When you connect Biltum to JobTread, the first thing that happens is not an export. It’s a read. Biltum scans your recent job budgets and your full catalog before it ever sends anything — because the only way to produce a budget in your format is to learn what your format actually is.
What Biltum reads when you connect
The connection uses JobTread’s grant-key flow, handled server-side. Once you choose the organization, Biltum pulls three things:
- Your recent job budgets — up to your last 100 jobs, including every budget group, line item, and the formulas attached to them.
- Your catalog — cost items, cost codes, and cost types, with names and units.
- How those two connect — which catalog items your past budgets actually reference, and how often.
This is a read of structure and usage, not a takeover. Nothing in your JobTread account is modified during the scan, and nothing moves the other direction until you explicitly send a Scope of Work.
What it learns from your past jobs
The learning happens in two layers, and the order matters.
First, deterministic counting. Biltum walks the budget trees it pulled and measures them: which group names appear and how often, how deep your nesting goes, whether phases like Demo or Framing sit at the root of your budgets or nested under project groups, what order they tend to appear in, which units you use, which cost types and cost codes your lines carry, and which quantity and unit-cost formulas repeat across jobs. That produces a factual profile of how your company builds budgets — counted, not guessed.
Second, AI on top of the evidence. A model then reads that factual profile and organizes it into the working rules Biltum uses when drafting — but it is constrained to explaining the evidence, never replacing it. If your last hundred budgets call the first phase “Demo,” the model doesn’t get to decide you’d prefer “Demolition.” The counts win.
Concretely, the learned profile answers questions like:
- Do you organize budgets by phase at the top level, or by area with phases inside?
- What do you call each phase — and in what order do they run?
- Which catalog items do you actually use, versus the hundreds that sit dormant?
- What units, cost codes, and cost types do you attach to which kinds of work?
- Which formulas do you reuse for quantities and unit costs?
From walkthrough to Scope of Work
Separately from all of that, a LiDAR walkthrough produces the raw material: rooms with real measurements, your narrated decisions turned into atomic tasks, quantities, notes, and linked photo evidence. Biltum calls the reviewed result the Scope of Work — and you edit it before anything leaves the app.
Biltum also has its own estimating inside the app — set your rates and custom rules once and Auto Price fills an estimate from your own numbers. That’s a separate feature, and worth being precise about: the in-app estimate stays in Biltum. What crosses the integration is the Scope of Work itself, and the draft budget it becomes is priced from your JobTread catalog — not from Biltum’s numbers.
Drafting the budget
When you tap Send, the learned profile and the Scope of Work meet. Biltum assembles a draft budget in JobTread that is shaped by everything above:
| Part of the draft budget | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Group structure and order | Your learned hierarchy — phase-first or area-first, at the depth your past budgets use |
| Group and phase names | Your own labels, as counted across your recent jobs |
| Line items | Atomic tasks from the reviewed Scope of Work, matched to your existing catalog items where a real match exists |
| Quantities and measurements | The LiDAR scan — measurements also arrive as namespaced job parameters your budget formulas can reference |
| Prices | Your JobTread catalog — a matched line inherits your existing catalog pricing on first create; unmatched lines stay unpriced for you to fill in |
| Evidence | Photos and notes from the walkthrough, attached to the lines they belong to |
The result reads like a budget your estimator drafted — same skeleton, same vocabulary, same cost codes — with the walkthrough’s measurements and tasks filled in. That’s the difference between an integration that exports to JobTread and one that writes in your handwriting.
Your numbers stay yours
Two rules protect pricing. On the first send, a line matched to your catalog may inherit that item’s existing JobTread defaults — your numbers, from your catalog. On any later sync, Biltum never overwrites a price you’ve set in JobTread; only a line still blank there may be gap-filled from your catalog defaults. If a line disappears from a later Scope of Work, the corresponding JobTread row is flagged for review, not silently deleted. JobTread remains authoritative on pricing, always.
What if you’re new to JobTread?
A fresh organization with little job history has less to learn from, and Biltum doesn’t pretend otherwise. With thin history, drafts start from sensible defaults — a standard phase structure and your catalog as it stands — and the profile sharpens as your budget history grows. The scan reflects what your account actually contains; it doesn’t invent a track record.
What this lane does not do
- It does not send anything automatically after a walkthrough — the draft budget moves only when you tap Send or Update.
- It does not invent pricing. Every number in the draft budget traces to your own JobTread catalog.
- It does not overwrite prices you’ve set in JobTread, or delete rows you’ve edited there.
- It does not replace JobTread proposals, contracts, accounting, or project management — the destination is the Job Budget, drafted, for you to refine.
- It is not represented here as an official, certified, or marketplace partnership.
The practical payoff
The measure of this integration is what your estimator does when the draft arrives. If the answer is “rebuild it in our format,” the integration failed no matter how fast the export was. If the answer is “review the numbers and refine,” the walkthrough just became the first draft of the budget. The cheapest way to find out which one you get is to connect your account, walk one job, and read the draft that lands.
Source note: JobTread product capabilities are linked to JobTread’s official documentation in the integration overview. The learning and drafting behavior described here reflects the Biltum integration as verified on September 7, 2026.
