The board & tasks

The board is where the work lives. Rows are your stages (Foundation, Structure, Finishing…), columns show how far along each task is, and each card is a task.

Setting up the board

• Add a stage with the button under the stage list. Rename or reorder a stage from the small buttons on its row.
• Columns (e.g. To do → In progress → Done) can be renamed, reordered, added and removed from their headers — set them up to match how your firm works.
• Add a task from a stage's row. Give it a clear name; you can fill in the rest later.
• Rather not build it by hand? Import a schedule from a gantt chart PDF or photo — BuildFlow creates the stages and tasks for you.

Working with a task

Click a card to open it. There you can:

• Assign it to a team member. A task nobody has picked up stays unassigned — it won't appear on anyone's My Tasks until you assign it.
• Set start and due dates. On the morning a task is due, the person it's assigned to gets a reminder.
• Write comments, and mention someone with @name — they get a notification (the bell, top right) — and an email, so nothing waits until you next open BuildFlow. You can turn the emails off from your profile.
• Watch a task to be notified when it changes — see Watchers below.
• Drag the card between columns as work progresses — changes appear instantly and save in the background.

Tasks show a small reference like luga-07 (from your project code) — handy in meetings and messages.

Site-visit & meeting tasks

When creating a task, you can make it a Site visit or a Meeting instead of a plain task — built for dropping everything from that visit in one go.

• Drop in every photo and paper from the visit — hand-written log notes, minutes, photos — all together, in one pile. BuildFlow sorts the photos from the documents for you; if anything lands in the wrong pile, one tap moves it.
• Add Invitees — the people you expect at the visit or meeting. Each one is notified straight away and can open the task; they also show on the timeline and calendar with the visit's pin. (This is separate from the attendees BuildFlow reads out of your notes below — invitees are people in BuildFlow you invite up front.) On the morning of the visit or meeting, everyone invited — and the person it's assigned to — gets a reminder too.
• Upload your hand-written log notes or a set of minutes and BuildFlow reads them into the task's Notes & minutes — who attended, what was decided, what needs following up — added alongside anything you typed yourself, never on top of it. Nothing is treated as final until you check it over and confirm it. Other papers from the visit — an invoice, a drawing, a permit — stay as plain attachments, and photos are only ever photos.
• On a site visit task, Bill this visit opens a short dialog listing the project's fee payees — set an amount against each party you need to bill for the visit (usually just one, but you can bill several), pre-filled from your last visit charge. Each one is added to the Fees ledger, linked to this task; a payee you've already billed for the visit shows a Billed tick so you can't double-charge them. Once a payee is billed, tap Generate invoice right there to turn that bill into a formatted invoice on the Fees ledger (you'll need an invoice template — an admin adds one under Templates).

Everything about the visit lives in this one block on the card — the pile of files, the invitees, the notes and minutes, and the billing — so there is one place to look and one set of minutes to confirm.

Confirmed minutes are also something FlowBot can be asked about later — like "what did we decide at the last site visit?"

Taking minutes during a meeting

Every meeting and site-visit task has a Minutes pad — a fast place to jot rough notes while the meeting is happening. Don't worry about tidy sentences or sorting anything: type fragments as they come ("client wants teak louvres", "nimal to recheck the beam sizes") and press Enter or tap Add note. Filed a typo? Point at the line to fix or remove it — the time and name stay as they were. Each line files itself with the time and your name, and the ⤢ button gives you a clean full-screen pad for the meeting hour. Colleagues on the task can add their own lines too — nothing gets overwritten.

When the meeting ends, tap Wrap up. BuildFlow reads your notes and lays out who attended, what was decided, and what needs doing. Check it over — everything is editable — then tick the follow-ups you want as real tasks and confirm. The minutes stay on the task for everyone to read, each follow-up becomes a task on the board with the right person on it, and Generate document turns it all into a formatted minutes document whenever you need the formal version.

If you've uploaded notes to the task, Read the uploaded documents adds what they say to the same minutes — useful when a paper arrives after the meeting, or was filed under the wrong heading when you uploaded it. Anything you wrote yourself is kept as you wrote it; only what's new is added.

If something comes up after you've confirmed, Reopen notes lets you add more and wrap up again. And a line you typed but hadn't filed yet survives a lost connection — it's still in the box when you come back.

Recording a meeting

Recording is an early feature, so it's switched off until you ask for it — an admin turns it on under Settings → Experimental features. Taking notes works either way.

Rather than typing everything, you can have BuildFlow record the meeting. Press Record in the Minutes pad and hold your meeting as normal — keep jotting notes if you like, both work together. Press Stop when you're done.

Please tell everyone in the room that you're recording — BuildFlow reminds you the first time, and shows a clear red indicator the whole time it's recording, but telling people is on you.

The recording is filed in the project's Storage tab, where it can be played back, restricted to certain people, or deleted like any other file. In the background BuildFlow writes out what was said; usually within a few minutes — longer for a long meeting — a Transcript section appears under your notes. From then on, Wrap up reads the transcript and your typed notes together — so the things nobody had time to write down still make it into the minutes.

Meetings in Sinhala or Tamil — or the usual mix with English — work the same way. BuildFlow writes the minutes in English, and the transcript keeps both versions: an English tab and an As spoken tab with the original words, so nothing said is lost in translation. (A meeting held in English simply shows the one transcript.)

If the write-up ever fails, nothing is lost: your typed notes are untouched and Wrap up still works from them alone.

Watchers

Watching a task means you get notified about it — a new comment, someone mentioning you, activity moving it forward. It's not the same as being the task's assignee: a watcher isn't responsible for the task and can't approve anything, they're just kept in the loop.

• You're added as a watcher automatically the moment someone @mentions you in a comment on that task.
• You can also add yourself or a teammate as a watcher directly from the task's detail panel, in its Watchers section — no mention needed.
• External members (clients or contractors added to just one project) are never auto-watched or notified from internal-only comments.

Watching, being assigned, and holding a role in a payment's approval chain are three different things — see assignee vs role vs watcher.

Filtering the board

The board opens on All — every task on this project you're allowed to see. Two controls in the header narrow it down:

• My tasks / All — a switch that defaults to All. Flip it to My tasks to see only what's assigned to you.
• Search — one box that finds a person, a role, or a task title together. Start typing a name or role and pick it from the list; it becomes a small removable tag called a chip. You can also pick Unassigned to find tasks nobody has picked up yet. Add several chips to widen the search — "Dev Perera" + "Director" shows tasks for either of them, not only tasks that match both. Anything you type but don't turn into a chip is also matched against task titles. Adding any chip or typing switches the board to All automatically; remove a chip by clicking it, and Clear empties every chip and the text at once.

Filters only hide cards — nothing is changed or deleted. A filtered column header shows "shown/total" (e.g. 3/7) instead of a plain count.

My Tasks

My Tasks in the sidebar collects everything assigned to you across all projects, grouped by project and stage. Update status right from the list. Only tasks explicitly assigned to you appear here — an unassigned task won't, even on a project you own.