Pass It Down the Line

Watch who reaches for a plan-review tool first, and a pattern shows up. It usually isn't the contractor.

It's the owner. The homeowner who wants the addition done right. The small developer who's been burned by a bounced submittal. The property manager who's the one on the hook when the city sends it back. The trust-but-verify one. They run the set through CrossBeam, they get the findings — and then they do the thing that actually matters: they hand the whole project to the person who's going to build it.

That handoff used to be the leak. You export a PDF, you email it, the other side skims a wall of text, half of it won't open on their phone, and the context — which finding maps to which sheet, what's a hard fail versus a maybe — evaporates somewhere between your outbox and their inbox.

So CrossBeam made the handoff a link.

Copy it, text it

Open a project and there's a Share button. Inside are two ways to pass the work along. One is an email invite — type the contractor's address, they get a message. The other takes it down to a single tap: Copy link. One tap, the link is on your clipboard, and you text it.

That's the whole ask on the owner's side. No seat to buy for the contractor. No account to set up on their behalf. No "let me add you to my organization." Copy it, text it.

Here's the thing about what happens next, because it's the part that's easy to get wrong.

No login wall at the door

The contractor opens the link on a job site, on a phone, standing next to the truck. What they land on is not a sign-in form.

They see, immediately, what the review found:

‹sharer's name› ran this project through CrossBeam
   123 Maple Ave
   RESIDENTIAL ADDITION

   7 fails · 12 flags · 4 passes        (illustration)
   identified on this plan set

   ⟨ plan-set cover sheet — bottom edge fading out ⟩

That's the teaser: the name of the person who ran it, the address and city, the permit type, the running tally of what passed and what didn't, and the cover sheet of the actual plan set with its bottom edge fading — the way the last page of a preview trails off. (The counts above are an illustration; the real tally is whatever the set earned on its run.)

The door isn't a password. It's the score.

What the teaser does not show is the finding-by-finding detail — the code sections, the letters, the file paths. That lives one step in. To read the full report, the contractor creates a free account: one click, a Google or Microsoft sign-in, no password to invent, no administrator to provision anything. Then they land right in the project.

The point is the sequence. The first thing the builder sees is the work, not a wall.

What the builder can actually do

Once they're in, they're a collaborator — a specific, bounded role. The Share dialog says it plainly:

Collaborators can view results, discuss findings, and
export letters. They can't edit or delete your project,
and they don't join your team.

Three verbs: view the results, discuss the findings, export the letters. Not edit. Not delete. And — the load-bearing part — they don't join your team. The grant is to this one person, on this one project. Billing doesn't move. The contractor can go off later and start their own account, their own projects, even their own company, and nothing about the shared project breaks. It was never tangled into anyone's organization to begin with.

The owner keeps the keys

A link you can text is only comfortable if you can take it back. So the owner keeps the controls:

• The link can be claimed by up to five people — enough for a contractor, a designer, and an engineer, not enough to leak across a subcontractor's whole crew.
• It expires after thirty days on its own.
• The owner can revoke it anytime, and everyone who's claimed it shows up in a "Who has access" list they can remove, one by one.
• When someone accepts, the owner gets an email — ‹name› accepted — they're viewing ‹project›.

And revoking is a one-way door for the next person, not for the people already inside. Prior claimers keep their access after a link is revoked or expires; pulling the link closes it to strangers, it doesn't lock out the builder you already handed it to.

Why it's built this way

A plan review is only worth something if it reaches the person with the tape measure. The owner who runs the set is the careful one. The builder is the one who has to act on it. Everything above exists to shorten the distance between those two people to the length of a text message — and to make sure that when the builder opens it, the first thing they meet is the findings, not a form.

That's what it means to pass it down the line. The review travels with the project, into the hands of whoever picks up the hammer next.