Getting started with Actions

What an Action is

An Action is anything on a project that needs attention and tracking — a snag, a defect, an RFI, a site query, a safety issue, a design clarification. Actions are the workhorse for capturing day-to-day problems on site and pushing them through to a proper close-out without losing track of them.

Every Action has a title, a description, a type (from a list your company configures), a priority, a status, and can be handed to one or more employees. You can also connect an Action to related records elsewhere in Project Commander — Variations, Invoices, Purchase Orders, and more — so the people looking at it have the full picture.

When to raise an Action

Reach for Actions whenever something on site needs following up:

• A snag spotted on a walk-around that needs fixing before handover
• A defect discovered during the defects period after practical completion
• An RFI where you need a design answer from the contract administrator
• A query from a site manager that's blocking a gang from working
• A safety issue that needs logging and sorting before work resumes
• A client complaint you need to record and chase through to resolution

If it's something you'd otherwise write on a scrap of paper or fire off in a WhatsApp message, raise it as an Action instead. Nothing gets lost, and everyone can see where it stands.

The status workflow

Actions move through five statuses as they get picked up, worked on, and finished.

The first two are the working statuses — you can edit anything on the Action and flip between Open and In Progress as often as you like. The last three are locked statuses. Once you mark something Resolved, Closed, or Rejected, the Action is a record of what happened rather than work in progress. Type, priority, and project become read-only, and the status dropdown is replaced with a Reopen button for if you ever need to unlock it again.

Moving to one of the locked statuses isn't a one-click affair. The Close Issue dialog opens first, asks why you're closing, captures notes, and takes a signature.

Inside a project vs across the whole business

Actions show up in two places:

• Inside a project — open the project and click Actions in its sidebar. You'll see only that project's Actions
• Company-wide — open Actions from the main sidebar to see everything across every project, with a Project filter to drill into one job

Most of your day-to-day work happens inside a single project. The company-wide list is there for stepping back to see the bigger picture — or for hunting down an Action when you can't remember which job it was on.

The two ways to look at the list

Pick whichever view suits what you're doing using the layout toggle in the top-right. Your browser remembers your last choice.

• Table — best for filtering, sorting, and running bulk actions across many rows
• Kanban — best for dragging cards through statuses as you work through them

Both views share the same filters, so switching between them won't reset anything.

Live updates as your team works

The Actions detail page is live — when a colleague adds a comment, changes a status, uploads an attachment, or reassigns an Action you're looking at, your screen updates within a second. A small pulsing green dot in the header tells you the live connection is healthy. See tracking what's happened on an Action for how the activity feed and live updates work together.

Next steps

• Creating an Action manually — for raising a single Action from scratch.
• Bulk-creating from a photo or PDF — for marking up a snagging photo and turning each box into an Action.
• Status workflow and closing — for the close-out flow and signature.
• Linking to other records — for connecting an Action to Variations, Invoices, and more.