard, Read Only and Subcontractor. See Roles and permissions and Set up permission templates.

Permission level: What a template allows on one tool: None (no access), Read Only (view), Standard (view, create and edit) or Admin (also delete and configure the tool).

Company admin: A user with Admin on every tool in every project of the company, plus access to Company Admin settings such as invitations and permission templates.

Outside company: A subcontractor, supplier, owner or design team member in your directory, given a permission template on the projects they work on.

Approval limit: Planned. The amount or record type a person is allowed to approve, for example commitment changes up to a set value.

Approval workflow: The ordered list of approvers on a submittal or change order. Each step holds the ball in court until it responds, and a rejection sends the item back.

Ball in court: Who has to act next on an item, such as the reviewer on an open submittal step.

Agents (Planned)

Agent: Planned. Software that reads records in the data core, does a defined job (matching invoices, drafting a pay app, chasing an RFI) and proposes the result for a person to approve. See How agents work.

Proposal: Planned. What an agent produces: a suggested action on one or more records, with its reasoning and the source records it used.

Agent action: Planned. The change that happens when a person approves a proposal: a hold placed, an RFI sent, a draft created. An agent action is always attributed to both the agent and the approving person.

Approval: A person’s response in a tool’s approval workflow, for example a submittal or change order step: approve, approve as noted, revise and resubmit, or reject. When agents ship, they will never approve.

Approval rule: Planned. A setting that decides who must approve a given kind of proposal or record, based on things like type, amount and job. See Writing approval rules.

Approval queue: Planned. The list of proposals and records waiting for a given person’s decision.

Money and reporting

Exposure: Cost or revenue that might change but isn’t yet in the contract: open change events, pending change orders. See Change events and potential change orders.

Forecast: The current estimate of cost to complete, by cost code, with its history. See Job cost reports and cost-to-complete.

Live view: A report computed from current records rather than a stored export, such as the Budget tool or an Analytics dashboard.

Snapshot: A frozen copy of a view at a point in time. A snapshot doesn’t change after it’s taken. Budget snapshots are in the app today; WIP and owner report snapshots are Planned.

Audit log: The change history of a record (who, what, when, before and after) and the project Activity feed, on supported tools. See Audit log and history.

Field

Field capture: Creating records on site from a phone browser: daily logs, photos, RFIs, punch items, observations, inspections. See Field tools on phones.

Offline queue: Records captured without signal and held on the device until they can sync. Planned. See Offline capture.

Navigation (Preview)

These terms describe the app’s desktop-style interface, which is rolling out now. See Find your way around.

Dock: The strip of app icons on the left edge (at the bottom on a phone): Desktop, Files and the tools you pin.

Launcher: The full-screen grid of every tool you can open, grouped by Project, Financials, Field, Docs and Admin. Open it with ⌘ Space on a Mac or Ctrl Space on Windows.

Spotlight: The search and command bar. Open it with ⌘ K or Ctrl K to find tools, records and projects, or start a new RFI, submittal or other item.

Window: Each tool or record you open becomes a window tab in the system bar, so you can switch back to it. Two windows can sit side by side in split view.

Files: The Documents tool, opened from the dock as a file manager.