A job-intake gate is a check that sits between a job arriving and anyone starting work on it. It compares what came in against your own list of what a complete job needs. If something is missing, it drafts a reply asking the sender for exactly those items, for you to check and send. Nothing reaches a worker until everything needed is there.
What is a job-intake gate?
It is the simplest thing we build and usually the first. There is no judgement in it at all. It holds a list you wrote, it looks at what arrived, and it names the gap.
Say a complete job for you means a site address, an order number, a drawing at the current revision, an access contact and a start date. The gate checks those five things. Four out of five and the job does not start. The gate drafts an email to the sender saying which one is missing, in your wording, for you to check and send. All five and the job is logged, with everything attached, and passed to the person you named to pick it up.
That is the whole mechanism. It sounds too small to matter.
Why half-specified work is so expensive
Because the cost lands twice, and neither time is on a timesheet.
The first cost is the chasing. Somebody notices the drawing is missing, emails, waits, chases again, and in the meantime the job sits. Nobody records that hour because nobody did anything with it.
The second cost is the restart. An engineer goes to site on the old revision. A method statement gets written for the wrong access arrangement. A quote goes out priced on a scope that turned out to be different. The work was done properly and it still has to be done again.
The trap is that both costs look like the fault of the person who did the work. They are not. They were baked in the moment a job was allowed to start with something missing.
Why it goes first
Three reasons, and they all come down to it being cheap.
There is nothing to learn. Documents need your templates and your rules. A gate needs a list, and you already have that list in your head.
There is no judgement in it. A person checks every email it drafts, and anything not on your list stays with a person. It does not price, it does not schedule, it does not decide whether to take the job. It only refuses to let incomplete work through, which means the rule about never automating where a mistake costs money or safety barely gets tested.
And it makes everything downstream cheaper. Every document you might automate later draws on the facts the gate has just made sure exist. Build the documents first and you spend the first month fixing intake anyway.
What it does not do
It does not improve the enquiry. If your clients send vague work, the gate will draft a lot of emails back. At first it will feel like the system is the problem. It is not. It is showing you a number you did not have before: how many of your jobs arrive incomplete.
It does not chase forever. It drafts the chaser. A person decides whether to send it or ring the sender instead.
And it does not decide whether a job is worth having. That stays with you.
What will go wrong
Your list is longer than you think. The first version will miss items so obvious that nobody has ever said them out loud.
Two people on your team will disagree about whether a job can start without one of the items. That argument is worth having, and having it once is worth more than the automation.
One big client will send work in a format that the gate cannot read, and you will decide to let theirs through by hand. That is fine. Write it down as an exception rather than pretending it does not happen.
And at first somebody will add “sorry about this” to each of the gate’s drafts before sending it. They stop once it becomes routine.
Is it worth it for you?
Count two things over the last month. How many jobs started and then stopped because something was missing. How many hours went on chasing information you should have been sent.
If you have never counted, the method is in how to work out what a paperwork problem costs your business a year. If the answer is small, do not build it.
If it is not small, bring the number to a 10-minute call. I will tell you whether it fits and give you a rough estimate, a range for the first route. The paid audit then works out what this paperwork problem costs you a year in your own figures, and what to build first. The fixed price for one route comes from the audit, with three options that cut scope rather than corners.