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Make your own copy. Copy the Production Board into your Google Drive. It opens a fresh, editable copy that is yours to fill in.
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A resource from RocketLevel for restoration company owners, project managers, and ops leaders, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 5 minute read.
The day a restoration shop has its tenth simultaneous job in motion is the day the owner's memory stops being a reliable system. A job finishes mitigation and waits three days for someone to schedule the rebuild. An estimate sits unsent. A final invoice never goes out. Each of these is a dropped handoff, and it happens in the gaps between stages where no one is looking. A production board is the simple fix: one place that shows every active job and exactly what stage it is in, so the gaps become visible and someone owns moving each job to the next step.
Your crews are good at the work. What breaks as you grow is the connective tissue between steps: mitigation to reconstruction, estimate to approval, completion to billing. Each handoff is a place a job can sit for days with nobody noticing, because the person who finished their part assumes the next person picked it up. Multiply that by a dozen active jobs and you have cash and capacity tied up in work that looks active and is going nowhere. The board is there to surface those stalls.
It's not complicated, and it doesn't require software to start. A production board is a column for each stage a job moves through (for many shops: new loss, mitigation, drying, estimate, approval, reconstruction, final walk, billing, closed) and a card for each active job that moves left to right as it progresses. A whiteboard with sticky notes works on day one; job management software does the same thing at scale. The format matters less than the rule: every active job is on the board, and every job is in exactly one column.
One rule keeps that honest when a job straddles two stages. The card sits in the column that names what the job is waiting on, not the last thing that got finished. A job with mitigation complete and reconstruction unapproved belongs in Approval, because approval is the thing that is not happening. Then add a blocked flag with the blocker named and one person's name on it. Keep blocked as a flag and never as its own column, or every stalled job quietly migrates into the same parking lot and drops out of sight.
The board only works if you review it on a set schedule. In your weekly production meeting, walk the board and ask one question of every job that has not moved: what is it waiting on, and who owns unsticking it. Jobs that have sat in the same column since last week show you where the bottleneck is. In our experience, the board plus that one weekly question does most of the work.
A column tells you where a job is. It does not tell you what is about to expire, and several expensive things expire quietly in this business. Add a short set of date fields to every card and review them in the same weekly pass.
| Clock | Runs from | What goes on the card |
|---|---|---|
| Preliminary notice and lien deadlines | The date labor or materials were furnished, not the invoice date | Furnishing date and the notice or filing deadline for that state |
| Permit expiration and required inspections | The permit, which lapses when work stalls | Permit expiration date and the next required inspection |
| Carrier and program deadlines | The carrier's or program's own terms | Supplement window, documentation upload deadline and service-level clock |
| The drying goal | Every day the equipment is running | The drying target and the date of the last reading |
Preliminary notice and lien deadlines. These run from the date labor or materials were furnished. California requires a preliminary notice within 20 days under Civ. Code 8200, and a late one only reaches back 20 days from service under 8204.
Texas splits twice, by project type and by who hired you, and mixing either one forfeits the lien. Non-residential is the 15th day of the fourth month and residential the 15th day of the third. If you hold the owner's contract you file under Tex. Prop. Code 53.052(a) and count from the month your own work was completed, terminated, or abandoned. If you are below the original contractor you file under 53.052(b) or (c) and count from the month you last furnished. Texas repealed its accrual section, 53.053, in HB 2237, effective January 1, 2022, so drop any field form that counts from the date the claim accrued. The bill's own Section 37, which you will not find in the code, keeps the old law for original contracts entered into before that date.
New York gives eight months from the last item of work under Lien Law 10, four months on a single-family dwelling, with service within five days before or 30 days after filing and proof of service filed within 35 days or the lien terminates, Lien Law 11.