Challenges Getting Accurate & Competitive Quotes — Anyone Else?
Hey everyone. Wanted to start a conversation around something I think a lot of us deal with daily. Getting quotes right is hard. Too high and you lose the job. Too low and you regret winning it. A few challenges I keep running into: Translating plans and site conditions into accurate material and labor costs Material prices changing between quote and job start Knowing what the market will bear in your area Finding customers who care about quality, not just the cheapest bid I've been using Jobber to streamline the quoting side. Building out templates, tracking job history to compare estimated vs. actual costs, and following up on open quotes automatically. It's helped, but the estimating accuracy piece still takes real discipline. Would love to hear from the community: What's your quoting process start to finish? How do you handle rising material costs in your pricing? Where are you finding your best customers? Any Jobber features that have helped you quote faster or more accurately? Drop your experience below — whether you've got it figured out or you're still grinding through it like the rest of us. 👇
Request for Quote building using hidden subtotals
As a handyman/general contractor, I only base my quotes per job/task and not time and materials. I do not want the client to see the price of labor, cost of materials, or other line items except the Job task itself and the price. In order to build an accurate quote, I have to build all of this in a spreadsheet (labor, materials, etc) and copy over the grand total. If I need to make a revision, I have to go back to the spreadsheet and redo the calculations. It would be very helpful to have a way to build a quote with hidden sub line items that can be changed. Quickbooks has a estimate feature called bundling. Example: Tile Backsplash Installation $2,575 (hidden below) Labor 12 $165 $1,980 Tile 1 $350 $350 Mastic 1 $30 $30 Grout 1 $30 $30 Misc 1 $20 $20 Does anyone else struggle with this or have an efficient workaround?
We Need a Catalog to Build Estimates 📗
🥳🔥We need a catalog 📗! The items in the catalog help with building out an estimate. These items are the nuts and bolts of the products and services. Examples of catalog items are materials, permits, labor, subs, and anything else you need to complete a job. The ability to add images to the item would be a plus! Creating an Item in the Catalog; Item Name; Description for customer (can be toggled on to let customer see or turned off); Sku Number; Part Number; Quantity; Unit (Each, Feet, Gallon); Cost Code; Type; Unit Cost; Extended Cost (Calculated After you input the qty); Unit Price; Extended Price (Calculated after you input the qty with selected Markup or Margin); Markup; Margin; Taxable y/n; Internal Notes; Image of item 😮Currently, we build estimates outside of Jobber. Once we know the prices, we create the estimate in Jobber and send it to the customer. It would be nice to create an estimate in Jobber and, behind the scenes, see the prices, quantities, and markups of items we picked from the catalog to determine the estimated amount. Once the job is complete, adjusting the actual item's prices or quantities would be super cool to see how the final numbers compare to the estimated cost. Is there anyone else out there who would benefit from a catalog?
