STrOp now spots the jobs that finished quietly

Small jobs rarely announce that they are over. You invoice the flat fee, the check clears, and nobody has a reason to open the project again. It sits in Construction for the next eighteen months, padding the stage counts and burying the jobs that really are still running.

Every Monday morning STrOp now checks for exactly that. A project is raised when all of this is true:

• everything invoiced has been collected — no balance outstanding
• where there is a contract value on file, it has been billed in full
• no retainage is still held
• no open change events or PCOs

It waits two weeks after the last invoice before saying anything, so a job whose final payment just landed does not get flagged while you are still walking the punch list. The project manager gets one notification naming the job, what is settled, and which stage it looks ready for — Closeout if the job still needs its Substantial Completion certificate and retention release, Closed if that certificate is already on file. A job that has been raised stays quiet for a month afterwards, so nobody gets the same nudge every week.

It also shows up in the business report digest, under the slipped items, for anyone whose role covers Closeout.

It never moves a project. Closeout is entered by issuing a Substantial Completion certificate — a legal document, not a dropdown — and closing a job is a decision with retention, warranty start and final lien waivers hanging off it. The scan's whole job is to put the candidate in front of the person who makes that call.

One deliberate choice worth knowing about: a job with no contract value entered is still eligible. Small work is often invoiced flat with nothing ever typed into the contract field, and requiring one would have made the check blind exactly where it is most useful. For those jobs "everything invoiced has been collected" is the whole of the money test.