Sales and Estimating

Sales & Estimating

Everything upstream of a job: capturing leads, quoting the work, getting a signature, and following up until the estimate is won or dead.

Leads

• Landing leads — raw form submissions (name, email, phone, UTM tags, message) land in a triage list; mark contacted or discard. To feed this from your marketing site's contact form, see Website Lead Intake.
• Lead pipeline — qualified prospects move through stages (new → contacted → qualified → quoted → won/lost) with estimated value and an assignee. Stage transitions are audit-logged.
• Online booking — a public booking form captures name, phone, service, and a preferred date/slot; requests wait in a pending queue, slot availability is checked against existing approvals, and approving one creates the job. See Customer Portal.

Estimates

• Full estimate editor: line items with description, quantity, unit price, and cost; subtotal, tax, and per-line margin snapshots. Auto-numbered (EST-NNNNNN). Status flow: draft → sent → accepted / declined / expired.
• Expiry is a company setting: choose how long estimates stay valid and they expire on schedule (the valid-until date prints on the PDF).
• Reopen — a closed (declined/expired) estimate can be reopened; if catalog costs drifted since it was priced, the app warns before you re-send stale numbers.
• Declining needs a reason — staff must record a loss reason when marking an estimate declined, so lost-work reporting means something. (Customers declining through the portal aren't forced to give one.)
• Line-item pickers pull from your catalogs (parts, doors, labor — see Catalogs), with pricing driven by the pricing engine (margins by customer class, cost tiers, volume discounts, adder rules).
• PDF export, with layouts controlled by the PDF template editor.
• Hide line-item prices — optionally show customers only the Subtotal/Tax/Total block, without per-line Unit Price / Line Total columns (totals are unchanged; the in-app editor always shows prices). Tenant-wide default under Settings → Feature Settings → Estimates, with a per-estimate three-way override (company default / show / hide). It gates the estimate PDF, the invoice PDF, and the install sheet, and the effective choice is snapshotted onto the invoice at conversion so a later settings change won't re-flip an issued invoice.
• Duplicate — copy an estimate to a fresh draft (customer, jobsite, lines, notes, tax, Good/Better/Best tiers). Duplicates are numbered as option variants of the original (EST-000042-1, -2, -3), so competing versions of the same quote stay visibly related instead of scattering across unrelated numbers. Once an estimate is converted, it shows a Converted to Job banner with a View Job button.
• Deposits — an accepted estimate can carry a deposit request, collected before work starts — see Invoicing & Payments.
• Customers accept or decline from a public link — no portal login needed.
• Quote Builder — a fast inline quoting dialog available on desktop and in the mobile app, including Good/Better/Best options on the truck.
• Draft hygiene — background jobs purge empty drafts after 7 days and archive stale ones (default 60 days, configurable).

AI assists

• AI Quick Estimate — describe the job ("16×7 insulated steel door replacement") and the app parses dimensions/material/type, matches catalog items, adds labor from your rates, and proposes line items. Uses a local OpenAI-compatible LLM when configured, and falls back to keyword matching when not — see Integrations.
• Smart line-item suggestions on regular estimates work the same way.

Follow-up & nurture

• Estimate nurture rules — automatic follow-ups for unaccepted estimates: a delay in hours, an optional discount %, and a message template; per-estimate last-contacted tracking prevents spamming a customer.
• Follow-ups queue — scheduled manual tasks on estimates, invoices, or customers with due dates and assignees (see Marketing & Retention).

Contracts & scope changes

• Proposals — formal proposal documents.
• Change orders — mid-job scope changes captured as their own documents so the original estimate stays intact. Approved change orders surface as a checklist when the job is invoiced, so scope changes reach the bill; once billed, a change order freezes (see Invoicing & Payments).
• Service agreements — recurring service contracts (pairs with maintenance plans in Jobs, Scheduling & Dispatch).
• Signatures — e-signature capture and tracking across estimates, quotes, and job close-out.

See also

• Invoicing & Payments — convert accepted estimates to invoices.
• Catalogs — where the priced items come from.