What Unlikely Professionals Does

Unlikely Professionals (UP) performs building code compliance inspections across Maryland, DC, and Virginia, primarily focused on structural foundation and water management systems. Builders and developers hire UP to inspect their construction projects against local building codes, and UP issues certification packages confirming compliance. This is a required step before occupancy permits can be issued — so everything UP does is time-sensitive and legally consequential.

What the Portal Is

The portal is the centralized operations platform for UP. Before it existed, work was scattered across spreadsheets, emails, WhatsApp threads, and manual processes. The portal replaces all of that with a single system where every project, inspection, certification, and invoice is tracked from intake to delivery.

The vision: every person involved in a project — schedulers, inspectors, admins, triage staff, and you — sees exactly what they need, when they need it, with nothing falling through the cracks.

Your Role: Owner

You hold the up_owner role. This is the highest authority level in the system. Here is what that means in practice:

• Final approval authority — no certification or invoice leaves UP without your sign-off. Jacob drafts them; you approve or kick them back.
• Unrestricted visibility — you see every project across every branch and every account. No data is hidden from you.
• User management — only you can create, modify, or deactivate portal user accounts.
• System oversight — you have access to reporting, audit logs, and system health monitoring.
• Escalation endpoint — when something cannot be resolved at any other level, it reaches you.

Portal URLs

You have two domains that reach the portal:

• unlikely.xxx — your primary domain (owner/admin access)
• mostly.it.com — alternate domain (same portal, same login)

Both lead to the same system. Use whichever you prefer. Log in with your email and password.

Your Dashboard

After login, you land on the Owner Dashboard. This is your command center. The dashboard is role-filtered — what you see is different from what Jacob, schedulers, or inspectors see, because it surfaces the things that need your attention.

The Numbers That Matter Most

Of everything on the dashboard, these three metrics are the ones to watch:

1. Revenue pipeline — gap between inspections completed and invoices sent. A growing gap means money is stuck in the pipeline.
2. SLA compliance — percentage of projects certified within 3 business days of final inspection. Below 90% is a problem.
3. Cert velocity — how many certs are going out per day. If it drops, check Jacob’s queue size and open RFIs.

Role Switcher

As owner, you can impersonate any role in the system. This lets you see exactly what a scheduler, inspector, GOA, or triage user sees. Use it for training, troubleshooting, or verifying that the right information is reaching the right people.

Your morning routine should take 10–15 minutes on a quiet day. Here is the recommended order, from most urgent to least.

Every project follows the same path from intake to archive. Here is the full lifecycle as you will see it from the owner perspective.

This is your core responsibility. Every certification package and every invoice passes through you before it reaches a client. This section explains exactly what to look for and how to act.

The Cert & Invoice Page

Navigate to the Cert & Invoice section from your dashboard or the sidebar. You will see items organized by status: drafts (Jacob’s work-in-progress), items for your approval, and delivered items.

What to Check Before Approving a Cert

• Project address — correct property, correct jurisdiction (MD/DC/VA)
• SOW lines — do the scope-of-work line items match what was inspected?
• Inspection data — are photos, drive logs, and field notes present?
• Cert type — PSoW (Pre-drywall Scope of Work) vs. ABSoW (Above-drywall/Behind-wall Scope of Work) — is it the right one for this stage?
• Account routing — is this going to the correct builder/account contact?

What to Check Before Approving an Invoice

• Line items — do they match the SOW and the cert?
• Amounts — are quantities and rates correct?
• Account — is it billed to the right account?
• Any trip charges or extras — emergency fees, missed appointment charges

What Happens After Approval

Invoice Lifecycle

Every invoice moves through these statuses:

You can track all invoices by status from the dashboard and the Cert & Invoice page. Pay attention to the gap between “Sent” and “Paid” — that is your accounts receivable.

Payment Tracking

Payments come in via Stripe and EFT (electronic funds transfer from corporate accounts). The system matches incoming payments to open invoices:

• Stripe — automatic matching. When a client pays via Stripe link, the invoice is marked paid immediately.
• EFT / Revolut — Jacob handles reconciliation. He uploads remittance files, the system matches transactions, and he confirms. You have full visibility into this process.

Revenue Dashboard

Available in the Reporting section. Shows MTD/YTD revenue by branch, trends over time, and the invoicing gap analysis (certified but uninvoiced projects — these represent money left on the table).

User Management

Available at /admin/users. This is owner-only — Jacob cannot access it. Here you can:

• Create new portal users (assign username, role, and branch)
• Edit existing users (change roles, reassign branches)
• Activate or deactivate accounts
• Reset passwords

Roles available:

Friday’s Notes

The Friday Notes page (accessible from the portal at unlikely.xxx/friday-notes) collects bug reports and feedback from portal users. Review weekly. This is your direct line to understanding what is working and what is frustrating for the people using the system daily.

Role Switching

Use the role switcher (available from your user menu) to impersonate any role. This is essential for:

• Verifying what a scheduler sees when they log in
• Testing new features before announcing them
• Troubleshooting when a user reports they “can’t see” something

System Health Monitoring

The Dependencies section on your dashboard shows the health of all connected systems:

• API — the backend that powers everything
• SmartSuite — the project database
• Supabase — the mirror database for reporting
• Google Calendar — scheduling integration
• Gmail — cert/invoice delivery

Green means healthy. Yellow means degraded. Red means down — see Section 13 (Emergency Procedures) for what to do.

Projects List

Your projects view is unrestricted — you see every project across every branch and account. Other roles see only their branch or assigned projects. This is your master list.

You can filter by status, branch, account, date range, and more. Use search to find specific projects by address, project number, or account name.

Review Queue

The Review Queue is organized into sections:

The “For Approval” row is your action queue. Everything else is either Jacob’s responsibility or informational.

Project Detail

Click into any project to see the full detail view: address, account, SOW lines, inspection history, RFIs, uploaded files (permits, plans, photos), cert PDFs, invoices, and the complete audit trail for that project.

File Management

Each project can have files attached: permits, plans, photos from inspection, cert PDFs, and invoices. You can upload, download, and view these from the project detail page. Cert PDFs and invoices are generated by the system — you do not need to create them manually.

Calendar View

The Calendar page shows all scheduled inspections across all branches. It syncs bidirectionally with Google Calendar. You see the full picture — other roles see only their branch.

Use the calendar to understand workload distribution: are inspections clustered in certain areas? Is the field team overbooked on certain days? This directly affects your downstream pipeline — more inspections today means more certs and invoices in 3–5 days.

Schedule Change Requests

When a scheduler requests a change (reschedule, cancel, add, hold), it appears in the admin approval queue. Both you and Jacob can approve. Types of requests:

The 45-Day Rule

When a project sits for 45 or more days after its last inspection without being certified, it is automatically transferred to the Triage Team. This is a safety net — it ensures that aged projects do not quietly die in someone’s queue.

When a project enters triage:

• The original scheduler and scheduling assistant lose portal access to the project
• The branch GOA (General Operations Administrator) retains visibility
• The triage team takes ownership and works the project to close-out
• When complete, the invoice still routes to the originating branch’s GOA

Your Role in Triage

You are the final escalation point. The triage team handles most aged projects independently, but some situations require your judgment:

• Client disputes about aged projects
• Projects where the original data is incomplete and the builder is unresponsive
• Revenue decisions — write-off vs. continued pursuit

Your dashboard shows triage counts (projects entering and leaving triage) by day, month, and year, broken down by branch. A rising triage count for a specific branch may indicate a process problem with that branch’s scheduler.

Escalations

Any stakeholder can trigger an escalation on a project. Escalations create an instant notification to responsible parties and open a threaded message channel scoped to that project. You are always notified of escalations.

The Work Pool is the system that allocates post-production work — the step between field inspection and cert/invoice drafting. Currently, Jacob is the primary person working this pool.

How It Works

When a project reaches “Field Complete” or “Ready for Review,” it enters the Work Pool. Jacob claims items from the pool and works them through the cert/invoice drafting process. Items can also enter the pool from triage returns and RFI fulfillments.

What to Monitor

• Pool size — how many items are waiting to be claimed. If this grows steadily, throughput is not keeping up with intake.
• Jacob’s active queue — how many items he is currently working. A reasonable load is 10–15 items in various stages of drafting.
• Time-in-pool — how long items sit unclaimed. Anything over 2 business days is a yellow flag.
• Oldest unclaimed item — this is your single best indicator of backlog health.

Reporting dashboards are available from the navigation. Data is live, sourced from SmartSuite and the Supabase mirror database.

Using Data to Identify Bottlenecks

The three most common bottlenecks in the pipeline and how to spot them:

System Down

If the portal is unreachable or showing errors:

1. Check the Dependencies section on your dashboard (if accessible). Red indicators show which service is affected.
2. Contact your system administrator. The VPS (server) is hosted on Hostinger and can be checked via their control panel.
3. If the issue is widespread (multiple services down), a server restart may be needed. The system is designed to recover automatically — all data is backed up nightly.

SmartSuite Issues

SmartSuite is the underlying database for all project data. If it becomes slow or unresponsive:

• The portal will show degraded performance (slow loading, stale data)
• Check SmartSuite’s status page
• The Supabase mirror provides read access to recent data even if SmartSuite is down
• Do not approve certs/invoices during a SmartSuite outage — status updates may not propagate

Cert Delivery Failures

If a cert or invoice email fails to deliver:

• Check the project’s audit log for delivery error details
• Common causes: invalid email address on the account, Gmail API rate limits, attachment size
• Certs can be resent from the project detail page

Client Escalations

When a client contacts you directly about a problem:

1. Look up the project in the portal by address or project number
2. Check the project timeline — when was the last inspection? Is there an open RFI? Is it in triage?
3. Check the audit log for recent activity
4. If a cert is delayed, check whether it is in Jacob’s queue, in your approval queue, or stuck on an RFI

Portal URLs

Key Actions & Where to Find Them

Who Handles What