Best Practices: Company Level Submittal Settings
Note
This page describes recommended best practices for setting up the project's Submittals tool. Click here to view tutorials, videos and more about the project's Submittals tool.Introduction
Before your team starts creating submittals, you will want to make sure that you have all of your company level configurations in place. This will help prevent headaches and re-work later on. Are you ready?
Why should I do this now?
Defining these defaults now ensures project teams are capturing the right information as they begin to use Procore, allowing you to standardise the data collected on your projects and preventing the potential need to edit all previously created submittals to alter or add additional missing information. Although bulk editing of submittals exists, it only works within a single project and certain fields, so it can become tedious if you need to modify submittal data across multiple projects.
Create Custom Submittal Types
Procore's Submittals tool allows you to route any type of document that might require an approval workflow on your project. Submittal Types allow you to organise those documents by creating separate categories of submittals. These types are filterable and reportable to make it easy for your project teams to find specifically what they are looking for. Gone is the day when you needed to look through a 100-page submittal to find a specific data sheet!
Best Practice
There are already several default submittal types in Procore, but we encourage you to create more for your teams to use. We have created this list of recommendations for you to consider:
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Why should I do this now?
Custom submittal types allow you to organise your submittal registry more efficiently. Instead of combining multiple submittal types together, it is considered a best practice to create separate submittals for each type. This allows you to ensure that you are meeting the submittal requirements of the project and also makes it easier for your site teams to find specific submittal information quickly.
Custom submittals types allow you to define the categories and naming conventions based on your company's preferences. Since different design teams might use different terminology, we recommend defining these early so that you don't end up with multiple versions of "Product Information", for example.
Additional Considerations
If you are planning to utilise Submittal Builder to create your submittal registry from specifications, keep in mind that in order for the submittal type to auto-populate you must already have an exact match in your Procore account. The only exception is that we account for plural formatting. For example, if you have a custom type called "Shop Drawings", Submittal Builder will detect use of "Shop Drawing" as the same type. Submittal Builder will categorise any types not found as "Other". These can be manually changed later, of course.
You can add more custom submittal types at any point, but if you add them after running Submittal Builder, Procore will not retroactively populate those new types. A screen refresh will, however, show that new submittal type in the Submittal Builder "Submittal Type" drop-down menu as an available option.
Create Custom Submittal Statuses
By default, Procore provides 3 default statuses for submittals: Open, Closed and Draft. However, these statuses are often not specific enough for everyone to understand exactly where a submittal might be in its submission and approval process.
An "Open" submittal can potentially be any of the following:
- A submittal that has been requested, but not yet received
- A submittal that has been received and is being reviewed( either internally or externally)
A "Closed" submittal can potentially be any of the following:
- A submittal that has been approved, with or without exceptions
- A submittal that has been rejected or marked as "Revise & Resubmit"
Best Practice
We recommend expanding beyond the Procore default submittal statuses. Here is a list of recommendations:
- Awaiting Submission (considered Open)
- Pending Review (considered Open)
- Approved / No Exceptions (considered Closed)
- Approved w/ Comments / Exceptions Taken (considered Closed)
- Revise & Resubmit (considered Closed)
- Rejected (considered Closed)
- Void (considered Closed)
- For Record Only (considered Closed)
Why should I do this now?
With default statuses alone, approved submittals would be listed with all other "Closed" submittals, including rejected submittals. Custom submittal statuses allow you to expand the options and help provide clarity for your project teams on where exactly the submittal stands. This can help identify points of potential delay and also allows teams to make sure that they are looking at the most current and approved submittal. Without custom "Closed" statuses like "Approved / No Exceptions" or "Rejected", users trying to find the approved version of the submittal will have a tough time if all of the submittal's revisions have a status of "Closed".
Define Your Configurable Fieldsets
Configurable Fieldsets is Procore's way to ensure your project team is only seeing fields relevant to your company's process and filling out all the necessary required fields for your business SOP.
Why should I do this now?
Defining a fieldset cuts out much of the noise that occurs when there are more fields than necessary to match your business process. Simplifying the interaction of the submittal fields can help to contribute to more adoption from your teams. Defining these custom field defaults now ensures project teams are capturing the right information as they begin to use Procore, allowing, you to standardise the data collected on your projects and preventing the potential need to edit all previously created submittals to alter or add the additional missing information. Although bulk editing of submittals exists, it only works within a single project and certain fields, so it can become tedious if you need to modify submittal data across multiple projects.
Define Your Custom Fields
Custom Fields allow your teams to capture data unique to your company and/or project.
Why should I do this now?
Much like fieldsets, defining custom fields now ensures project teams are capturing the data important to your business processes. Although custom fields can be added later, Procore does not yet support adding data to these fields in bulk for items already created.
Common Examples
Custom Fields
- LEED Submittal? (using the 'Checkbox' custom field type)
- Priority (using the 'Multi Select' custom field type)