Owner & communications

The Owner Dashboard

A portfolio rollup for company admins — top risks, pipeline, cash, and every record one click away.

1. Open the Owner DashboardTop-bar nav → Owner Dashboard, or just /owner. Available to company admins.
2. Top RisksThe oldest open RFIs, biggest pending change events, and subs with expired insurance — each row deep-links to that exact item in its project.
3. PipelineA kanban of opportunities by stage with weighted value at the top.
4. CashAccounts-receivable aging by project, cash position, and which pay apps are due to land soon.
5. All ItemsEvery RFI, submittal, commitment, and change order across every project — one sortable, filterable, deep-linked list.

The owner / client portal

A focused, owner-safe window that lets the homeowner follow progress, make decisions, and sign change orders — without ever seeing your internals.

The owner portal gives the homeowner their own scoped, password-protected window into just their project. Where the subcontractor portal sits below you — each trade seeing only their own work — the owner portal sits above you: the homeowner follows progress and makes the decisions that are theirs to make, while you keep the full picture in the middle. Together the two portals complete FieldsDesk’s external-collaboration story — the owner on one side, every sub on the other, you holding everything.

The homeowner sees the same project data, filtered to what concerns them: progress and the schedule, photos from your daily logs, the selections waiting on their decision, change orders to review and sign, an owner-safe money summary, shared documents, and a direct message thread with you. They never see your cost-to-complete, your markup, sub pricing, the buyout, or internal notes.

Owner-safe is structural

The portal is scoped by the way the data is wired, not by a setting you have to remember to flip. There is no toggle that, left wrong, would expose your margin. The money the owner sees is their side of the job — the contract sum, approved change orders, allowance status, and where their payments stand — never the trade costs or markup underneath. Even the weekly summary email and the daily-log entries are filtered to the same owner-safe rules.

Give the homeowner access

Invite the owner as a project member with the Owner role — they get a scoped login, and distribution groups decide which notifications reach them.

The homeowner reaches the portal as an external project member at the Owner role. That role is what unlocks the owner-safe surfaces and nothing else — an owner can never reach the internal project, another project, or any cost view.

1. Invite the owner to the projectAdd the homeowner as a project member at the Owner role (see Invite your team). FieldsDesk emails them a one-click link to set a password.
2. They land on their portalWhen the owner logs in they get a clean, branded shell scoped to their project — no internal navigation, just the owner-safe surfaces. If they are on more than one of your projects, a switcher lets them pick.
3. Tune their notificationsDistribution groups control exactly which emails reach the owner — decisions needed, approved changes, the weekly summary — so they hear about what matters and nothing else.

What the owner sees and does

Read surfaces keep the owner informed; a few narrow write actions let them approve selections, sign change orders, and message you — each one attributable.

Most of the portal is read-only and keeps the owner oriented. A few deliberately narrow actions let the owner do the things that are genuinely theirs to do — and the owner never sets a price or a status, so every action stays safe.

Surfaces the owner can see

• Summary — project stage, what needs their attention, and the headline dates.
• Schedule — an owner-friendly read of where the job is and what is coming up.
• Photos & daily progress — the photos and homeowner-friendly daily-log notes from the field, filtered to what is appropriate to share.
• Money summary — an owner-safe view: contract sum, approved change orders, allowance status, and where their pay applications stand. Never trade costs or markup.
• Documents — the files you choose to share, with secure download links.

Actions the owner can take

• Selections — compare the options you offered side-by-side, then approve a choice or request changes. An approval flows straight back into your budget and schedule.
• Change orders — review a change order issued for their approval and either sign it or decline it with a reason.
• Messages — message you directly from the portal, on a thread scoped to their project.

When the owner approves a selection or signs a change order, FieldsDesk records an owner signature — their typed name plus consent, captured with a timestamp, IP address, and device, a valid electronic signature under the U.S. ESIGN Act. The real mutation still runs through your normal flow, so every downstream ripple — budget, the linked commitment, the schedule, your notification — fires exactly as if you had made the change yourself. The owner attests the decision; you remain the system of record.

Preview the portal as the client

See exactly what the homeowner sees before you ever invite them — a read-only walk-through with every owner action disabled.

Before you give a homeowner access, you can view the portal exactly as they will see it. The client preview is the mirror of the sub preview: it loads the real owner-safe data for the project so you can confirm the scope is right, with every owner action — approving a selection, signing a change order — disabled while you look.

Because the preview reuses the same owner-safe scoping the homeowner’s own login uses, what you see is faithful by construction: if a cost figure is not in the preview, it is not reachable by the owner either. It is the fastest way to answer “what will the client actually see?” with certainty.

Automatic weekly summaries

A clean owner-facing recap goes out on a schedule, assembled from the week’s real activity.

FieldsDesk can send each owner a weekly summary email — progress since last week, photos, decisions needed, schedule status, and any approved changes — assembled automatically from the project’s real activity. It keeps owners informed without you writing a recap by hand every Friday.

Turn it on

In the project’s owner-communication settings, enable the weekly summary and pick the send day. You can preview the next summary before it goes out, and an owner report can also be generated on demand from the project Reports menu at any time.