STrOp · Learn
Practical knowledge for specialty contractors
Compliance, change management, project controls, and the data discipline that compounds across bids. Written for California specialty subs — owners, PMs, estimators, and the field.
A new shop in STrOp — sign up and set up in one sitting
Create your organization in the two-step wizard, take the thirty-second tour, and let the getting-started checklist tick itself off as your real data lands.
Apprenticeship on public works — DAS 140, DAS 142, and the 1-to-5 ratio
The two notices you owe the apprenticeship committees and the journeyman-to-apprentice ratio auditors actually count — miss them and the penalties accrue per violation, per day.
Award a job — what flips when you win
The Award Job button is the moment a pursuit becomes a job — what the three-field form records, what changes underneath, and the setup work that's deliberately still yours to do.
Baseline vs current vs actuals — the three views every project lives in
A baseline is the promise. Current is the forecast. Actuals are the receipts. Treating them as one number is how subs miss overruns until they're paying for them.
Bill the month — a pay app that doesn't bounce
Open the period, let the G703 build from the SOV, enter percent complete, submit to open the receivable, generate the §8132 conditional waiver, and send one package whose math ties to the SOV.
Build your crew roster
Add your workers once — name, classification, agreement, rate — and every timecard, schedule slot, and certified-payroll line downstream fills itself from the roster instead of being retyped.
Buy out the material — a PO from the estimate to the lot
Build a purchase order from the estimate's material lines, issue it, receive the truck from the lot, and watch committed cost land on the budget the day the PO issues, not the day the invoice does.
California lien deadlines — preliminary notice, stop notice, mechanic's lien
The three deadlines that protect your right to get paid on a private California project. Miss one, lose the remedy.
Certified payroll — one run a week, eCPR out the door
Build the week's certified payroll run from approved timecards, generate the eCPR XML DIR takes, print the A-1-131 for the GC's portal, and read the Compliance tab before you leave.
Certified payroll — weekly cadence and DIR submission
When CPRs are due, what "work performed" means, and how STrOp builds the LCPtracker / eCPR export.
Close out the job — punch, package, retention, done
Clear the punch list, file the closeout documents so the package assembles itself, issue substantial completion, and bill retention on the final application with the §8138 waiver behind it.
Closing the loop — warranty callbacks become next year's contingency
Most subs lose the warranty data trail because the callback lives in a different inbox than the estimate. The loop is short, the payoff is high, and the discipline is mostly about where the data lives.
Companies and contacts — who you bid, who pays
Set up the GCs, owners, and people you work with once — typed correctly — and every pursuit, proposal, and invoice downstream links to the right party automatically.
CSLB license renewal — windows, fees, and the gotchas
When the 60-day renewal window opens, what an "active" vs "inactive" renewal means, and what STrOp warns you about.
Daily site photos and the daily report
Capture the day while it's happening — the timecard's daily report (work completed, areas, site conditions, delays, deliveries, weather) and the photos, shot from the phone with a caption and a category — so when a claim or an audit asks what the site looked like on a Tuesday six months ago, you answer in thirty seconds.
DIR registration & renewal — California public works
Who needs to register, when annual renewal opens, and what STrOp checks before you bid a prevailing-wage job.
Dispatch board basics
The day's service calls, who's on each, and what's still unscheduled — run the board in the morning and every tech knows where they're going without a phone tree.
Earned value for trades — the four numbers that predict overruns
EVM without the certification. PV, EV, AC, and the four ratios that tell you a job is going sideways before the final pay app does.
Enter and approve timecards
The foreman's daily crew entry and the PM's approval pass — how hours become job cost, payroll data, and the record that survives an audit.
How estimate pricing is calculated
Every estimate line runs the same four-step recipe — pad the quantity, extend by unit cost (tax on material only), add overhead then profit margin, round. Profit is a margin; overhead is a markup or a margin, set per estimate.
Import a DIR wage determination (and keep it current)
Load a California prevailing-wage determination — including its scheduled July-1-style increase — so your projects validate pay against the right floor, and refresh it when DIR reissues.
Lien waivers — the four California forms and when each is safe to sign
Conditional vs unconditional, progress vs final — the §8132–§8138 statutory forms as a two-by-two matrix, and the one rule that keeps you from waiving rights for a check that hasn't cleared.
Log an opportunity and work the pipeline
From "heard about a job" to a pursuit moving through Qualify, Budget, Bidding, and Bid Submitted — where work enters STrOp and how the board tracks it to award.
Meal and rest breaks — the PAGA exposure on your timecards
California's break rules in crew terms, the premium owed per missed break, and why the daily attestation on the timecard is the record that keeps a slip from compounding into a seven-figure claim.
Migrate your data into STrOp
How a company moves onto STrOp from whatever it runs today — master data first, in-flight jobs at their current state, and the old system's paper trail as a searchable archive. Nothing re-entered, nothing silently dropped.
Pay app submission checklist
What goes in a monthly pay application, what the GC's reviewer looks for, and what STrOp assembles automatically.
PCO vs CO — proposal versus executed change
A PCO is your priced ask. A CO is the executed contract amendment. Until the CO is signed, the work isn't billable on a pay app.
Prevailing wage rates — how to find the right one
Which rate applies to which worker on which project, where DIR publishes them, and how STrOp pulls the right one onto your timecards.
Price your first estimate — cost types, assemblies, and the bid
Build an estimate line by line — cost types, assemblies priced per square foot, labor from your agreement's loaded rate — and read the raw cost, overhead, margin, and bid price it rolls up to.
Productivity rate capture — today's timecard becomes tomorrow's bid
The estimator's productivity assumption is the single biggest source of bid variance. The fix is a feedback loop, and the loop only works if timecard data lives in the same system as the assemblies.
PWC-100 — is your public works project registered?
The awarding body's DIR project registration is what your certified payroll submits against — how to verify it exists, find the DIR project ID, and what to do when it's missing.
Retainage release — when, how much, and what to chase
Standard 5–10% withholding through the project, partial release at substantial completion, final release after closeout. The clocks and triggers contractors miss.
RFI vs Change Event — when to file which
An RFI asks a question. A Change Event records an impact. Treating them the same is how recovery slips through the cracks.
Schedule the crew week
Drag workers onto the week's work orders once, and the plan flows downstream — the field sees where to be, and the foreman's timecard starts from the crew you scheduled.
Send your first proposal
The proposal builds itself from your estimate — address it, shape what the GC sees, print the PDF, and mark it Submitted so your pipeline knows the bid is out.
Service agreements — cadence, visits, invoicing
Turn recurring maintenance into an agreement STrOp works from — the visit cadence generates the calls, the billing cadence drives the invoices, and neither depends on anyone remembering.
Set up a service agreement — cadence, visits, dispatch, invoice
Turn a "walk it every three months" customer into an agreement that knows its next visit, puts it on the dispatch board with a tech, and bills it on its own terms when the visit is done.
Set up the subcontract — parse the PDF into the fields the job runs on
Register the executed subcontract once, let Parse Contract read value, dates, retainage, and terms out of the PDF, review each field against its page, and flag what the contract makes due.
T&M tag — why the owner signature is everything
What a T&M tag is, what makes it legally enforceable, and what STrOp does when the signature is missing.
The negotiated job — when the GC calls and there's no bid
How work enters the pipeline when a GC hands you the next job outright — log it, put it in Qualify, and run the same board with a different way in.
The STrOp glossary — what we call things, and why
Construction has never agreed on its words — the same term means three different things depending on who's talking. Here's the one name STrOp uses for each thing, and the words we deliberately split.
Turn a signed T&M tag into a change order
Walk a signed T&M ticket through change event, priced PCO, and executed CO in the Changes tab, so the contract value and the SOV move together and the chain holds up.
Where the job stands — read the budget and the business report
Read the job's Budget tab (baseline from the estimate, current adds executed change orders, committed from POs, actuals from approved hours and receipts, by cost code) and the daily, weekly, and monthly business report.
Who sees what — invite your team and set roles
Invite people by email with a role, read the capability matrix as the rule of your org, and see what a foreman's phone and a finance seat actually show.
Work a warranty callback — log it, fix it, keep the lesson
Log a warranty item against the one-year clock, send someone out with a date and a bucket, close it with a root cause, and file the lesson where the next estimate will find it.
Your estimate is your earliest budget — not the contract value
The contract value tells you what the GC owes you. The estimate tells you what the job is supposed to cost. Confusing them is how subs miss a 30% margin compression.
See STrOp in action
Single-pipeline operations for California specialty contractors — bid through warranty.
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