Communications

Communications is how documents leave your business and how you prove what went where.

A transmittal is not an email. An email is a message you can’t later produce a clean record of. A transmittal is a numbered record of communication on a project: a cover sheet, a schedule of exactly which revisions went out, a named recipient list, and a log of who opened it and what they said. When a job goes sideways eighteen months later, this is the register you print.

See Documents for getting drawings into the Register in the first place.

The Communications register

Communications shows everything that has gone out or been recorded, in two lanes:

• Correspondence — everything you’ve issued: transmittals, contract actions, claims, invoices, quotes, contracts.
• Site — what’s been recorded on site: toolbox talks, safety observations, site diaries, inductions. Read-only here; it lives in Site Management.

Columns are Category, Kind, Subject, Party, Status, Date, Project, with filters for each.

Each item has one of four statuses:

Export CSV takes whatever you’re looking at out as a file. Filter to one project and export — that’s your correspondence schedule for a dispute, an EOT claim or a handover pack, without anyone reconstructing it from an inbox.

Sending documents

Two ways in, same result:

• From the Register — tick the documents, hit Transmit.
• From Communications — New transmittal, then pick the documents.

Watch out: everything in one transmittal must be from the same project.

Choosing a kind

Each gets its own number series per project — TX, RFI, NT, SB — assigned when you issue, not when you start drafting, so abandoned drafts don’t leave gaps in the sequence.

Program updates are also transmittals, but you send those from Program rather than authoring them here.

Filling it in

• Reason for issue — the status the documents are going out under. For Approval is the one that asks for a decision back; the rest are informational.
• Response due — the date you need an answer by. This is what drives Overdue in the register. Only the party who owes the answer can go overdue; people copied in never do.
• Subject — what it is, in a line. “Structural drawings — For Construction”.
• Message — the covering note. It prints on the cover sheet.

Recipients

Every recipient gets a role:

Only one person can be Response required per transmittal. An obligation addressed to four people is an obligation nobody owns. An RFI must have exactly one.

The recipient picker builds itself from the job: your client, your staff, and subcontractors and suppliers with an RFQ or commitment on the project. Anyone not listed can be added inline with a name and email, and they’re kept for next time.

Tip: the project directory fills itself from real use rather than from a data-entry exercise up front. The first time you transmit to a consultant they become part of the job’s directory.

What the recipient gets

A cover sheet — your branding, the kind and number, the subject, a particulars table (project, project number, reference, date issued, reason for issue, response due), your message, and a schedule of documents transmitted listing every number, title and revision.

Then the documents themselves, at the exact revision you sent. Frozen. If you later supersede A-101 Rev C with Rev D, what they received still opens as Rev C — which is the whole point when someone claims they were working to the current drawing.

They don’t need a CortexPM account. Recipients open it from a link in their email. Clients with portal access get it in their portal instead.

What they can do

Depending on what you sent:

Accepting or signing requires them to tick a consent box; signing also requires them to type their name.

“Approved with comments” is an Approve with a comment attached — there’s no separate button for it.

Every response page has an Attach files field. A marked-up drawing, a sketch, a signed copy — PDF, images, Word, Excel, DWG or DXF, up to ten files of 25 MB each. Whatever they attach is kept on the record and listed in the email you get.

Following it up

Every issuance logs Sent, Viewed, Downloaded, Responded, Superseded and Revoked, with times.

You get a push notification when a recipient views an issued document and when they respond.

Viewed is not Responded. Viewed means they opened it. For anything with an obligation attached, the status you care about is Responded.

Click any correspondence row to open the record: the message, every recipient and what each of them did, the documents that went with it, what came back (including any files), and the full audit trail. The link in the “response received” email lands here too.

Overdue works for anything that carries a due date — not just transmittals. A variation uses its own Due date for response; a progress claim uses the payment-schedule date (ten business days by default). Quotes, contracts and invoices don’t carry one.

RFIs

An RFI is a contract-administration instrument, so under a contract it is raised as a contract action — Contracts → New action → Request for Information — and lives under the contract’s number (RF-HC26-0012-002). It is delivered through here: issuing it creates a transmittal underneath it, so it has a responding party and copies, a cover sheet with the RFI form and any attached documents, a tracked link per recipient, and a place for the answer. See Contracts for raising one.

The register shows it under the action’s number. Click the row: the drawer shows the question, every recipient and what they did, the answer and any files returned, and a link back to the contract action. The answer also lands on the action itself.

RFI without a contract. A question to a party with no contract on the job — a consultant, an authority — is raised here: New transmittal → Request for Information, one recipient Response required, the rest copied. It takes a project number (RFI-0001). If the project has a contract, the form points you to it, but a consultant RFI is still legitimate.

Either way the responding party’s link asks for an answer with a text box and Attach files; copies just get Acknowledge receipt. When the answer comes in you get a push notification and an email with the text, the files, and a link to the record. The RFI moves to Responded; once you’ve acted on it, Close it.

Recording an answer you received elsewhere

Answers still arrive by phone and by reply email. Open the RFI’s record and choose Record answer (or Record Response on the contract action). Type what they told you and how it arrived — “Emailed by Ann 14 Sep: 150mm rebate, see attached” — and attach their file if there was one.

It counts as the answer: the RFI moves to Responded exactly as if they’d used the link. The difference is in the audit trail, which shows it was recorded by you, not submitted by them — so the record is accurate about how the answer arrived.

You can record an answer even after the link has expired. You can’t sign on anyone’s behalf.

Who holds which revision

The Distribution tab on any document in the Register shows one row per party the document has gone to, the revision they were last sent, and whether that’s still the current one. Behind — on Rev C, current is E is the row that matters. Stakeholders who have never been sent the document are listed underneath.

For the whole project at once, filter the Register to one project and switch to the Distribution view: documents down, parties across, a coloured revision in every cell. Tick the rows with someone behind and Transmit to those behind — the transmittal opens already loaded with those documents at their current revision, addressed to exactly the parties who need them. See Documents.

Where to next

• Documents — the Register and getting drawings in
• Contracts — variations, notices and instructions, which issue the same way
• Client Portal and Subcontractor Portal — where issued documents land for people who have portal access