The person who actually keeps it moving
On most small construction businesses one person holds the whole administrative thread: the lead that came in yesterday, the quote that has not gone out, the WCB certificate that expired, and the invoice nobody has chased. Admin is the role for that job, and it opens nearly everything.
This role opens
- Leads, clients and the full pipeline
- Estimates and proposals
- Projects, tasks and the schedule
- Crew and crew scheduling
- Invoices and payments
- Vendors, purchase orders and bills
- Documents, compliance and holdback
- Reports and business dashboards
It does not open
- Nothing, in practice — admin sits one rung below owner
These are the actual route guards, enforced on the server — not a menu that hides links.
Chasing is the job nobody schedules
Money owed does not arrive because it is owed. It arrives because somebody noticed it was late and asked. The aging receivables report is the list to work from on a Monday, and an invoice that moved to viewed tells you the client opened it — which is a more useful thing to know before phoning than the date you sent it.
The same applies to quotes. An estimate sitting unsent is not a pipeline, and the lead that went quiet three weeks ago is the one most likely to be gone. Both are visible in one place rather than in someone's memory.
Paperwork that expires
Subcontractor insurance and WCB clearance lapse quietly, and you find out when a general contractor asks for the certificate or an inspector does. Vendors carry their expiry dates, and lapsed coverage is flagged rather than discovered.
Documents are typed by what they are — contract, permit, insurance, WCB, warranty — and attached to the project, so the answer to what a specific job has on file is a page rather than a search through email.
One system instead of the space between four
The administrative cost in a small construction business is rarely any single task. It is the re-entry between them: the quote retyped into the invoice, the client address typed a third time, the job number that exists in a spreadsheet and nowhere else.
An accepted estimate becoming the job budget, and an invoice built from the work logged against that job, removes most of that. Not because any one step was slow, but because the copying between them was where the errors lived.
Why this role is admin rather than its own thing
Admin sits one rung below owner and opens effectively everything the business runs on. That is deliberate: an office manager who cannot see receivables, or cannot raise a purchase order, cannot do the job they were hired for.
What stays with the owner is the account itself — plan, billing and who holds which role. If your office manager also administers the subscription, they need owner, and that is a decision worth making on purpose rather than discovering.
Questions
- What can an office manager do in BuildersBridge?
- The admin role opens leads, clients, estimates, projects, schedule, crew, invoices, payments, vendors, purchase orders, bills, documents, compliance and the reports. It is one rung below owner.
- Can an office manager see the business reports?
- Yes. Reports and payments are restricted to owner and admin, and an office manager on the admin role has both. That is the point of the role — chasing receivables without seeing them is not a job.
- What is the difference between admin and owner?
- Practically, the account itself. Owner holds plan, billing and role assignment. Everything operational is open to admin, so most office managers should be admin rather than owner.
- How many admins can I have?
- As many as your plan's user limit allows. Roles are not licensed separately — seats are counted by user, not by role.