Connect JobTread and set up your organization from Foreman AI

Connecting takes about a minute and only has to happen once per person. You need a JobTread Grant Key, which JobTread issues from its own integrations settings page.

Open a Foreman AI workspace, then use the message box at the bottom of the screen. Tap the plus button to the left of where you type, choose Integrations, and open the JobTread section.

Paste your grant key into the JobTread Grant Key box and press Connect. Foreman checks the key against JobTread before it saves anything. If JobTread rejects the key, you get the reason on the spot and nothing is stored.

Once the key is saved, the Integrations panel shows a green dot, the JobTread user the key belongs to, the organization name, and the last few characters of the key. That organization name is the check that matters most: if it is not the company you expected, the key belongs to a different JobTread account and you should disconnect and use the right one.

Then ask Foreman something read-only. A good first question returns real numbers from your account, not a general answer about JobTread.

Foreman never asks you to type or paste a grant key into a chat message, and you should never volunteer one there. A chat message is stored as part of the conversation; the Integrations panel is not. The key box is a password field, it is cleared the moment the key is saved, and afterwards only a masked version is ever displayed back to you.

If someone or something ever asks you to paste a JobTread key into chat, into a support ticket, or into a screenshot, treat that as a red flag and rotate the key in JobTread instead.

Each person connects their own key. Foreman does not quietly borrow a teammate's connection: if you have not connected, JobTread tools simply are not available to you, rather than silently running against somebody else's organization.

Your grant key carries your JobTread permissions with it. Foreman can do what that key can do in JobTread and nothing more. If your JobTread role cannot see a job's financials or delete a cost code, Foreman cannot either, and it will tell you it was refused rather than pretend the work happened.

You do not have to guess where the line is. Foreman can ask JobTread directly whether a specific action on a specific record is permitted, and it can ask the reverse question too: which people in your organization are allowed to do a thing. That is the fast way to find the right approver for a change.

Permission checks are read-only and instant. Foreman uses them before attempting a write that looks risky, so you get a clear answer instead of a failed change.

Reading is free and immediate. Writing is not. Before anything is created, updated, deleted, uploaded, or sent into JobTread, Foreman states exactly what it is about to do and waits for you to confirm.

Confirmation is not a formality on shared settings. Cost codes, cost types, units, custom fields, roles, and webhooks are organization-wide: everyone in the JobTread account sees them, and a delete lands in every estimator's picker list. For those, Foreman requires an explicit yes and will name the safer alternative if one exists.

If you do not confirm, nothing is written. If a write ever happens without you approving it, that is a bug worth reporting, and the JobTread change history will show exactly when it happened and what changed.

Custom fields are how a contractor models the parts of the business JobTread does not ship out of the box. A Status field on every job with your real pipeline stages. A W-9 on file checkbox on every vendor. An insurance expiry date so nobody works uninsured. A permit number on the job record.

Until now Foreman could not see any of it. Your jobs carried the data, and to Foreman the jobs looked blank. Foreman can now list the custom fields your organization has defined, read the values stored on a specific job, customer, vendor, contact, location, cost item, or daily log, and write those values back when you ask.

That single change makes a whole class of questions answerable. Where is this job in our pipeline, and move it to Construction. Which subs have insurance expiring in the next thirty days. Which vendors are missing a W-9. Show me every job still sitting in Estimating.

Foreman can also create and edit the fields themselves: add a new field, choose its type, and set the list of choices on a dropdown. A field is a new column for the whole organization, so Foreman confirms the name and what it attaches to before creating it.

Your catalog is the backbone of every budget, so Foreman treats it carefully. It can create and edit cost types with their default margin and taxable flag, create and rename units of measure, and clean up duplicates in either list.

Deleting a catalog record is almost never the right move on its own. A cost code that budget lines already reference leaves those lines orphaned when it disappears. Merging does the same cleanup safely: every budget line pointing at the old record is re-pointed onto the replacement, then the old one goes away. Foreman offers the merge first and asks which record should inherit the work.

When you only want a record out of the way rather than gone, retiring it is better still. Marking a cost type or unit inactive takes it out of the pickers and leaves all history intact.

Default margin on a cost type is entered as a fraction, not a percent. Twenty-five percent is 0.25. Foreman converts for you when you say it in plain language, and JobTread rejects the number outright if it is sent as 25.

If you import budgets or price books from spreadsheets, JobTread keeps a set of saved aliases so an incoming column or value resolves to the right catalog record every time. Labour maps to Labor. SQ FT maps to SF. Foreman can list the aliases you already have, add new ones, and remove ones that no longer apply.

Setting these up once before a big import saves the manual matching pass afterwards. Foreman checks the existing aliases first so you do not end up with two aliases fighting over the same column.

JobTread roles come in three kinds: internal roles for your staff, customer roles for the client portal, and vendor roles for the sub portal. Each one carries a list of permissions and a list of the job file folders that role is allowed to see.

Foreman can list your roles with their full permission sets, create a new one, adjust an existing one, and delete one. Reading them is the underrated part: it answers questions like which roles can see the plans folder, or what a customer-portal login can actually do, without clicking through settings.

One thing to know before editing. A role's permission list is a replacement, not an addition. Foreman reads the role first and sends back the whole intended list, so asking it to add one permission does not wipe the rest. Deleting a role affects every person currently assigned to it, so that one is confirmed explicitly.

A webhook tells JobTread to POST to a URL of yours whenever chosen events happen: a job is created, a document is sent, a payment lands, a daily log is filed. There are 43 event types, and Foreman can subscribe to any subset of them or to all of them at once.

Be aware of one real limit before you create one. JobTread has no way to edit an existing webhook. The URL and the event list are fixed at creation, so changing either means deleting the webhook and creating a replacement. Foreman will say so rather than pretending an edit went through, and it will walk you through the delete-and-recreate.

This is also the cleanest way to spot a dead integration. A webhook whose endpoint has been erroring for months sits there silently; asking Foreman to review your webhooks surfaces it.

Foreman can read your organization's locale settings, which country, currency, language, and time zone it runs on, and which other services are already wired into JobTread, such as Slack, Twilio, Stripe, or QuickBooks Desktop. Useful when a number looks off by a currency or a timestamp looks off by a time zone.

It can also search JobTread's own help library and pull back the full article. So when the question is genuinely how do I do this in JobTread rather than what is in my JobTread, Foreman answers with JobTread's documented procedure instead of guessing at it.

Work through these in order after you connect. The first four are read-only and prove the connection. The last one proves the safety behavior: Foreman should describe the change and wait for you before anything is written.