Estimating and proposals for contractors

Field measurements priced from your own rates, a proposal the customer opens and signs on their phone, and follow-up that stops the moment they answer. This is the fix for companies whose quotes are good and slow, or good and forgotten.

Who this fits

A company that sells work by estimate and writes them one at a time: measure on site, price in a spreadsheet, export a PDF, email it, follow up when somebody remembers. The pricing is usually fine. The delay and the silence afterward are what cost the work.

It fits badly if you have no unit rates at all and no interest in writing any down. The install can help you put them on paper, and it cannot invent them for you.

Signs it is broken

• The estimate takes days to write because it is rebuilt from scratch every time.
• Quotes go out as attachments, and nobody knows which ones are still open.
• Follow-up happens when the owner is between jobs and thinks of it.
• The same optional add-on gets priced differently by two different people.
• Nobody can say how many dollars are sitting in unsigned estimates right now.

What the customer sees

A link, then a page. The scope is written out, the measurements are shown, the options are priced, and the total changes as they pick. They type their name, sign, and choose how they are paying the deposit. Both sides get a copy immediately.

What gets installed

• A price table built from your unit rates, so two estimators quoting the same job land on the same number.
• A proposal that opens as a page, with priced options the customer can pick and a total that updates as they do.
• Signature and deposit in the same place, with a copy to both sides and the signed version stored.
• An open-quote list: what is out, how old it is, and what it is worth.
• A follow-up sequence in your voice over a few weeks, which stops when the customer replies, books, declines, or opts out.
• A human review step before anything reaches a customer, because the estimator owns the number.
• A written runbook, plus the old way as a fallback: any proposal can still go out as a PDF.

Tools it runs on

Whatever you already use to price work, if it can be read and written. A spreadsheet of rates is a perfectly good starting point and is the most common one. If you run Jobber, Housecall Pro, or something similar, the proposal step is built around it rather than on top of it, and the audit says which parts of your tool are already doing the job.

Things that need discovery: estimating software with no export, price books that live only in one person's memory, and anything where the vendor rather than you controls the account.

Client effort

More than the lead response fix, and still small. You hand over a handful of recent estimates so the price table matches reality, you confirm the rates, and you approve the proposal wording and the follow-up messages. Expect two short sessions and about two hours total.

Before launch, the first few proposals go out with the estimator watching every line, which is also how the rate table gets its last correction.

What it costs

$1,500 to install and $295 a month to run. The install covers discovery, the rate table, the proposal build, testing, training, the runbook, and the first thirty days of adjustments. The monthly covers monitoring, changes, and support, and it starts the month after go-live. Messaging, hosting, and any e-signature or payment fees are billed at what they cost, on their own line. Month to month, cancel any month.

Limits worth stating

• This does not price your work. It applies the rates you approved and shows its arithmetic.
• It is not certified estimating, engineering, or a takeoff service. Field quantities and cost judgment stay yours.
• A faster proposal does not win a job the customer was never going to give you. It removes the delay and the silence, which are the parts you control.
• Card payments carry processor fees, and those are the processor's, not a markup. Which methods you offer is your call.

Proof

Bellingham Painting Co. and Bellingham Floor Pros send every homeowner bid this way, and the screenshot above is that system with demonstration data. It is operator evidence rather than a measured customer result, and the site says so wherever a result is not yet measured. The labeled work examples are on the home page.

Questions