Guide · Contractors and job shops
Almost every contractor and job shop starts the same way. Somebody opens the last job that looked similar, saves a copy, and edits the numbers. It works for years. Then it stops working, usually quietly, and usually before anyone notices what it is costing.
It does not fail with a bang. It fails in five ways at once, slowly.
Prices drift. Material costs move. The spreadsheet does not, unless somebody remembers. Six months later you are quoting off a copper price from last year and winning jobs you should have lost.
Two people quote differently. Two estimators, two lineages of copied files, two answers for the same job. Eventually a customer gets both, and the conversation that follows is not about the work.
The owner becomes the bottleneck. The markups live in one head. Every quote of any size waits for that head to be free. If you are the owner, you already know this is why you are quoting at nine at night.
Nobody knows what was quoted. The file is on a desktop, or in an email, or in a folder called Quotes 2 Final. When the job goes badly you cannot compare what you priced against what it cost, so you cannot learn anything from it.
Quotes go out late. This is the one that shows up in revenue. In most trades the first credible quote wins a meaningful share of the time, and a quote written three days later is competing against a decision already half made.
The instinct is to look for a quoting package. It is the wrong first move, and it is the reason most of these projects fail.
The problem is not that your spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. It is that your pricing rules live in a file and in somebody's head instead of in one agreed place. Software does not fix that. Software applies rules. If the rules are unwritten and inconsistent, all you get is a faster way to produce inconsistent quotes, and a subscription.
Every quoting tool that gets abandoned in the first year was abandoned for the same reason: it was bought before anyone wrote down how the business actually prices work.
Get the rules out of the head. Sit with whoever prices work and write down what they actually do. Not what the procedure says. What they do. The markup on materials, the labour rate, the different rate for the awkward customer, the round-up on anything involving a Saturday. This is the whole job and it usually takes a couple of sessions.
Expect disagreement. When two estimators see the rules written down, they will discover they have been pricing differently for years. That argument is valuable and it is cheaper to have it now than after you have bought something.
Find the items that matter. A minority of your line items will account for most of your quoting. Get those right and correct the rest as they come up. Trying to catalogue everything first is how this stalls for a year.
Decide who is allowed to override. Somebody will always need to discount a job. The question is whether that is visible afterwards. If overrides are invisible you will never work out why margin slipped.
Once the rules are written, the build is straightforward. Prices held in one place. A quote assembled from those rules rather than from a copy of last week. The same job priced the same way regardless of who is at the keyboard. A record of what was quoted, so it can be compared against what it cost.
The first version should do one kind of job well rather than every kind badly. Crews can quote from a phone on site if that suits how you work, which for most trades is the change that moves quotes from same-week to same-day.
QuickBooks generally stays exactly where it is. It remains the record of what was invoiced; the quoting tool feeds it rather than competing with it. Replacing your accounting system is not part of this and should not be.
Two people quote the same job within a few percent of each other. A price change is made once rather than in every file. Quotes go out the day of the visit. And at the end of a job you can look at what you quoted next to what it actually cost, which over a year is worth more than the time you saved.
That last one is the part people underestimate. Time saved is the reason to start. Knowing which jobs make money is the reason it matters.
Time it honestly first. Count the quotes you send in a month and how long each takes, including the chasing and the corrections. If the number is small, leave it alone. If it is not, the audit will put hours per week and dollars per year against it, with a fixed price to fix it, in writing within five business days.
More guides: QuickBooks Desktop integration · ERP reporting · Replace or build around
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