Your first close is the one that turns ClearWIP from a calculator into a system of record. Here is the whole path, from connecting QuickBooks to a locked schedule you can hand to anyone. Plan on ten minutes.
Connect QuickBooks Online
From Connections, sign in to QuickBooks and choose the company you report on. ClearWIP pulls the records WIP depends on: customers, invoices, bills, and expenses, and keeps them synced from then on. You never key in cost data.
If anything looks off after the first sync, open sync diagnostics from the connection page. It lists what QuickBooks refused to hand over and what to change on the QuickBooks side to fix it.
Give each job its inputs
Costs and billings come from QuickBooks. The judgment calls come from you, per job: original contract value, approved change orders, a retainage rate if you hold one, and either estimated total cost or cost to complete (whichever you know, ClearWIP derives the other).
Whichever of the two you enter drives percent complete, earned revenue, and every over/under figure on the schedule. Enter what you actually believe the job will cost, not what the bid said.
Run the readiness checks
Before you can lock, ClearWIP checks the period for the things that make a WIP schedule wrong: jobs missing inputs, estimates nobody has touched, costs that blew past the estimate, a sync that's gone stale.
Fix what's fixable. For anything you're consciously accepting, like an estimate you reviewed and held, attest to it. Attestations are recorded with your name and date, and that record follows the schedule.
Tie out to QuickBooks
Before you lock, reconcile the period: ClearWIP checks your job costs against the QuickBooks general ledger and shows the difference. A clean tie-out means your WIP schedule stands on the same numbers your accountant sees, and it's part of what a bank or surety reads on the share.
A mismatch doesn't block the lock, but it does show up on what you send out, so it's worth chasing down first.
Lock the period
Locking creates a numbered snapshot that never changes. Not "saved", locked: same inputs, same math, same numbers, every time anyone opens it. That snapshot is what you share, what your reports cite, and what next month's close is measured against.
That's the whole system. Close every month and the schedule stops being a scramble and starts being a record.