Push a Foreman budget into JobTread without losing a single field

Ask Foreman to push the budget you built on a plan into a JobTread job. Your phases become JobTread cost groups, your lines become cost items underneath them, and the classification fields that used to disappear - unit, cost code, cost type, line order - now arrive filled in.

Every line Foreman writes is stamped with a hidden reference back to the Foreman budget row it came from. That stamp is what lets you push the same budget over and over: the second push finds the line it wrote last time and updates it, instead of adding a second copy.

This works on a job that already exists in JobTread. Foreman will not create the job for you as part of a budget push - open or create the job in JobTread first, then push into it.

Before anything is written, Foreman can show you exactly what it is about to do: which JobTread cost group each line lands in, which unit and cost code each line resolved to, how it decided, and every warning it hit along the way. Nothing is created, changed or deleted during a dry run.

This is the moment to catch a line that resolved to Uncategorized or a unit that had to fall back to something close. Fix it in Budget Builder, dry run again, then push for real.

The default behaviour merges. Lines Foreman previously wrote are matched and updated in place, new lines are added, and anything else on the job budget - lines your team typed into JobTread by hand, phases Foreman does not own - is left exactly as it was. If you moved a line to a different phase in Foreman, the existing JobTread line is re-parented into the new cost group rather than copied into it.

You can also ask for lines to be added without matching, which always creates new rows, or for a full replace. A full replace rewrites the job's entire budget tree and destroys anything that is not in the budget you are sending, so Foreman refuses to run it until you confirm - and it tells you first exactly how many cost items and cost groups would be destroyed. There is no undo for that, so treat it as a last resort.

By default a push only touches the phases it is writing into. It never rewrites the top level of the job budget, which means a line somebody else added in JobTread while you were working cannot be wiped out by your push. There is a faster all-or-nothing mode that writes the whole budget in one shot, but it does rewrite the top level, so it is not the default.

Foreman and JobTread do not speak the same vocabulary. Foreman uses short unit tokens like sqft and cuyd and CSI MasterFormat cost codes; your JobTread organization uses spelled-out unit names and its own numbered trade codes. Foreman translates between them on the way in, reading your complete JobTread catalog - every cost code, cost type and unit, not just the first page.

A cost code is resolved in order: a code that is already one of your JobTread numbers, then a code whose text matches one of your code names, then the CSI section, then the CSI division, then the Foreman category, then keywords in the line description. Only when all of that fails does a line land in Uncategorized - and when it does, you get a warning naming the line. Nothing resolves silently.

You can ask Foreman to preview this mapping for a list of units, cost codes or categories at any time, without touching a budget or a job.

Seventeen of Foreman's units have no equivalent in a stock JobTread organization - square yards, cubic feet, board feet, thousand board feet, hundredweight, weeks, months, sheets, bags, rolls, boxes, pairs, sets, rooms, openings and fixtures. Foreman does not quietly guess. It falls back to the closest unit it can, flags the line, and tells you the exact unit name to create in JobTread to fix it permanently.

Foreman can create those missing units and cost codes for you, but it will not do it on its own initiative. Units and cost codes are organization-wide records that every JobTread user in your company sees, and they cannot be cleanly removed later - so Foreman reports what it would create and waits for you to say yes.

After a push, ask Foreman for the JobTread budget and you get the whole tree - cost groups with their cost items nested underneath, fully paginated, with the unit, cost code, cost type and reference stamp on every line. That is the fastest way to confirm the push landed where you expected.

For the numbers rather than the rows, ask for the job's budget summary: total cost, total price, gross profit, margin, and breakdowns by cost type, cost code and cost group. Those totals are computed inside JobTread rather than by downloading every line, so they stay fast on a large budget.

You can also pull one cost item or one cost group on its own when you are chasing a single number - a group read comes back with its descendant item count and cost total, which is the quickest way to see whether a phase totals what you expected.

You do not have to re-push a whole budget to change one thing. Foreman can create or update a single cost item at full fidelity - name, quantity, unit cost, unit price, unit, cost code, cost type, which cost group it sits in, job area, taxability, and the quantity or price formulas JobTread supports.

Cost groups can be created, renamed, re-described or moved under another group, and a new group can be created with its whole nested tree of subgroups and lines in one step. Deleting a group is different: in JobTread that cascades to every subgroup and cost item inside it and cannot be undone, so Foreman counts what is in there, tells you, and refuses to delete a non-empty group until you confirm.

One more sharp edge worth knowing: replacing a cost group's child list wholesale deletes any child left out of the list. Foreman will not do that without an explicit confirmation either.

JobTread lets you tag a budget line with a job area - Main House, Garage, Guest Suite. An area has to be declared on the job before a line can use it, so Foreman can list a job's areas, set the list, rename one, or delete one and move its lines to a replacement. If a budget line references an area the job does not have, that line is pushed without the area and you get a warning naming it.

Once the budget is in JobTread you can have Foreman generate schedule tasks from it - roughly one task per budget line. That is a bulk write with no bulk undo, so it takes a confirmation and Foreman tells you how many tasks the job already has before it runs.

Foreman can also list, add, change or remove the people allowed to make product selections on a job. Assigning somebody by email address invites a real person, so that path needs your explicit go-ahead; assigning an existing team member does not. JobTread does not allow a whole role to be a selection assignee, only a person.

Separate from any one job, your JobTread organization keeps a catalog of reusable priced items. Foreman can list that catalog, search it by name, add an item to it, or remove one. Catalog items are company-wide, not job records - a change there shows up for everyone in your JobTread account.

This is the JobTread-side catalog. Foreman's own approved rate book is the Cost Catalog inside Company Brain; the two are separate lists and neither one overwrites the other.

Markup percentage is not a field JobTread stores. Foreman carries it as the unit price and reads it back as the difference between unit price and unit cost - so if somebody edits the unit price directly in JobTread, the markup Foreman reads on the next pull will have changed to match. Costs and prices are calculated by JobTread and rounded to the cent, so expect up to a penny of drift per line against Foreman's totals.

Foreman's budget has one flat phase field per line, so a push only ever creates top-level cost groups. If your JobTread budget uses nested groups, those existing groups are preserved untouched, but a Foreman budget cannot express that nesting on the way in.

JobTread's job budget backups are download-only. Foreman can list them for you, but the JobTread API has no restore - a backup is a file you fetch, not something anyone can roll back to. The real undo for a bad budget is pushing a known-good one again.

The cost code mapping is tuned to the numbering scheme your organization uses. A JobTread account with a very different code list will resolve more lines by name and drop more into Uncategorized - always warned, never silent - and the fix is to say what a code should map to and re-push.