Workflows, forms, and reporting in JobTread

JobTread has a real automation engine, a forms system, and a reporting layer behind those sidebar views you click every morning. None of it used to be reachable from Foreman. All of it is now.

Everything in this guide needs a connected JobTread account. If Foreman says it cannot see your JobTread, connect it first from the Integrations panel. And as everywhere else, Foreman reads freely but confirms with you before it creates, changes, deletes, or sends anything.

A JobTread automation is a trigger plus a list of actions. Something happens, then JobTread does things about it. The engine is much larger than most people realize: 72 things that can set an automation off and 46 things it can do in response.

Triggers cover almost every record in the system being created, updated, or deleted, plus reminders relative to a due date, a scheduled time of day, an inbound email, and an inbound webhook. Actions cover creating and updating records, finding a related record to work on, sending a notification, calling out to another system, and the plumbing in between: wait, filter, loop, transform, and query.

You do not have to learn any of that. Describe the outcome you want and Foreman looks up the trigger and actions that fit, then shows you the automation it intends to build before it builds it.

New automations are created switched off. That is deliberate. You get to read what it will do, on your own records, before it is allowed to fire once. Turning it on is a separate step, and if the automation notifies real people, Foreman confirms that step with you specifically.

Every time an automation fires, JobTread records the run. Foreman can list those runs by automation or by status, and pull up a single run to show each action's real inputs and real outputs, step by step.

That is the answer to the question every contractor eventually asks about automation, which is why did that not happen. You get the actual data the filter saw and the actual reason a step was skipped, rather than a guess.

Foreman can also start a run on demand, schedule one for later, cancel a run that is queued or in flight, and re-run one that failed. Each of those executes real actions and sends real notifications, so each one is confirmed before it happens. Runs execute asynchronously, so a run you start now may take a few seconds to show a result.

Forms are JobTread's structured data collection: inspections, punch lists, safety checks, walkthroughs, warranty callbacks. A form is a list of typed fields, and it attaches to a job, a customer, a vendor, or the organization as a whole.

Foreman can build a form for you from a description, listing out the fields with sensible types. It can list the forms you already have, read what people submitted, and file a completed submission against a specific job. It can also send a form to someone to fill in, whether that is a teammate, everyone in a role, or an outside email address, which is how you get a sub to complete a safety check.

Reading submissions is where the value compounds. Once a season of inspections is in JobTread, the answers become searchable rather than sitting in a folder.

A web form is the public version: the form you embed on your website so a homeowner can request an estimate. A submission creates a real customer in JobTread, and optionally opens a job at the same time. There is a vendor flavor too, for onboarding subs.

Foreman can list the web forms you have, including each one's public link, build a new one, change its fields, its success message, and who gets notified about a new lead, and delete one. It can also include your own custom fields on the public form, so the lead arrives with the data you actually want.

One honest limit. Foreman cannot submit a public web form on your behalf. JobTread requires browser verification on public submissions, which only a real browser on JobTread's hosted page can provide, and it enforces that even for a trusted integration. Test your form by opening its public link in a browser.

The views down JobTread's sidebar, All Jobs, Pipeline, WIP Report, Job Costing, Unapplied Payments, and whatever your team has built on top of them, are saved report definitions. Foreman can list them and, more usefully, execute them and hand you the rows.

Ask for a report by the name you call it in JobTread. Foreman finds the definition, applies its filters and sorting exactly as saved, and returns the results in chat where you can then ask follow-up questions about them.

It can also create a new saved report so it appears in your sidebar, edit an existing one's filters or columns, and delete one. A new report is personal to you by default. Making it visible to the whole organization is a separate, confirmed choice.

This one is worth reading before you rely on a number. Some of the columns you see in JobTread's own web app are not stored in JobTread and are not available to any integration. They are calculated inside the web page as it draws the table.

Percent complete, projected profit, projected margin, earned revenue, budgeted cost, cost to complete, budget variance, invoiced, over-invoiced, under-invoiced, and a few schedule-derived columns all work this way. A report run through Foreman returns every column that genuinely exists and tells you plainly which ones it could not get, by name.

That is the deliberate behavior: name the gap rather than quietly return a blank column or, worse, fill it with something that looks like a number. When you need one of those figures, JobTread's own screen is the place to read it. For project-level totals such as approved price and cost to complete, ask Foreman for the job's financial summary instead, which is a different and available source.

A small number of report settings are also web-app-only, such as whether a task view draws as a Gantt chart, a calendar, or a kanban board. Those are display choices and have no effect on the rows, and Foreman lists them as ignored rather than silently dropping them.

You do not need a saved report to get an answer. Foreman can build a one-off query against jobs, customers, vendors, budgets, cost items, documents, payments, tasks, time entries, daily logs, locations, form submissions, and team members, with your filters and your sort order.

It can also ask JobTread to do the arithmetic on its side, which is the cheap and fast way to get counts and totals broken down by something. How many tasks by status. Total invoiced by month. Job count by pipeline stage. The grouping happens inside JobTread rather than by pulling every row across and adding it up here.

Foreman can list your JobTread dashboards, see how each tile is configured, build a new dashboard, rearrange or replace its tiles, and control which roles can see it. Leave the roles empty and everyone sees it.

Tiles come in four kinds: a text tile for notes and headers, a table tile that embeds a report definition directly, a chart tile that renders a line, pie, table, or single big number from a count, sum, average, minimum, or maximum, and JobTread's built-in action items and activity tiles.

One structural note. A dashboard tile carries its own report definition inline rather than pointing at a saved report, so editing a saved report does not change a dashboard that shows something similar. If you want both updated, say so and Foreman will do both.

JobTread keeps a full audit trail, and it is richer than most people expect. Every entry carries the complete before and after of the change, who made it, which integration made it if it was not a person, and when.

Foreman can read that history for the whole organization or scoped to a single job, filtered by the kind of change or by a date range. It settles arguments. Who dropped the price on this job. When did this task get reassigned. Did anyone touch the budget after the proposal went out.

One limit to know: JobTread's audit entries do not expose a link back to the record they belong to, so the reliable way to ask is to name the job. Foreman scopes the history to that job rather than trying to guess which record an organization-wide entry refers to.

The short list of things Foreman genuinely cannot do here, so you are never waiting on something that is not coming.