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. 👇
Quotes can be the wrong tool. Estimates avoid disputes, protect margins, and elevate professionalism
Quotes and Estimates are fundamentally different, and not having both options is genuinely problematic for us. Fudging it by adding exception language to a document labeled as a Quote communicates that we aren’t committed to the quote, that we can’t accurately assess or execute our own services, and that we don't have the basic ability to simply send the correct type of sales form. Every workaround risks the sale and our professional image. How do you protect yourselves when a job clearly requires an Estimate instead of a Quote? Would having the option to create either a Quote or an Estimate, so you can send the correct sales document for each job, help you run your business more effectively? I believe some people are employing entirely different software for quotes and estimates. Considering that the ability to send an Estimate is a critical and basic business requirement, would it make sense for Jobber to add the simple option of changing the word "Quote" to "Estimate" when needed? They could still fall under the heading of "Quotes" in the UI, because only the word on the form being sent to the client, and the word used in the related message, needs to change. That's simply front-end work to implement and not a major feature update. The beauty of web-based applications is that it is programmatically easy to add simple functionality to expand the capabilities of basic features that affect nearly all users, requiring only a willingness to spend a little time improving the product's core functionality: helping us grow and manage our businesses.
