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.
13 of 47 articles for Principal. Clear
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why the record is a database, not a folder of spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are where a sharp operator thinks. They're a bad place to keep the shop's record. What a relational database does that a folder of .xlsx files can't — one fact in one place, links that can't be mistyped, locks that hold for everyone, a history of who changed what — and why every list in STrOp still exports to CSV.
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.
See STrOp in action
Single-pipeline operations for California specialty contractors — bid through warranty.
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