What is Real Time Collaboration?

Real-time collaboration is what lets more than one person work inside the same Splinde budget at the
same time, seeing who else is in it and which field they are in. It exists so a bid can be priced by a
team without the numbers drifting apart across separate files or separate browser tabs.

What it's for

More than one person often needs to touch the same budget in the same afternoon: one pricing crew, another checking gear, a producer reviewing totals. Real-time collaboration keeps them in one shared budget instead of several copies that disagree by the end of the day.

How it works

When more than one person has a budget open, small avatars appear at the top of the budget editor, each with a colour that stays the same for that person every time. A person alone in a budget sees no avatar at all, not even their own; the row only shows once a second person joins.

Clicking into a Cost Item field, a Cost Item name, or a line of text in an Offer Document claims it for the moment: it is outlined in your colour with your avatar beside it for anyone else in the budget. A table or a Classic Budget block claims as one unit, so a claim there covers the whole block, not a single cell inside it. If someone else already holds the field or block you click into, you are told Another user has claimed this field. and your cursor is moved back out, even when what you clicked was a document block rather than a field. The person already there is never interrupted and keeps working normally.

A claim lasts about 60 seconds and is never renewed, so staying in one field past a minute lets its protection quietly lapse with no warning to you. Other people's changes reach your screen on a cycle of a few seconds rather than instantly, across every scenario column of the budget, not only the one you are viewing. Syncing pauses while the browser tab is in the background and picks back up once you return to it. There is no queue for edits made while the connection to the collaboration layer is down; editing keeps working, and a message appears after a few failed attempts, but nothing is held back to send later.

How it fits with the rest of Splinde

Collaboration covers the whole budget family, every Scenario column and the Offer Document editor, not just the tab that happens to be open. It depends on the workspace having collaboration enabled. Where it is not, the budget behaves as a single-user document with nothing on screen to explain why, no avatars, no claims, no messages.