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 problems and re-work later on. Are you ready?
Why should I do this now?
You should define these configurations now to standardise the data entered by your project teams from the start. This will help save you from needing to edit existing submittals to change or add missing information later. Although you can edit submittals in bulk, you can only bulk edit specific fields in a single project.
Custom Submittal Types
With Procore's Submittals tool, you can 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. See Create Custom Submittal Types. Your project team can filter and report on submittals based on their type to easily find the data they need.
Best Practice
Although Procore has several default submittal types (see What are the default submittal types in Procore?), we encourage you to create additional types for your project teams to use. Here are some popular types that we recommend:
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Why should I do this now?
Custom submittal types allow you to organise your submittals more efficiently. You should create custom submittal types at the beginning of your project so that your project team can use them as soon as they start creating submittals. Best practice is to create separate submittals for each type as needed instead of combining submittals together under one type that isn't applicable to all of the items. This helps ensure that you are meeting your project's submittal requirements and makes it easier for your project 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: Submittal Builder
If you are planning to use Submittal Builder to create your submittal registry from specifications, the submittal type only automatically populates if there is an exact match for the type in your Procore account. Plurals are considered an exact match. For example, "Shop Drawing" matches with "Shop Drawings." If an exact match is not found, Submittal Builder selects "Other" as the submittal type. If you add custom submittal types after using Submittal Builder, you must manually update any existing submittals with the new types if necessary.
See Best Practices: Submittal Builder for more considerations and recommendations.
Custom Submittal Statuses
Procore provides 3 default statuses for submittals: Open, Closed and Draft. However, you might want to add more statuses to show exactly where a submittal is in its submission and approval process.
An "Open" submittal can be:
- 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 be:
- 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 adding custom submittal statuses to fit with your company's processes. See Create Custom Submittal Register Statuses. Here are some common 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?
You should add custom submittal statuses at the beginning of a project so that the options are available for the project teams to use right away. With clear statuses, teams can see if a submittal is at risk of being delayed and confirm whether its the most current and approved version. Without custom statuses like "Approved / No Exceptions" or "Rejected", it could be difficult for users to find the final version of a submittal if all of its revisions had "Closed" as their status.
Configurable Fieldsets
Use Configurable Fieldsets to help make sure that your project team only sees and completes the fields that are applicable to your company's processes. See Create New Configurable Fieldsets.
Why should I do this now?
You should define your project's Submittals fieldset at the beginning of your project to simplify your submittal process and make sure your teams enter the correct information in Procore according to your business needs from the start. This increases the adoption of Procore and limits the need to manually edit submittals later on. Although you can edit more than one submittal at a time, you can only bulk edit certain fields in a single project.
Custom Fields
Custom Fields allow your teams to capture data unique to your company and/or project. See Create New Custom Fields.
Why should I do this now?
Much like fieldsets, defining custom fields at the beginning of a project helps ensure that project teams are capturing the data important to your business processes. Although custom fields can be added at any point during a project, Procore does not support adding data to custom fields in bulk for existing submittals.
Common Examples
Custom Fields
- LEED Submittal? (using the 'Checkbox' custom field type)
- Priority (using the 'Multi Select' custom field type)