Set up the workspace

What the workspace assumes, meaning storage, filing, automation, holidays and weather, and what reaches you, meaning the digest and your sign-in, one section at a time.

Settings is a rail on the left and one section on the right. The rail splits into what the workspace assumes, meaning billing, document storage, QuickBooks, the Outlook add-in, filing folders, automation, the holiday calendar and weather, and what reaches you, meaning the weekly digest, the guided tour and the authenticator app on your sign-in. The first group is workspace-wide; the second is set per person.

Nothing renders until you ask for it. Picking a section on the rail is the whole navigation, and the rail carries the two answers people most often come for without opening anything: whether document storage and QuickBooks are connected, and what the workspace costs.

One save bar per section

Each section is a heading, a short summary, and then cards: one decision to a card. Fields do not save themselves and they have no Save button of their own. Change anything and a bar appears at the foot of the section saying how many fields are unsaved, with Discard and Save changes. Save writes all of them at once.

Some controls are not fields and do not wait for a save: Sync now, Pull costs again, Check for changes, Reconnect, Disconnect, Load the federal holidays, and adding or removing a single holiday. Each of those is an act that takes effect when pressed, and each is reversible by the opposite act.

The filing-folder list is the one editor that saves itself, a beat after you stop. It has no Save button and never had one; the text version of the same list, folded under it, does go through the save bar.

Document storage and filing folders

The storage connection is the account PadFlow reads documents from. It is granted once, for the whole workspace, and its state is also reported on the sync page. The grant lets PadFlow read the library you pick and add and move the files you file through it; PadFlow never deletes, and a test over the code keeps that promise. Where an administrator has to approve PadFlow first, the refusal shows an approval link to send them, and their approval comes back to this page with a note to connect.

Filing folders are the folder names a project's register expects to find. They are workspace-wide so that every deal is filed the same way, and a project maps its own folder to them.

Automation

One section holds every control that decides what PadFlow does without being asked, and each of them says what happens on both sides of its bar.

Filing documents has a bar of its own: at or above it PadFlow files the document and records it in the filing log, and below it the document waits for you with PadFlow's reasoning. The bar belongs to the storage connection and is changed there, beside the switch that decides whether filing happens at all, so this row states it and links to it rather than keeping a second copy.

Reading imports has its own bar, set here and nowhere else. At or above it PadFlow treats what it read as understood and lists it in the import review ready to confirm; below it the sheet waits under Needs you with what PadFlow made of it. Nothing reaches a project either way until you confirm the review.

Extracting from email is a switch rather than a bar, and it is on to begin with. On, a spreadsheet or exhibit that arrives at a project's intake address is read when it lands and an import is prepared for somebody to confirm; off, the file is filed on the register and waits there, and can still be opened in import by hand. Reading is automatic and importing never is: nothing reaches a project's schedule, dates, takedowns, budget or draws until a member with the right role confirms the review, and the review says so at the top.

Beside the switch is the most readings a day that may reach a model. The inbound address is semi-public, so this is the ceiling on what a busy inbox can spend. Past it, files still arrive and are still filed; PadFlow reads them with its own readers alone and the review says it was read without the model that day.

Reading emailed scans and photos is a second switch, and it is off to begin with. The first switch is about cells: a spreadsheet or a text PDF read into rows, without an image of anything leaving. A scan has no cells, so reading one means sending a picture of each page to an AI model, through a gateway, with the instruction that it may not keep them or train on them, and it counts against the workspace's reading budget for the day. That is a different thing to agree to, so it is a different switch, and turning the first one on never turns this one on.

With it off, a scanned PDF or a photographed lot sheet is filed on the register and waits there with Open in import on its row: the click is the consent, and it is the same read on the same budget. With it on, PadFlow reads the pages when the file lands, turns the tables on them into a review, and turns what the pages say about the document (a face amount, a party, an expiry) into lines waiting for somebody to accept or skip. Nothing reaches a project until the review is confirmed. Only the first pages of a file go in one read, and any page past that is named on the run as unread rather than quietly skipped. A document that already has a reading opens on that reading rather than being read again.

The sender gets a receipt saying what kind of document it was read as and how many lines are waiting, and nothing else about it: a verified sender is not necessarily a member of the workspace.

Dates and days

One setting: the timezone this workspace counts a day in. It decides which day a countdown lands on, how many idle days the stoppage monitor has counted, and the “as of” date printed on an exported budget, draw package or takedown schedule. A package built at ten in the evening should carry that evening's date, not the next morning's. The next morning's is what it carried for anyone west of US Eastern before this existed.

Every workspace starts on US Eastern, which is what the whole product assumed before there was anything to set, so leaving it alone changes nothing. The section shows today's date read in whichever zone is chosen, because a place name is not an answer to “is this the right one” and a date is.

Two things it does not move. The weekly digest still goes out on Monday morning US Eastern for everyone: that is a send window rather than a date being read, and it is a separate decision. And a date you typed is the date you typed: this changes how a moment is reported as a day, never a date already recorded.

Holidays

Holidays are a set rather than a register. What matters at a glance is the next one and how far the set reaches, so that is the summary at the top of the section. The days that have already passed are folded away, with the rest in columns by year.

The set is what business-day offsets on a schedule are counted against, so a missing holiday is a date that lands a day early.

Because the set is shared by every project, changing it is not something one person can do quietly from a single job. Adding or removing a holiday, or loading the federal calendar, needs schedule access across every project, not just the ones you are assigned to. When the change moves any dates, each project it touches gets a recompute receipt on its schedule saying which dates moved and by how much, so a shift in the shared calendar is never silent.

Weather

Two knobs, and both decide the same thing: when the portfolio warns you that rain is coming for work you have planned.

The first is which schedule groups stop for rain. Earthwork and paving to start with, because they stop for rain everywhere; after that the answer is regional and it is yours to keep. Names are matched whole, ignoring case and punctuation, so a group goes on the list spelled the way your schedules spell it. The section lists the group names already in use in the workspace so you do not have to go and look. Clearing the box is an answer: nothing is flagged, and the seven-day forecast still shows on every lane.

The second is how much rain counts, in inches forecast for one day. A quarter of an inch is the default, which is about the point a grading crew loses a morning.

A project only takes part once it has coordinates. See the overview for where the flags appear and what fills them in.

The weekly digest

The digest section is your own. Opting out changes what is sent to you and changes nothing for anybody else. What the message contains is on the digest page.

The guided tour and the sample deals

The guided tour section is your own, the way the digest is. It carries one setting, which stops Start here and the New for you card being highlighted for you and changes nothing for anybody else. Nothing is taken away either way: Help then Learn PadFlow still opens any walkthrough, and a link somebody sends you still plays.

The sample deals are loaded from the same section. A workspace does not arrive with them, and loading gives you two whole projects to practise on with nothing real in either: one twenty-two months into development, with a schedule, a budget, draws and documents, and one still inside its feasibility period, which is the deal the walkthroughs about the period before closing are written on. A workspace holding one of the two is offered the same button, because loading and resetting are the same act. Once both are there it reads Reset samples instead, which puts the dates back where the walkthroughs found them and touches nothing outside the samples. Both are acts rather than fields, and both need settings at edit.