Most big jobs start the same way. You book a visit to go and price it up, you go, you take your measurements, you send the quote. Then the customer says yes.
At that point the work is a project: several days, maybe more than one pair of hands. Building it used to mean starting from an empty screen and re-entering the client, the address and the notes you took standing in their bathroom.
You don't have to any more.
Where you'll see it
Open the visit you did, and under Job Details there's a prompt:
Won this one? Set the project up and I'll bring the client, the address, your notes and the £4,180 quote across.
You'll also get an action card, headed Won It, the moment the customer accepts the quote. Tapping Set the project up takes you to the same place. That's usually the one you'll hit first, because it finds you rather than waiting to be found.
What it asks
Four things, and only one of them needs thinking about:
- Project name. Filled in from the quote, and you can change it.
- Client. Shown so you can check it, not to be re-picked.
- How long, roughly? Worked out from the labour on your quote where you priced it that way. It's a starting number, not a commitment.
- When does it start? Optional. Leave it empty and the days sit unbooked until you're ready to put them in the diary.
Underneath, Mucka lists exactly what's coming across before anything is created. Nothing is saved until you tap Set it up.
What comes across
- The client and the work address, straight off the visit.
- Your notes from the day — the job's own notes and every note added against it, under a dated heading. This is the bit that matters. Your survey notes are the measurements, and they're the thing nobody wants to type twice.
- The accepted quote, attached to the project so the price sits with the work. It stays on the visit too, because that's where it came from.
What happens to the estimate visit
It stays exactly as it is: its own job, still finished, still in your history. The project just records that it came from that visit.
That's deliberate. The visit is usually already marked done, so folding it into the project would open the job at "1 of 4 done" before anyone had picked up a tool, and drag the project's start date back to the day you went to look at it.
If you did charge for the survey, tick Put the estimate visit on the project too on the way through and it'll count as one of the project's jobs.
Booking the days in
Each day you asked for becomes a real job on the project. If you gave a start date they're laid out on working days from there, so three days from a Friday runs Friday, Monday, Tuesday rather than over the weekend.
If you left the date empty, the days are created but not booked in. They'll show as unscheduled until you drag them into the diary or open them and set a date, and they won't hold anyone's time in the meantime.
Nobody is assigned yet either way. Open a day and put an engineer on it whenever you know who's free.
Common gotchas
- The prompt isn't showing. It only appears on jobs that look like pricing visits (anything with quote, survey, estimate or measure-up in the type) or that have an accepted quote against them. It also hides once the job is already on a project, and on cancelled jobs.
- You've already set the project up. Mucka won't build a second one from the same visit. It'll offer to take you to the project you already made.
- The day count looks wrong. It's read off the labour lines on your quote, so a quote with no labour line gives a rough guess instead. Type over it, or change it later from the project.
- You need the Projects skill switched on, and permission to create projects. Engineers and subcontractors don't hold that, so they won't see the prompt.