Running work across your team and outside vendors
For the coordinator in the middle: your people decide and check, somebody else does the work.
The work does not stop at your edge
Almost nothing on a private asset is done entirely in-house. The service is a yard, the survey is a surveyor, the antifoul is a contractor the yard brings in, the annual inspection is a firm your insurer likes. Your team's job is mostly to decide, coordinate and check.
That makes the interesting failures interface failures. The job everyone thought the other party had. The quote that was verbally accepted. The finding the contractor reported to the person who left. The invoice that arrived for work nobody remembered approving.
Give the outside company one job, with one scope
The most reliable fix is unglamorous: every outside company gets a defined piece of work with a written scope, a date and one person on your side to talk to.
- One scope, one place. Not the scope in an email, the revised scope in a phone call, and the actual work in somebody's memory.
- One contact. Two people from your side giving instructions to a contractor produces exactly the outcome you would expect, and the contractor is not the one who will be blamed.
- A date that means something. "When you can" is not a date, and it is the reason the job is still open in March.
Quotes, approvals and the moment money becomes owed
The sequence people actually run is: ask, get a price, approve, have it done, get invoiced, pay. Each of those is a different state, and collapsing them is where money goes wrong.
Two states worth keeping distinct:
- A price agreed is not money owed. A quote you have accepted is a commitment, and it belongs in what the quarter will cost, but it is not a bill.
- Work done is not money paid. A finished job that has not been invoiced, and an invoice that has not been paid, are different kinds of outstanding, and both are normal.
If your record cannot hold "done and unpaid", it will push you into recording one of the two facts wrongly, and the wrong one is usually the money.
What the contractor should and should not see
They need the job, the asset, the date, the access arrangements and the scope. They do not need what you budgeted, what the last contractor charged, what the owner said, or why the previous arrangement ended.
The practical failure here is a shared notes field: one box, written candidly by someone on your side, displayed to the assigned company. It is never noticed, because the person writing sees a box labelled for them and the person reading sees a heading that says scope.
Keep two fields, label them for their audience, and keep the money out of the one that crosses the boundary.
Completion is your decision
A contractor saying they are finished ends their involvement. It does not end the job. Somebody on your side looks at it, confirms what was done, records the reading or the finding, and decides whether the money follows.
That step is skipped more than any other, usually because the invoice arrives and paying it feels like completing it. Paying is not checking.
What this looks like in Meridian
A vendor is not a member of your workspace. They sign in to their own portal and see the jobs assigned to them, with the scope written for them, and nothing else: not your notes, not the amount, not the estimate, not what the work is costing you. That boundary is enforced by the database rather than by the screen, which is the only place it holds when somebody later adds a column.
A job carries its stage and its money separately, so quoted, invoiced and paid are three distinct facts and "done and unpaid" is a state the system can hold and count rather than a compromise. Accepting a vendor's quote writes their figure onto the item; accepting their completion is your action, not theirs, and it is where the date, the reading and anything measured get confirmed.
The Portfolio screen carries Spend this month and Committed as two figures and never adds them, because money already gone and money owed but not yet paid answer different questions.
See how the operations view works, or read what an owner actually wants in a report, which is where all of this ends up.
Run this across a whole portfolio.
Meridian keeps the dates, documents, owners and vendors for every asset in one operating record, so the work above stops living in a spreadsheet and an inbox.