Build, send and track JobTread proposals, invoices and vendor documents

Foreman writes directly into your JobTread Documents tab. Everything it creates is a normal JobTread document — your team can open it, edit it and send it from JobTread exactly as if someone on your staff had typed it in.

All five JobTread document types are available, and each one is created complete in a single pass: cover page, narrative, grouped cost sections, line items, footer terms and signature block together, not an empty shell you then have to fill in line by line.

Ask Foreman to push the estimate across. It builds the whole document in one request — your phases become cost groups, your rows become line items, and the price, cost and tax are calculated by JobTread itself so the totals match what your office sees.

The letterhead defaults to your own company name, not Foreman's. You can override any of it: who it is from, who it is to, the job address, the tax rate, the due date, the narrative above the lines and the terms below them.

If the numbers change after you have pushed it, Foreman can replace the entire line-item tree in one go rather than editing rows one at a time. Replacing the tree replaces all of it — anything not re-sent is removed, so ask for the full revised scope, not just the part that changed.

JobTread does not let a document be called anything you like. Each type has a short fixed list, and the name is really a category — a customer document must be named Proposal, Selections or Change Order; a customer bill must be Deposit, Invoice or Progress Invoice; a vendor document must be Bill, Expense, Purchase Order or Bid Request.

Your real title goes on the subject line, which is what the customer actually reads. Ask for "Change Order #7 - Basement Egress" and Foreman files it as a Change Order with that full title as the subject. If a title does not match any allowed category, Foreman stops and tells you which names are available instead of quietly filing it under the wrong one.

Foreman reads the allowed names live from your own organization settings, so if your JobTread account has been configured differently, you get your list and not a hardcoded one.

Once the document exists, Foreman can add recipients and email it out. Each recipient carries the truth about delivery: whether the email went out, whether it bounced, when the customer last opened the document, and whether they signed.

This matters because the document's own status does not change when you send it. Status tracks approval — draft, pending, approved, denied. A document you emailed an hour ago still reads "draft" until somebody approves it. To answer "did it go out?" Foreman checks the recipient's delivery state, not the status field, and it will tell you if an address hard-bounced.

Turn the signature requirement on or off per recipient. When a signature is required, JobTread will not let the document be marked approved until a real signature exists — Foreman surfaces that refusal in plain language rather than a raw error.

Foreman will never write a signature on your customer's behalf. Signing is something the recipient does in JobTread, on the document you sent them.

Approval moves in one direction. Draft goes to pending, pending goes to approved or denied, and a denied document can go back to draft. An approved document cannot be returned to draft — the only way back out of approved is to deny it. That also governs deletion: JobTread only deletes documents that are in draft or denied, so an approved document has to be denied first.

Foreman can pull JobTread's own rendered PDF of any document — real vector text, JobTread's arithmetic, the signature block as the customer sees it. That is the file to send to a lender or attach to a permit application, not a screenshot or a re-render.

The same works for JobTread's other printable reports: the budget report, selections, specifications, tasks, daily logs and form submissions. The budget and task reports need you to pick a saved JobTread view first, and the specifications report has to be set up in the JobTread interface, so Foreman will ask which view you mean.

Invoices, deposits and progress invoices bill against your job budget. JobTread requires every line on them to point at a budget line that already exists — an invoice cannot invent a cost line the budget has never heard of. The same applies to purchase orders and bid requests. If you want to bill for something new, add it to the budget first, then invoice it.

Proposals, change orders and vendor bills are the exception: those can carry brand new lines.

Foreman can also see the money side. It reads what a document is worth, what has been paid against it and what is still outstanding, and it can apply an existing payment to an invoice, change the applied amount, or un-apply it again. Applying a payment moves real money in your books, so Foreman always confirms with you first. JobTread only accepts credit-type payments here, and only against a document with an outstanding balance.

A draw schedule can be attached to a proposal — named progress billings at a percentage or a fixed amount each. Foreman will not let one of those fire off an email at creation time unless you explicitly say so.

Vendor documents need a vendor. JobTread will refuse a bill, a purchase order or a bid request that is not tied to an existing vendor account in your directory — there is no way to type a supplier name in freehand. If the vendor is not in JobTread yet, add them first, then Foreman can raise the document against them.

Bills and expenses can carry new lines. Purchase orders and bid requests, like invoices, have to bill against budget lines that already exist.

Foreman can list the documents on a job or across your whole organization, filtered by type, by name or by status — every change order on a job, every unpaid invoice, the JobTread twin of a document you built in Foreman.

It can also read one document all the way down: totals and tax, dates, letterhead, the full cost tree, attachments, applied payments and the recipient records. Any field on it can be edited afterwards — subject, narrative, footer, dates, tax, customer details, display settings. Edits do not email anybody unless you ask them to.

Documents can be linked to each other, so a change order can point back at the proposal it amends, or a vendor bill at the time entries it covers. Links can be removed the same way. And a draft or denied document can be deleted outright; Foreman confirms first and then reads the record back to prove it is really gone.

Templates are the branded starting points your team picks from in JobTread — your letterhead, your standard terms, your cover page, your default display settings and payment terms. Foreman can list them, read one in full, create a new one, and update an existing one.

Templates are shared organization settings, not job settings. Changing one changes it for everyone, and deleting one takes it away from the whole company, so Foreman confirms before it does either. It also refuses to delete the built-in Default templates unless you insist — those are what define which document types your organization can create at all, and removing one would take a document type away from your whole team.

Your JobTread connection carries permissions, and they may be narrower than you expect — a connection that can read proposals may not be allowed to create invoices or touch vendor bills. Foreman can check what it is permitted to do before it tries, which turns a confusing failure into a clear answer.

This is the first thing to ask if a push into JobTread fails and the reason is not obvious.