The three categories
- Customer artifacts — the executed contract, the accepted scope, warranty terms.
- Evidence the customer benefits from — permits, inspection approvals, completion photos.
- Internal material — costings, supplier invoices, internal notes, dispute preparation.
Why sharing must be explicit
The dangerous default is 'everything attached to the job is visible'. Job records accumulate supplier pricing, internal photos with commentary, and drafts that were never meant to leave the building. A single inherited default can put all of it in front of the customer.
Making sharing an explicit act costs a click and removes an entire category of accident. It also creates a clear internal answer to 'did they see this?'.
Signed artifacts have stricter rules
- Share the executed version only — never a draft that resembles it.
- When a document is revised, the superseded copy must stop presenting as current.
- Keep the executed copy attached to the job so it survives staff turnover.
Photos deserve their own judgement
Completion and progress photos are the highest-value documents you can share, and the easiest to get wrong. Field photos are taken for internal purposes and often carry context — a mistake being corrected, a condition being argued about — that reads badly out of context.
Choose what goes out. A curated set with a sentence of explanation does more for trust than a raw dump of everything the crew captured.