How to Set Up a New Project in RedTeam's New Submittals Experience
RedTeam Flex has a rebuilt Submittals experience, currently in beta, that replaces the legacy submittals tool with a faster setup process and clearer tracking of who owns the next action on every item. If you’re starting a new project, here’s exactly what to check before you turn it on, how to enable it, and what to do first once it’s live.
Using the new experience is optional. You decide project by project whether to switch, and the legacy experience isn’t going away.
Before You Enable It
Two things have to be true before you can turn on the new experience for a project:
- The project has no submittals in it yet. If any submittals already exist on the project, the option won’t be available — RedTeam Flex will tell you so. In practice, this means choosing a project that hasn’t started submittals yet, which is exactly why it makes sense to pilot the new experience on a new project rather than one already underway.
- The project is in Request status. The Submittals tab only appears on projects in Request status.
There’s one more thing worth knowing before you commit: enabling the new experience cannot be undone. Once you turn it on for a project, that project can’t be switched back to the legacy submittals experience. A few related details:
- Legacy submittals are not carried over — there’s no migration path from the legacy experience into the new log.
- Once enabled, legacy submittal views and configuration options for that project are hidden automatically.
- Commitments aren’t part of the new experience yet, so if your process depends on linking submittals to commitments, stay on the legacy experience for that project for now.
- If you’ve already uploaded a spec book in Plans & Specs, it isn’t available to submittal extraction — you’ll need to upload it again directly in the extraction tool.
Because the switch is permanent, it’s worth enabling the new experience on a new project first, so your team has room to learn the workflow without affecting a job already in progress.
How to Enable It
You’ll need the Project Preferences permission to do this.
- Open the project.
- Go to Project Setup.
- Go to Project Preferences.
- Find the Submittals section.
- Select Use new submittals experience.
- A “Saved” confirmation appears, and the setting updates to confirm the project is now using the new submittals experience.
What to Do First, In Order
Once it’s enabled, work through these steps before your team starts using the log. The order matters — skipping ahead to building your register before the first two steps will cause headaches later.
1. Add everyone to Team Members first
This is the step most likely to trip people up, because it works differently than the legacy experience. The new Submittals experience pulls the people you can assign to submittals from the project’s Team Members tab. Anyone not listed there — including subcontractors, architects, engineers, and owners — cannot be assigned to a submission or review step. Add your contacts to Team Members before you build any workflows.
2. Review access levels
Five access levels — None, Viewer, Coordinator, Manager, and Administrator — control who can view and act on submittals within the project, replacing the more granular permission settings from the legacy experience.
On the project’s Submittals settings, each team member is given a suggested access level based on their role. Check these before anyone starts working. Two things to keep in mind:
- You can raise someone’s access level on a specific project, but you can’t set it below the default for their role. Role defaults are set in Configuration — set them to the lowest level a person would typically need, then upgrade per project as needed.
- External reviewers and submitters need at least Viewer access to see their items.
3. Set a default project workflow
Configure the review steps you want every new submittal to inherit, so items arrive ready to send instead of needing manual setup each time. Each submittal workflow has a submission step, as many review steps as you need, and an official response — you can rename and reorder review steps and add as many as needed, though the submission and official response steps themselves can’t be removed. You can also copy a workflow from one item and apply it to others in bulk.
4. Build your log
With Team Members, access levels, and a default workflow in place, you’re ready to build the register. You have three ways to do it:
- Upload a specification book and let the extraction tool identify submittal requirements and group them by specification section. You’ll review each extracted item side by side with the source document and confirm it before it’s added to your log.
- Import items from another project.
- Add items manually.
A Few Other Things Worth Knowing
- Every submittal item lives in a single list you can search, sort, filter, group, and customize with pinned and reordered columns — your layout saves automatically. The Court column shows who owns the next action on each item.
- Files from you and the submitter are merged into a single document for review. Reviewers apply a stamp with their response, then the submittal manager finalizes the official response, distributes it, and tracks acknowledgement of receipt.
- You can comment on items or documents and tag teammates directly. Comments marked confidential stay internal to your company.
- Reminders can be configured to go out a set number of days before or after submission and review due dates.
Staying on the Legacy Experience
You don’t have to switch. Any project where you haven’t enabled the new experience continues to use the legacy submittals experience exactly as before, with no deadline to move over. Because the setting is per project, you can run new projects on the new experience while your in-progress jobs finish out on the legacy one.
For the full walkthrough, including screenshots of each step, see RedTeam Flex – New Submittals: Overview and How to Enable It in the Help Center.
