Hello & Welcome!
Welcome to the Chalkstring Learning Programme. In this area of our knowledge base, you will find a range of video tutorials and documents to help you get familiar with all aspects of your Chalkstring system.
We have grouped the information together to try to make it easier to guide you through the information you will need at specific stages of the project tendering and delivery process.
1 Getting started
This section contains resources on the fundamentals of Chalkstring. It also contains some documents to support your learning such as activities to practise what you have learnt and workflows that you can refer back to once you start using the system.
2 Resources
This section covers how to set up the libraries of materials, labour activities and product templates that you will use on your projects to help you price and deliver the work required.
3 Estimating
This section covers the processes involved in setting up your project scope (also called assessments), pricing up the project using quotes and utilising tools such as takeoff and client bills to add your quantities. There are also tutorials in this section on value engineering your project for better margins and how to accept tenders once your client says 'Yes!'
4 Starting onsite
This section covers the features you will use once you have won a project and are getting ready to deliver it on site. These tutorials include how to review your project post tender, and how to add variations.
5 Procurement
Once the project begins so does procurement. This section covers how to order materials, log deliveries, and track purchase invoices.
6 Progress & applications
As work gets under way you will begin updating the progress of your project to feed into your valuations and applications. This section covers how to log and update progress, raise applications for payment and log the certified amounts. There are also tutorials on managing labour applications from subcontractors
7 Project admin & reports
As you add more information to your project, this data feeds into the reports you can generate from the system. This section covers how to interpret these reports including how to utilise the live CVR information. It also covers how to manage link people to your project directory, manage issues and log any external costs.
8 Accounts
Because within the accounts function you are generally working across all projects rather than within a particular project we have some tutorials in this section on how to use the accounting functions of the application to track orders, manage invoices and set up some of the foundational information such as VAT and Nominal codes.
9 Supply & Fit
If you subcontract out whole elements of work including the purchase of any materials and the labour elements, this is tracked in Chalkstring as 'Supply & fit'. This section covers tutorials on the functionality used to manage packages of work on a supply & fit basis.
Training documents
Because some of the activities require information in particular formats, in this section you can find sample documents that you can use to practise using the system.
Using the Learning Programme
The tutorials are very comprehensive and we recommend following them in the order in which they are presented.
At the end of each article you will see links to the previous and next articles to help you navigate easily.
Applying what you are learning is important, so we recommend downloading the Learning Programme Activities from the Introduction section to use alongside the tutorials.
Because the information flows through the system from the tendering stage to the onsite project you will need to have created a project and taken it through to being an accepted tender before you will be able to try out the onsite project features. So even if your role only involves projects that are already onsite, you may need to work through some of the estimating activities if you don't already have training projects within your system.
If you do get stuck at any point then you can contact our support team via the 'Submit a ticket' option at the top of the knowledgebase screen and we will be happy to help answer any queries.