What is real-time collaboration?

Real-time collaboration lets several people work in the same Splinde budget at the same time, and Splinde makes sure no two people ever edit the same thing at the same moment. It means a bid can be priced by a whole team in one budget, with every number staying in one place.

What it's for

One crew prices labour, another checks gear, a producer reviews totals, all in the same afternoon. Real-time collaboration keeps them in one shared budget instead of several copies that disagree by the end of the day, and because each person works in their own spot, nobody's edit ever replaces someone else's.

How it works

Collaboration works in two places, the budget editor and the Offer Document. The promise is the same in both, and each is described on its own below. It is available to the people in a Workspace that has collaboration enabled, and it covers the whole budget, every Scenario column included.

In the budget editor

Small avatars at the top of the budget editor show who else is in the budget, each person in a colour that stays theirs. The avatars appear as soon as a second person joins.

When you click into a Cost Item field or a Cost Item name, it is yours while you work in it. It is outlined in your colour with your avatar beside it, so everyone else can see where you are and works on other lines, and you can see the same for them. The field a colleague is working in stays theirs until they move on.

Your colleagues' changes appear in your budget as you work, in every Scenario column, so the numbers you see are always the shared, current ones.

In the document

The Offer Document carries the same promise, in its own terms. Text blocks, tables and the Classic Budget block are each worked on by one person at a time. When you click into one, it is outlined in your colour with your avatar beside it, and your colleagues work on other parts of the document in the meantime.

A table or a Classic Budget block belongs to one person as a whole block, from the first click until they move on. This is what keeps a client-facing page consistent while a team prepares it together.