CoConstruct will save your changes to the estimate approximately every ten minutes.
Even if your internet connection goes down, your power goes out, or you just plain forget to click the save button, you won’t lose the work you’ve put in to get your numbers just right.
As long as you’re not missing any required information, such as a description and accounting code for each estimate line, the save will kick off on its own. The save will run in the background so you can keep working uninterrupted.
Every time your data is saved, the top-right of the page will be updated with a note letting you know what time the last save occurred.
This provides a safety net to protect your estimate data from the unexpected, but as a best practice we recommend that you still manually save your estimates frequently with the Save Changes button, especially after you’ve entered a lot of information or made significant changes.
What if I don’t want clients to see changes before I’m done?
Because the estimate will save on its own every ten minutes, a save might occur when you’re in the middle of pricing a spec or selection. Not to worry! CoConstruct’s features help to ensure that you have complete control over the pricing info your clients see.
If you’re building out an initial estimate before you’ve invited clients to the project, you’re free to make as many changes as you want. Once clients eventually get invited and log in, they’ll only see finished pricing, regardless of whether you made a dozen tweaks along the way.
Even when clients have already been invited to a project, you still have control of how far back they can see into the "change log" for each spec and selection. On the project’s Setup page, you can hide change log entries from clients prior to a certain date and time.
You also still have the option to set selection prices to "TBD" before they’re finalized. As long as a choice is set to "TBD," clients won’t see any of the intermediate steps you’re taking to work out the final price.
What happens if more than one person is working on an estimate at the same time?
As long as you’re working on different areas of the estimate, more than one person can save their changes without stepping on anyone else’s toes. For example, if you’re pricing out kitchen cabinets while one of your colleagues is working on plumbing fixtures, both of you can save your changes without interfering with the other.
While you’re on the Estimate page, CoConstruct will never interrupt your work to automatically show you someone else’s changes. But, if you make use of the green "Save Changes" button, we’ll go ahead and refresh the page to reflect any changes made by other users. (Another reason it’s good to still make use of the manual save button!)
In some rare cases, two users can make changes to the estimate that conflict with each other. If this happens, CoConstruct will still save as many of your changes as possible. You will be notified if any of your changes need to be discarded in order to preserve the changes made by someone else.