07 — Glossary¶
Construction, insurance, and Cara-specific terms you'll hit constantly. Bookmark this.
Acronyms (GC, RFI, RFP, IFB, SOV, COI, PCO, CO, ICO, CSI, PO, DWG) show a quick definition anywhere they appear on the site — just hover over them, no need to come back to this page. This page is still the full reference, and other docs link straight to a specific row here when they need to point at the fuller explanation.
As we build out click-by-click walkthroughs (doc 06), some entries below will get a "→ see walkthrough" link for the fuller explanation with examples. For now, entries stay short — ask Claude Code if you need more detail on any term than what's here.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Alternate | Optional add/deduct scope, priced separately and not included in the base contract total (e.g. "Alt 1: upgrade to premium fixtures"). Shown in its own Alternates tab for the client/owner to decide on later. |
| AP / AR | Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable — standard finance terms. AP = money Pinley owes (to vendors/subs); AR = money owed to Pinley (progress billing to the GC). Finance owns AP/AR in the app. |
| Assembly / Extract Assembly | A bundled kit of parts that belong together on a drawing detail (e.g. an air handler plus its dampers, controls, and mounting hardware). "Extract Assembly" is the AI feature that reads a drawing PDF page and proposes the whole kit as draft line items for the estimator to review and apply. |
| Award | The moment Pinley wins a bid; the bid becomes a project. |
| Backcharge (BC) | A cost passed between GC, Pinley, and a sub/vendor — e.g. Pinley is charged for corrective work and passes that cost on to the sub who caused it. One of the four Change Order types. Careful: the on-screen "BC" abbreviation here is unrelated to BuildingConnected (also "BC") — same two letters, different meaning depending on context. |
| Bid | Pinley's effort to win a specific job: its estimate, vendors, documents, and status. |
| Bid Invite | An invitation from a GC asking Pinley to bid (often synced from BuildingConnected/Procore). Not the same as a Bid — it only becomes one once Accepted. |
| Budget | On the estimate sheet, a placeholder number an estimator enters before a vendor is chosen for a line item. Careful: on that same grid, "Bid" is also a column name (the vendor's actual quoted price) — a different, narrower meaning than the main "Bid" entry above. Budget doesn't automatically become the Bid column value, even if no vendor is ever selected. |
| BuildingConnected (BC) / Procore | External bid-management systems Cara syncs bid invites from. |
| Change Order (CO) / PCO | A change to contract scope/price after award. PCO = potential/proposed change order, becomes a CO once approved. Two more specialized types exist: ICO (against Pinley's own profit) and Backcharge (passed to a sub/vendor). |
| COI (Certificate of Insurance) | Proof a sub carries required insurance. Tracked per project. |
| COI Revision | A versioned snapshot of insurance requirements. Immutable (see §5 of doc 01). |
| Cost (aka "Buy price") | The price Pinley actually pays a vendor for a line item — on the estimate sheet, Cost = Bid × (1 − Cut%). "Cost" is the on-screen column name; "Buy price" is the same concept in conversation, kept here so either term finds this entry. Not to be confused with Cost Code below (an accounting classification, unrelated). |
| Cost Code | A standardized accounting code for a type of work (CSI MasterFormat divisions, e.g. Div 23 = HVAC). Company-level. |
| Cut% | The estimator's negotiated discount off a vendor's quoted Bid price, expressed as a percentage. Feeds directly into Cost: Cost = Bid × (1 − Cut%). |
| Daily Log | A field record of one work day (manpower, materials, delays, safety, photos, work performed). |
| DWG | The native CAD drawing file format (from AutoCAD) — usually uploaded alongside a flattened reference PDF of the same drawing. The Drawings tab and Takeoff viewer both handle DWG + PDF pairs. |
| Estimate | The detailed priced cost of doing the work; built on the estimate sheet. |
| Estimate Revision | A saved, versioned snapshot of an estimate. Append-only (see §5 of doc 01). |
| GC (General Contractor) | The main contractor running the whole building project; Pinley usually works under a GC as a subcontractor. |
| ICO (Internal Change Order) | A change order that eats into Pinley's own profit rather than being billed to the GC — always requires a reason (missed in estimate, field error, design change, coordination issue, or other) with at least 20 characters of explanation. |
| IFB (Invitation for Bid) | A solicitation document, strictly price-focused — "just give me a number." Often the literal filename of the plan-set PDF a GC sends. |
| Indemnity Agreement | A signed agreement shifting certain liability; tracked per project sub. |
| Job Cost | Materials + Labor + Tax — what the job actually costs Pinley, before profit is added. |
| Labor | Cost of Pinley's own crew hours (self-performed work), separate from anything bought from a vendor. |
| Manpower | The Daily Log section recording who worked a given day — trade, number of workers, and hours. Distinct from Materials/Labor cost tracking on the estimate side. |
| Markup / Contract price | Job Cost with markup% added — the number quoted to the GC. Profit fields are restricted to certain roles (Owner/Exec/Admin/Senior PM only); a PM or Estimator not seeing them is expected, not a bug (see doc 01 §2). |
| Materials | Cost of stuff bought from vendors/subs, after the estimator's negotiated discount. Not the same as Labor. |
| Organization | Cara's single unified record for any external company — sub, vendor, client, broker, GC, property manager, owner's rep. One org can wear several "role" tags. |
| PO (Purchase Order) | An internal request/approval to spend against the project budget — tracked on the Project Budget tab. Sourced from either the original budget or a change order. |
| Project | An awarded, in-execution job. |
| Proposal | The formal priced offer document sent to the client, rendered as a PDF from a frozen estimate snapshot. |
| Punch List | The list of remaining defects or unfinished items to fix before a job is considered complete — a field/PM tool, tracked under a project's Field tab. |
| Reopened | A Bid status a Lost, No-Bid, or Withdrawn bid can move to — despite how those three are sometimes described, they are not fully terminal. A Reopened bid can go on to Qualifying or Superseded. Only Awarded and Superseded have no forward transitions at all. |
| Retainage | A % of each payment the GC holds back until the job is complete. |
| Revision | A full snapshot copy of a record (estimate, COI, proposal). Old data is never edited in place — always a new revision; only one is "active" at a time. |
| RFI (Request for Information) | A formal question to the GC/architect to clarify something on the drawings. |
| RFP (Request for Proposal) | A solicitation asking for qualifications/approach, not just price — used almost interchangeably with IFB. In this app: what Pinley sends to its own vendor network, asking them to quote pieces of a job Pinley has already accepted from a GC. |
| SOV (Schedule of Values) | The breakdown of the contract price into billable line items; drives progress billing (the "G703" form — a standard industry billing form). |
| Spec Section | The part of the project specification a submittal belongs to (CSI format, e.g. "23 05 00"). Per-project. |
| Subcontractor / "sub" | A specialist trade company (Pinley is one; Pinley also hires its own subs/vendors for parts of a job). |
| Submittal | Product/material data sent to the architect for approval before purchase/install. |
| Submitted Price vs. Final Contract Value | Two different fields on a Bid's outcome record — easy to conflate. Submitted Price is auto-filled from the bid's existing contract amount whenever an outcome (Lost/No-Bid/Withdrawn/Awarded) is recorded — nobody types it in. Final Contract Value only ever gets set by an actual Award — it stays empty for Lost/No-Bid/Withdrawn. Don't assume "final price" is captured just because a bid was marked Lost. |
| Takeoff | Measuring quantities of materials/work off the construction drawings, manually or via AI extraction. |
| Takeoff Excel/CSV Import | An alternative to measuring off drawings — imports an existing spreadsheet of quantities instead. Trade is a required field on every row; unmapped Trade correctly blocks the import before Preview. |
| Trade | A category of construction work (Sheetmetal, Pipefitter, Plumbing, Electrical, etc.). Two separate lists exist: the big estimating catalog, and a separate 18-item field-labor list used in Daily Logs — don't confuse the two. |
| Vendor | An organization tagged as a supplier/sub that Pinley buys from or invites to quote. |