What's the difference between a job, a parent job and a sub job?

Answer

When creating a project in Procore, its useful to know the difference between a job, a parent job and a sub job.

Jobs

In Procore, the term job is synonymous with project. To create a new project in Procore, see Add a New Project.

Parent Jobs

A parent job is a Procore project that has been designated as the 'parent' project for one or more related project(s) in Procore's Portfolio tool. You can designate any existing project in Procore as a 'parent job' when you add a new project or edit the related projects. See Add a New Project or Add and Edit General Project Information.
Note: A 'parent job, as it is defined above, is an informational link between related projects. It does NOT specify a parent-child relationship in Procore's project database.

Example

Your company is a general building contractor who specialises in the development of master-planned communities. The full scope of your latest contract award is for a master-planned community, you plan to complete the project in four separate phases and your company wants to manage each phase as a separate Procore project. For this scenario, you would add four new projects to Procore's Portfolio tool as follows.

Project 1: Highlands Ranch—Phase I (Parent)
1000 residential units, 1 rental office, 1 clubhouse, 1 parking structure and 3 community pools
- Project 2: Highlands Ranch—Phase II
  2000 residential units, 1 community pool, 1 parking structure and 1 golf courses
- Project 3: Highlands Ranch—Phase III
  1250 residential units, 2 community pools, 1 parking structure and 2 restaurants
- Project 4: Highlands Ranch—Phase IV
  1750 residential units, 2 community pool, 1 parking structure and 1 golf course

When creating Projects 2, 3 and 4, you would designate Project 1 as the 'Parent Job'. This will associate the project's for the last three phases with the parent project.

Sub Jobs

You can enable the optional 'Sub Job' segment in Procore's WBS. See Enable Sub Jobs for WBS. Once enabled, you can then add sub jobs as you would add other segment items to a Procore project. See Add Segment Items to a Project. Important! It is important to note that, a sub job is NOT related to the Jobs and Parent Jobs concept described above.

In Procore, a sub job allows you to compartmentalise job costs within a project. Once they are added to Procore (or imported via an integrated ERP system) you can monitor your project budgets and costs against them to help you better determine if you are making money on your project. For example, if your project is a multi-story commercial building, you might create a separate sub job for the build work on each floor. Or, if your project is a multi-unit development, you might create a separate sub job for each individual structure.

Some reasons for creating a sub job in a Procore project include:

To track buildings, floors, areas (and so on) as separate line items within the project budget.
To track variations as separate line items within the project budget.
To track follow-up or finishing work for the project.

Examples

You are a commercial building contractor building a multi-story office tower. You might want to add sub jobs for Floor 1, Floor 2, Floor 3 and so on.
You are a federal construction contractor building a large healthcare & hospital campus with numerous specialty complexes on base (i.e., A Rehabilitation Centre, a Family Birth Centre, an Eye Institute, an Oncology Treatment Centre and a Robotic Surgery Complex). You might want to add sub jobs to track the progress and costs for each specialty building and/or complex.