Getting started

Getting started: your workspace, your team and your first project

3 min read · Checked against the product 3 October 2026

Set up VariationFlow for a specialist subcontractor: create the workspace, sign the company agreement, invite the team on the right roles, add your first project with its payment terms and get the site team capturing.

This guide takes a new company from sign-up to its first variation captured on site. Allow about twenty minutes, with your company number, one live subcontract and your team’s email addresses to hand.

Create the workspace

1. Sign up at variationflow.com and confirm your email address.
2. On the Welcome screen choose “Create a new workspace” and enter the company name and, if you know it, your financial year end.
3. Complete “Set up your agreement”: registered or trading name, the company number if you are a limited company, the registered office, any VAT number and the signatory’s name. The signatory signs on screen and chooses “Sign & continue”; nothing else opens until it is done.
4. In Settings, Organisation, upload your logo and fill in “How clients pay you”, the bank details your applications and invoices carry.

A new workspace starts on the free plan: one project and two users, with no card. An admin or director chooses a plan in Settings, Billing.

Invite the team on the right roles

In Settings, Team, choose “Invite member”; each person gets an email link to join. Roles are enforced by the server, so pick the one that matches the job:

• Site Operative captures variations on the phone and sees the project list and the register without prices.
• Site Supervisor sees the register, projects and prices on the web and can capture, but cannot price, move stages, record payments or work on valuations.
• Quantity Surveyor is the commercial role: pricing, submitting, recording payments and building valuations.
• Contracts Manager can do everything a QS can, and can invite people and change roles.
• Commercial Director and Admin have full control, including organisation settings, billing and the account export. Only an Admin can remove or reactivate a member.

Add your first project

1. Open Projects and choose “New Project”. Pick Commercial for work under a subcontract, or Domestic for a homeowner job. On the Builder plan every project is domestic, up to £100,000 each.
2. Enter the project name your site team uses, your job number, the site address, and the main contractor with its QS email, where priced variations go for instruction.
3. Enter the contract value and the retention percentage. The VAT treatment defaults to the construction reverse charge, which suits most subcontract supplies.
4. Under Payment & notice tracking, on the VariationFlow plans, tick “Enable for this project” and pick the contract form. Three boxes appear: days to the payment due date, the pay-less notice, and Payment terms, with 30, 45 and 60-day buttons counted from the due date to the final date for payment. The line underneath gives the total from the valuation or assessment date. A blank box uses the standard shown in grey.
5. On a JCT form, type all three from your own subcontract, even one that matches the standard: those are the JCT main contract’s figures, and until your own are recorded there is no verdict on whether a pay-less notice was in time.
6. “Contract has bespoke amendments” now holds only the JCT period for confirming an oral instruction and the NEC compensation-event bar. Choose “Create Project”, then run the contract setup wizard for the onerous-clause sweep.

Get the site team capturing

Each site user installs the VariationFlow app on an iPhone or Android phone, from the app page, and signs in once, with signal, using the email they were invited on. The app then stays signed in and captures offline. On the project page, the Site team panel narrows an operative’s project list to the projects they are ticked onto.

What good looks like

• Everyone on the role that matches their job, and nobody on Admin who does not need it.
• One project per subcontract, with its own payment terms entered when it is set up.
• A first variation captured on a phone by someone on site within the first week.

Common mistakes

• Inviting supervisors as QSs so they can “see everything”. Supervisors already see the register; the QS role is for pricing and agreeing money.
• Leaving the main contractor’s QS email blank, so every submission has to be addressed by hand.
• Leaving the payment terms blank because the subcontract has no amendments: your own terms are not an amendment.