One real job — Estimate 4502, Renaissance Lighting and Metal Furniture — from the moment your team sends the confirmation to the moment production is released. Your tracker on the left, the customer’s portal on the right. Whichever side is acting is the side that lights up.
Everything above rests on one edit to your tracker. It is already made and working on the sandbox copy — your live tracker is untouched.
Before — a job got a due date the moment money cleared:
Due = Deposit Paid + (Lead Time × 7)
After:
Due = Confirmation Complete + (Lead Time × 7)
An empty Due column now means one specific thing, readable at a glance down the whole tracker: we are waiting on the customer. Not “no deposit yet”, not “nobody got round to it”. On the sandbox right now, one job has a due date and 373 do not — because only one has been confirmed through the portal.
Every job already in production was confirmed the old way — on the PDF form, by email, or over the phone. Those jobs need a Confirmation Complete date filled in, or they will show as waiting on a customer who already answered you months ago.
Send us the returned order confirmation forms for open jobs and we will backfill from them. Real dates from real forms — no guessing, and no job silently losing its due date at go-live.
If a customer says they do not need shop drawings, that question is finished — both the requirement and its approval go green immediately. Same for submittals. They are not left waiting on an approval for a document nobody is going to produce.
Worth stating because the opposite is an easy mistake to make, and a quiet one: a checklist that can never reach zero for the customers who ask for the least, which would mean their clock never starts at all.
When a customer confirms an answer, how long can they change their mind before it locks? Mark argued both sides on 4 August — a grace window so a misclick is fixable, but no silent delay that leaves you waiting.
Our recommendation does both: the tracker updates the instant they confirm, so you are never waiting; they can still correct their own entry until end of day, and each correction updates the tracker again; after that it locks and the portal tells them to call you.