Logging a sub engagement

The ten-second record that builds the score

Everything the Subcontractors section says about reliability starts here: the engagement log. An engagement is one record of one piece of work a sub did for you, was it good, was it on time, did you have to call them back, did it cost you a backcharge, and the reliability score is built from nothing else. Verinode cannot read this out of an invoice; whether the drywall crew had to come back is something only you know. So the section gives you the fastest possible door: an inline logger on the sub's Performance tab, built to be filled in the truck after the walkthrough.

Where it lives

Open a sub's detail deck and go to the Performance tab. At the bottom sits "+ Log an engagement". Tapping it unfolds the form in place, no separate screen, and Cancel folds it back away.

The four fields, all optional

The logger asks for four things, and every one of them can be skipped:

• Quality, a 1 to 5 rating. Tap a number; tapping it again clears it.
• On time, Yes or No. Did the work land when it was supposed to?
• Callback / redo, Yes or No. Did you have to bring them back to fix finished work?
• Backcharge ($), a dollar amount, when you deducted money from what you paid them, or absorbed a cost that was theirs.

Plus an optional Notes line for the context you will want in six months ("second callback on tile this quarter").

Log what you know and skip the rest. The score's weights renormalize over the signals you actually provide, so a quality-only log or an on-time-only log still produces a fair read rather than a penalty; the mechanics are covered in how the reliability score works. An engagement with only a backcharge still counts too: the dollars total up even though they sit outside the 0 to 100 score.

Attaching it to a job

At the top of the form, a row of chips picks the job the engagement belongs to, with General for work that does not tie to one. The jobs offered are the ones this sub plausibly worked: the jobs they are dispatched to come first, then the jobs their invoices were billed on, without duplicates. If exactly one job is on offer, it is preselected. Dispatching a sub to a job from the Dispatch tab is what puts that job at the front of this list, which is the practical reason to keep dispatch current: the log lands on the right job with zero hunting.

Attributing engagements to jobs is what unlocks the per-job-type read below, so it is worth the one extra tap. General is always there for the odd side job, but a log tied to a job says more.

What happens when you save

The record saves to the sub, and the score updates immediately, without a reload: the reliability ring, the label, and the stats on the tab recompute on the spot from the engagement you just added. The new entry also joins the engagement list on the tab, each row showing its job and a compact summary of what was logged, "4/5 · on time," "late · callback," "$500 backcharge," so the tab reads as the sub's history at a glance.

Above the list, the tab keeps running totals: average Quality out of 5, On time percentage, Callbacks percentage (turning red at 20 percent and up), and total Backcharges in dollars. The engagement count next to the ring ("[N] engagements logged") is your reminder of how thick the record behind the score is.

The per-job-type rollup

Once your logs are attached to jobs, a "By job type" section appears on the Performance tab: the sub's engagements grouped by the peril of the job they were logged on, water, fire, mold, and so on, each with its own reliability score and its own count of logged engagements.

This is where the log starts answering a sharper question than "are they good?", namely "good at what?" A sub can run strong on water and weak on fire, and the rollup makes that visible: each job type gets its own score bar, worst first, so the type that needs a conversation, or a different sub, tops the list. Only job types with at least one rated engagement appear; the rollup never manufactures a read for work you have not scored.

Building the habit

The log is only as good as its cadence, and the cadence that works is small: one log per sub per job, at the moment the work wraps or the punch list closes. That is when "on time" and "callback" are facts rather than memories. A bench of ten subs logged this way for a quarter gives you real rankings, honest replace candidates, and a by-type read you can dispatch against, all from about a minute of tapping a week.

Data sources