Jobs

The Jobs screen is the heart of QELM — it’s where the work you do for your customers lives. Every job tracks what you agreed to build, what it’s costing you, what you’re billing and collecting, and — most importantly — whether it’s making you money. This guide walks through reading your jobs, filtering them, and working inside a single job’s seven tabs, plus how to merge jobs together.

The jobs list

The main screen lists every job in your workspace. Each row shows the job name (and its code), the client, the job’s status, the contract amount, and the profit so far. Profit is shown with its sign — a positive number means the job is ahead, a negative number means it’s behind — so the meaning reads the same whether or not you can tell the colors apart.

Select a job to open its detail.

Filtering and searching

Use the search box to filter the list by a job’s name, client, or code as you type.

Above the list is a row of status filter pills, one per status, each with a count so you can see at a glance how many jobs are in each state:

• All — every job.
• Active — jobs currently in progress.
• Completed — jobs that are finished.
• On Hold — jobs paused for now.
• Cancelled — jobs that were called off.

By default the list shows your live jobs. Use Show Archived to bring archived jobs into view, and Hide Archived to go back. Archiving keeps a job’s history without cluttering your working list.

Adding a job

Use + Add Job to create a job. A job carries its name, code, client, contract amount, retainage percentage, start date, and status. Once added, it appears in the list and is ready to track costs and income against.

Reading a job

Open a job from the list. The detail screen is organized into seven tabs you can move between with your mouse or the arrow keys, in this order:

• Overview — the job’s details: client, code, contract amount, retainage, start date, who sold it, and the job description.
• Line Items — the contract and billing summary: the contract amount, how much you’ve invoiced, how much you’ve collected, and the unpaid balance. Line items are billed through the job’s estimates and invoices.
• Expenses / Income — record what the job costs and what it brings in (covered below).
• Labor — the time your team has logged against the job, which is the other half of what the job costs you.
• Profitability — the bottom line: did this job make money (covered below).
• Change Orders — the extra work agreed after the original contract (covered below).
• Blueprints — upload and review the job’s documents (covered below).

Expenses and income

The Expenses / Income tab is where you record money flowing through the job:

• Expenses — what the job costs you: materials, a vendor, the amount, and the date.
• Income — money received against the job: the amount, the date, and a description.

A running total of income, expenses, and labor is shown so you always know where the job stands. You can remove an entry, which archives it (you can restore it later) — QELM asks you to confirm first so nothing is deleted by accident.

The Profitability tab

The Profitability tab answers the one question every job comes down to: did this job make money? It used to be a separate screen; now it lives right inside the job, so the numbers are always next to the work they describe.

It shows:

• Revenue — what the job has brought in, against its contract amount.
• Total Costs — your expenses plus labor.
• Net Profit — revenue minus costs, with the profit margin. The sign on the number carries the meaning, not the color alone.
• Retainage Held — the portion of revenue held back per the job’s retainage percentage.
• A cost breakdown (expenses vs labor) and a line-by-line profitability detail.

These figures are calculated by QELM from the job’s own income, expenses, and labor — the same trusted calculation everywhere it appears — so the profit you see here is the profit you see in your reports. It never mixes in payment-processor data; it’s purely your job’s costs against what it earned.

Change Orders

Work grows. When the customer agrees to something beyond the original contract, that agreement is a change order, and it lives on the Change Orders tab of the job it belongs to.

An approved change order raises the job’s contract amount — that is the point of it. The job’s Line Items and Profitability tabs then measure against the new, larger contract, so the extra work is not quietly eating your margin.

How one moves:

1. Create it on the job. Describe the extra work and what it is worth.
2. Get it approved. Download the change order as a PDF to send to the customer for sign-off. Once they agree, a Manager or Admin approves it in QELM, which is what raises the contract. An unapproved change order does not move the contract.
3. Bill it. Approved change-order money is what a bill the balance invoice picks up. When such an invoice is downloaded or emailed, the change orders it bills travel with it in the same PDF — see Invoices.

Keeping the change orders on the job is what makes the profitability figure honest: the contract, the extra work, the costs, and the billing are all measured in the same place.

Blueprints

The Blueprints tab is where you keep the job’s drawings and documents. Use the upload form to add a blueprint — give it a title and choose a file — and it appears in the list below, stored safely and scoped to your own workspace.

Merging jobs

Sometimes the same work ends up split across two jobs. The merge tool (in the Blueprints tab) lets you fold one or more other jobs into this one: their line items, expenses, income, and time all move here, and the others are archived. Because this combines records and can’t be undone, QELM asks you to confirm — “Merge these jobs?” — before it happens. Merging is limited to administrators and managers.

A note on what you see

The Jobs screen shows only your own workspace’s jobs and their money. If the list looks empty, it usually just means nothing has been added yet; it fills in as you add jobs and record their costs and income. For how the rest of QELM fits together, see the Guides overview.