Quick start: a 10-minute tour of BuiltUp
Land in BuiltUp, find your way around the dashboard, create your first project, and generate a scope from a set of plans — all in about ten minutes.
- • A BuiltUp account (free is fine — no card needed to follow this tour)
- • A set of plans handy if you want to try the AI scope generator (PDF or image)
BuiltUp is a single workspace for everything that happens between winning a job and getting paid for it. This guide walks you through the parts you'll touch in your first session — the dashboard, projects, scope, quotes — so you stop hunting for buttons and start moving real work through the platform.
Get oriented on the dashboard
When you sign in, you land on the Projects board — a Kanban view of every job, sorted by status. The top nav is your map. Most of your day happens in three places:
- Projects — where every job lives, from lead to completed
- Clients — your CRM
- Suppliers — your material catalogue, including anything you've clipped with the BuiltClip browser extension
Everything else (Financials, Activity, Settings) you can come back to once you have a job moving. The orange dot on the bell is a notification — click it to see what's changed.
Projects
26Create your first project
Click New Project in the top right of the Projects board. You only need three things to start: a project name, the client (pick existing or create new), and an address. Everything else — scope, quotes, files, messages — gets attached to the project after.
A few things worth knowing:
- Projects move through statuses: Lead → Estimating → Proposal → In Progress → Completed. Drag-and-drop to change status, or use the dropdown inside the project itself.
- New accounts come pre-loaded with a demo project so you can poke around before risking real data. Delete it whenever you like.
- You can always get back to a project from the Projects board, or use the search in the top header.
Meet the project tabs
Open any project and you'll see a row of tabs across the top. This is where almost all the work happens. The ones you'll use most:
- Overview — a one-glance summary: stats, client info, quote/invoice quick links, and what to do next
- Scope — your room-and-component editor (the heart of estimating)
- Quotes — turn your scope into a quote your client signs
- Billing — invoices, deposits, payments, late fees
- Messages — internal team chat plus a thread with the client
Tabs you can ignore until you need them: Contracts (subcontractor sign-off), Selections (client picks finishes), Progress (Gantt-style schedule), Files, Subcontractors, and Portal (the client-facing view).
Hampton kitchen renovation
Generate a scope from your plans
Open the Scope tab and you'll see two important buttons in the header: AI Assist and Template.
AI Assist is the fastest way to fill an empty scope:
- Click it, drop in a PDF or image of your plans, and write a short brief ("kitchen renovation, 4×4m, oak floors, 4 sockets")
- The AI reads the plans, creates rooms, and adds materials and labor with quantities
- You review, edit, and accept — nothing is locked in until you say so
Template lets you load a saved scope from a previous job — useful when you do similar work repeatedly.
You don't have to use AI. You can also build a scope manually: add a room, add components (materials and labor), set quantities and waste factors, and BuiltUp does the maths.
Your scope is empty
Click AI Assist to upload plans and let BuiltUp build the rooms, materials, and labor for you.
Send a quote and you're done
Once your scope looks right, jump to the Quotes tab. BuiltUp pulls everything from your scope automatically — you just review, add a cover note, and send. The client gets a clean PDF and (if you've enabled it) a web link they can sign on their phone.
After they accept, the Billing tab takes over: deposit invoice, milestone invoices, payment reminders, and a paper trail you can hand to your accountant or sync straight to Xero or QuickBooks.
That's the whole loop — project → scope → quote → invoice → paid. Everything else BuiltUp does (subcontractors, finish selections, scheduling, the client portal, BuiltClip, financial reports) is built around that core path.
You're ready to use BuiltUp. Everything else you'll learn is just refining the workflow you just walked through. If you get stuck on a specific feature, the Help menu in the top nav of the app will bring you back to these guides any time.
Setting up your workspace
Branding, region, currency, and labor rates — the workspace settings that quietly show up on every quote, invoice, and scope you ever generate.
More in Getting started
Setting up your workspace
Branding, region, currency, and labor rates — the workspace settings that quietly show up on every quote, invoice, and scope you ever generate.
Inviting your team
Add teammates, choose the right permission level for each, and understand what Owner, Manager, Estimator, and Viewer can each see and do.