Projects FAQ & troubleshooting

A job is the whole thing: the project container that groups all the loads for one job site or contract, and carries the customer, the job number, and the branch. A phase is one unit of site work inside that job (one stage of the work, with its own site, dates, and crew and equipment requirements). A job can have several phases, one phase, or none. A job with no phases is a loads-only job. So: the job is the contract, a phase is a stage of the work on the ground. See Site work and phases for more.

Job status (Planning, Active, Completed, Canceled) is the business state of the job, and you set it yourself: from the status control on the project page, or on the workspace. Load status rolls up from the job's loads and reflects where the freight actually is. A job can be Active while its loads are all still planning, so the workspace shows both columns.

No, if your organization has job numbering enabled. Once an admin sets up a numbering pattern in Settings, Numbering, the next job number shows as a fixed chip on every new project and the server assigns it at save. If numbering isn't enabled, you type the Project ID yourself when you create the job. See Set up job numbering.

Mostly. When numbering is on, the assigned part of the number is fixed on the create modal, and you can append an optional suffix (26-1042-A). To use a fully custom number, turn numbering off in Settings, or edit the number on the job after creating it. Because the server assigns the authoritative number at save time, two people creating projects at the same time never end up with the same number.

A follow-up job is a separately-billable extension of an existing job. Use Create follow-up job from a project's row menu, and Offload numbers the new job off the parent as {parent}-1, {parent}-2, and so on. It's for work that's an add-on to an existing job but needs its own billing. This action is available to every organization, whether or not job numbering is configured.

In v1, automatic job numbering and bulk import can't both be active for the same organization at once. Turning one on is refused while the other is active, so you deactivate the one you're not using first. This is a deliberate v1 limit: the two features assign job numbers in ways that would conflict. If you need both, contact support@letsoffload.com.

Every load belongs to a project. The project is the wrapper that ties a customer, a job number, and a set of loads together. You can create a project first and add loads to it, or create the project inline while adding a load. To work with loads themselves, see Load management.

They're what a phase needs to get its work done. Crew requirements are fulfilled per scheduled day (for example, "2 crane operators" means every scheduled day needs 2). Equipment requirements are fulfilled by presence on site, through mobilization and demobilization (mob/demob) loads that bring an asset in and take it out. Declaring requirements is planning; you assign the actual people and equipment on the Dispatch board. See Site work and phases.

They're two different things. Project members are about access: the people associated with the job, who (if they have an Offload login) can see or manage the project and its loads. Crew is about work: the workers a site work phase needs on the ground, declared as a requirement on the phase and assigned per scheduled day on the Dispatch board. A person can be crew on a phase without being a project member, and a project member doesn't automatically become crew. Adding a project member never changes anyone's organization role or takes away access they already have.

Yes. The people you add to a project and the documents you attach to it automatically appear on every load under that project. On the load they're marked with a "Project" tag and are read-only there ("Inherited from the parent project"), because they're managed on the project, not the load. So you add a member or upload a document once on the job and it covers all of its loads.