Build, move, and staff a JobTread schedule by asking for it

Ask what is coming up and Foreman AI reads the job's real task list out of JobTread. You can filter it the way you would filter the Gantt yourself: a date range, a single trade, a name search, phase headers only, schedule tasks only, or to-dos only. Results can be sorted by start date, due date, name, creation date, or the order they sit in on the schedule, and Foreman AI pages past the first screen instead of stopping at ten rows.

For a single task you can get the full picture: its dates, its baseline dates, how far along it is, its trade, its checklist, who is assigned and whether they accepted, what it waits on, what waits on it, its child tasks, and where it is pinned on the drawings.

For a whole job there is a one-line answer: how many tasks are finished, started, and not started, the rolled-up percent complete, the overall start and finish, which tasks are acting as the start and finish milestones, and how many plan sheets and time entries the job has.

One note on those counts. Finished, started, and not started are a three-way bucket of the task and everything nested under it — not a count of completed children. A task with no children counts itself.

Foreman AI can create a schedule task with the full field set: name, description, start and due dates, start and end times, baseline dates for slip tracking, trade, percent complete, a checklist of subtasks, a parent to nest it under, where it sits in the order, and the tasks it depends on or blocks. A task can be a phase header that holds other tasks, and it can live on a job, on a customer account, or on the organization.

To-dos are a separate list from the schedule in JobTread, and they are created separately here too. A to-do never appears on the Gantt. Ask for a to-do when you mean a punch item, and a schedule task when you mean a bar on the chart.

Two rules JobTread enforces that are worth knowing up front. Start and due dates come as a pair — give one and JobTread wants the other. And there is no separate due-date field: the end date is the due date. Checklists cap at 50 items and descriptions at 4,096 characters.

Trades come from your organization's task types — Framing, Roofing, Inspections, and so on. Foreman AI can list them with their colors, add a new one (names cap at 25 characters, colors are six-digit hex like #2563eb), rename or recolor one, and delete one. Task types are shared organization settings that existing tasks point at, so a delete is refused until you confirm it.

Ask to push a phase and Foreman AI moves it. If you want the work behind it to move too, say so, and the date change cascades down through every dependent task. This is real: moving a predecessor from the 7th to the 14th moved its successor from the 10th to the 19th. You can also cascade to only certain tasks, or to everything except certain tasks.

Because a move can ripple, it is worth looking before you push. Ask what a task waits on and what waits on it, and Foreman AI shows both sides with their dates and progress, so you can see what will slip.

Dependencies themselves are managed from chat. Making one task depend on another defaults to finish-to-start — this task begins after the other one finishes, the normal construction dependency — and you can instead tie it to the predecessor's start, or lock the gap between them so the two move together. Adding a link never wipes the links you did not mention: Foreman AI reads the existing predecessors and merges. Removing one link leaves the rest intact. JobTread allows up to 25 links per task.

Anything else on a task can be changed the same way: rename it, re-describe it, change its trade, re-nest it under a different parent or un-nest it entirely, reorder it, or replace its checklist. Replacing a checklist replaces the whole thing, so give Foreman AI the full list you want, not just the new line.

Tell Foreman AI a task is done and it sets that task to 100 percent, then reads it back to prove the change stuck.

There is no status field on a JobTread task and no done checkbox the API will accept — progress is the only thing that means finished. So "done" is 100 percent, "half up" is 50 percent, and "barely started" is 1 percent. Foreman AI always works in percent and converts to the fraction JobTread stores, which removes a real trap: a bare 1 used to be stored as 100 percent complete.

There is also no priority field on a JobTread task. If you need urgency visible, put it in the task name, the description, or a trade category — there is nowhere else for it to go.

Deleting a task is permanent, so confirm it first. For a repeating task you can delete the single occurrence or the entire series in one call.

Weekly safety meeting, monthly draw, annual inspection — Foreman AI can set a task to repeat, and can stop it repeating later while leaving the occurrences that already exist alone.

JobTread's repeat rules are narrower than most calendars. Weekly, monthly, and yearly work. Daily does not — JobTread rejects it outright. A weekly rule has to name the weekdays, a monthly rule has to name the days of the month (1 through 31; negatives like "last day" are rejected), and you can repeat every N weeks or months.

The important part: a repeat rule creates real task rows, not virtual occurrences on a calendar. Asking for eight occurrences puts eight tasks on the schedule. A rule with no stated number of occurrences generates JobTread's full cap of 50 rows, which is a lot of tasks to appear on a customer's job at once — so say how many you want, or an end date.

Ask who is available and Foreman AI lists your organization's people, how many tasks each already carries, and the hourly rate types configured for them. You can limit it to internal staff and leave out customer and vendor contacts.

Assigning adds to whoever is already on the task rather than replacing them, unless you say to replace the list, and the change is read back to confirm. You can remove one person, or clear the assignees entirely. JobTread allows up to 20 people on a task, and it will not assign a task to a whole role — only to named individuals.

Assignment is not the same as acceptance. Each person's assignment starts as neither accepted nor declined, and you can see who has accepted and who has not, or record an accept or decline on someone's behalf.

Foreman AI can also email a job's assigned crew their schedule. Because that is real mail to real people, it runs as a safe dry run by default: it validates the message against JobTread and sends nothing. It only sends after you have said, explicitly, to send it — and it will tell you who is on the list first.

You can assign a task to someone who is not in your JobTread organization by giving their email address and name. Do this deliberately, because it cannot be undone.

Assigning by email address permanently creates a user and a membership inside your JobTread organization. JobTread's API has no way to delete a membership — only to change one — so neither Foreman AI nor anyone else can remove that person afterwards. A typo in an address leaves a permanent bad record in your org.

The only mitigation is that reusing the same address again attaches to the membership that already exists instead of creating a second one.

So: for anyone already in your organization, assign them as an existing team member — ask Foreman AI who is available and pick from that list. Save the email route for someone genuinely new, and check the spelling of the address before you confirm.

If you build the same schedule over and over, save it once. Foreman AI can create a reusable task template, and the fastest way to build one is to point it at a job whose schedule already works — the whole task list comes across. You can also clone an existing template, or build a to-do checklist template instead of a schedule.

Applying a template stamps the entire saved schedule onto a job in one shot: every task, its nesting, and its relative dates, anchored to a start date you pick. This is the one-call way to set up a new job. Foreman AI compares the task count before and after, so an empty template reports a failure rather than a false success. Applying a template does not email anyone unless you ask it to, and you can choose whether the copied tasks' assignees get access to the job.

Templates can be listed with how many tasks each holds, opened to see exactly what applying one would create, renamed, and pointed at which of their tasks act as the start and finish milestones. Deleting a template is deleting shared organization configuration, so it is refused until you confirm, and verified afterwards.

Logged hours are how actual labor cost lands in a job's budget, and JobTread is strict about where they land. Ask Foreman AI which budget lines on a job can take hours and it lists them — on a typical job only a handful of lines qualify, because the cost type behind the line has to be marked time-trackable. Everything else is refused.

Most organizations also require a cost item on every entry, not just a job. And the rate type on an entry comes from that specific person's configured types, not the organization's overall list: one person may only be able to log Standard, another only their own base rate. Foreman AI reports each person's available types when you ask who is available. Rate and cost are then calculated by JobTread — four hours at $200 an hour comes back as 240 minutes and $800.

You can log a finished block of time, or start an open clock-in by leaving the end off and close it later. Entries can be corrected afterwards — times, job, cost item, rate type, notes, approval — read back individually, listed for a job or the whole organization with hours and cost totalled for the page, filtered by date range, person, type, or approval state, and deleted when they are wrong. Deleting an entry pulls that labor cost back out of the job, so confirm before you do it. GPS coordinates can be attached to a clock-in and clock-out.

One behavior that surprises people: clocking out with a break does not subtract the break from the entry you are closing. JobTread reads it as "going on break" — it closes the current entry now and opens a brand-new entry starting after the break. Foreman AI hands that new entry back to you by name so it does not sit running unnoticed.

A plan sheet in JobTread is a page of an uploaded drawing that tasks can be pinned to, so the crew can see on the drawing exactly where the work is. Upload the drawing first, then have Foreman AI register the page as a sheet with a name, a page number, and a scale.

Sheets can be listed for a job — optionally with the tasks pinned to each one — renamed, repointed to a different page, scale, or source file, and deleted. Deleting a sheet removes the sheet record only; the uploaded file itself stays on the job.

Pins are placed at a spot on the sheet, moved to a different spot, and removed. Removing a pin leaves the task itself untouched. When you move or remove a pin, Foreman AI needs to know which sheet it is on — JobTread offers no way to look a pin up on its own, and Foreman AI refuses to report success on something it cannot verify.

The file behind a plan sheet has to be a PDF. Pointing a sheet at an image already sitting on the same job fails with a misleading "this file does not exist on this job" — the real problem is the file type.