Quote the install with real margins and know by week two whether it is making money.
A tenant-improvement sprinkler job gets quoted from a spreadsheet with a margin someone guessed. Change orders happen in the parking lot. You find out it lost money when the last invoice goes out, four months later.
Where the day goes now
- Every quote is built from scratch; the pipe, the heads, the hangers and the labor are priced from memory and the margin is a round number.
- The quote waits on the owner's approval, then on the customer, and nobody can say where it is.
- Once the job starts, actual hours are in a different system from the estimate, if they are anywhere.
- The phases (rough-in, trim, test, inspection) are tracked in a text thread and the punch list lives on a napkin.
What Projects changes
- Quotes from a catalog. Items, assemblies and labor rates with the margin rules you set per office, so pricing is consistent and the profit line is visible before you send it.
- Review and approval. A quote submitted for review lands in My Approvals and comes back approved, rejected or with changes requested; the quote dashboard shows what is pending, quoted, won and lost.
- Quote becomes project. The won quote converts to a project with phases and a punch list, and templates start the next one faster.
- Hours against estimate. Approved timesheet hours charged to the punch list are compared to the hours quoted while the job is still running.
Quoting a project
A project quote carries the customer, building and contact, the estimator and sales rep, a business segment, project type, vertical market and a confidence rating, and moves through Pending, Quoted, Won and Lost with a reason recorded on the outcome. The estimate is built on one of two forms: a bill of materials from your catalogs, assemblies and custom items; labor by position from the rate card; equipment, expenses and subcontractors; and the spaces the work covers. Favorites keep the items you use most within reach.
Cost, margin, profit and sell are shown by material, labor, expense, equipment and subcontractor. Default margins are set per office and per business segment, and the labor rate card carries wage, fringe, burden and overhead for each position so the labor line is costed, not guessed. A proposal is generated from the quote on your own Word template with your logo and terms.
A change order is a child quote under the won quote, so the original estimate and every change are kept separately and the History log records who changed what.
Running the project
A project has a number, an office, a project manager, estimated and actual dates, and the labor hours it was quoted. It is organised as phases, each holding punch-list items with an assignee, estimated hours, planned dates and a baseline that is fixed when the project first goes Active. Items move through Not Started, In Progress, Blocked and Done; the project moves through Draft, Active, On Hold, Complete and Cancelled. The same work can be viewed as a Gantt chart, a list or a board.
Templates define a reusable set of phases and punch-list items, so a wet-pipe tenant improvement or a panel replacement starts from the same checklist every time.
Actuals
Hours reach a project through timesheets. When a technician's time entry is approved in the Operations module and allocated to a punch-list item, those hours, with their hourly rate and labor cost, roll up to the phase and the project. Percent complete, hours over budget and the project manager scorecard are computed from those approved allocations. Materials are not tracked against the project; the estimate's bill of materials is the record of what was priced.
The Projects dashboard
Active projects, punch lists done, logged hours, projects over budget, overdue, due this week, blocked and unassigned, with a portfolio Gantt, projects by status, delivery throughput, budget versus actual, punch-list work mix, a project manager scorecard and a needs-attention list. Every number drills down to the projects behind it.
Bottom line
Consistent pricing, a visible margin before the quote goes out, and hours measured against the estimate while the crew is still on site. One install caught in week two instead of month four is the difference the module is built for.
Inside this module
- Dashboard, Active Projects, All Projects, Templates
- Quotes: Dashboard, Active Quotes, New Project Quote, Tasks, My Approvals