Project vs Job: when to use which

Use a job for a single dispatch visit — one technician, one scheduled date, one close with its payout math. Use a project when the engagement is bigger than one visit: a remodel, a multi-door install, anything with a deposit and progress payments. A project is the umbrella that holds the payment schedule, invoices, estimates, expenses, photos, contracts — and the jobs themselves, linked underneath it.

When a job is enough

A job is Dispatch Bros's unit of dispatch: it has a customer, a scheduled date, an assigned technician, a status, and — when the work is done — a close that computes the technician payout and company share. If the work is one visit and one payment, a job is all you need. Creating a project for it adds bookkeeping with no benefit.

When to open a project

Open a project when any of these apply:

• Staged payments — the customer pays a deposit, then per stage, then a final balance. The project's payment schedule turns each stage into its own invoice — as the schedule header says, "nothing is ever sent automatically".
• A signed scope — you need a contract signed before work starts, and possibly change orders later.
• Real cost tracking — materials, permits, subcontractors: the project's P&L nets them against what you've invoiced.
• Many visits, one engagement — several dispatch jobs across days or weeks that should read as one body of work with one paper trail.

Side by side

How they work together

Jobs and projects aren't either/or — a project's field work still runs as jobs:

1. Create the dispatch jobs as usual, so scheduling, the calendar, and technician assignment all work normally.
2. Open the project's Jobs tab and click Link existing job to attach them.
3. When a linked job closes, its technician payout and company-paid parts feed the project's costs — and its gross counts as project revenue when the job has no live invoice of its own, so nothing is double-counted.
4. Unlink detaches a job without deleting anything.

The project's Payment schedule handles the customer-facing billing; the linked jobs handle dispatch and the internal cost side.

Troubleshooting

• You opened a project for a one-visit repair — no harm done. You can keep using it, or delete the project from its Edit dialog; linked estimates and jobs are kept — they just leave the project.
• A job you expect isn't offered in Link existing job — the list only shows this customer's jobs that aren't already in a project. A job can belong to only one project.
• "Nothing available to link" — every one of this customer's jobs (or estimates) is already in a project, or none exist yet. Create the job first, then link it.