Use Case 02
AI ESTIMATING& PROPOSALS
Quotes drafted from your own pricing, formatted the way you already send them — ready to review, not ready to start.
The Job
Estimating is the job that eats evenings. Someone reads the plans, prices them against last year’s numbers and a supplier email, assembles a proposal, and sends it two days after the client asked. Automation can take the assembly off that list while leaving the pricing judgement exactly where it belongs — with the person who knows the client and the crew.
What actually happens now
The estimate is not slow because the maths is hard. It is slow because it means opening three systems, finding what a similar job cost, checking whether that supplier price still holds, and retyping it into a document that has to look right. Then the scope changes and most of it is done again from memory. Meanwhile the bid that arrived this morning sits unopened, because the person who answers bids is the person doing the estimate.
What It Does
The parts worth handing over.
Drafts from your own pricing
Line items pulled from your actual numbers and your actual historical jobs, not a generic cost database that does not know your market or your suppliers.
Formats it the way you already send it
Your layout, your terms, your inclusions and exclusions. The output should look like something your office produced, because it is.
Reads the documents so nobody retypes them
Pulls scope, key dates and quantities out of bid invitations, plan sets and supplier quotes, and puts them where the estimate can use them.
Rebuilds after a scope change
A revision starts from the previous version rather than from memory, so the third revision is not the one where something quietly gets dropped.
What It Touches
This kind of work usually has to reach some combination of these:
- Your existing price book
- Spreadsheets you already estimate in
- Job and project management software
- Accounting software
- Supplier quotes and PDFs
- Document storage
Naming a product here means it is the kind of system this work connects to — not that a finished connector is sitting on a shelf. What is possible depends on what your specific account and plan allow, so we check that before quoting rather than after.
Where We Stop
It does not set the final number and it does not send the proposal. Pricing is judgement — what this client is worth, whether to hold your margin, whether the crew is actually free — and it is exactly the sort of expensive, hard-to-reverse decision that belongs with a person. What it removes is the assembly, not the deciding.
Free consultation. A reply within one business day.
The Services Behind This
How we’d build it.
Where this comes up most
Common Questions
What people ask about this.
Both, and the first one is the part most software companies are missing. The team also runs a general contracting and plumbing business, so takeoffs, change orders, submittals and the way a proposal actually has to read are first-hand rather than researched.
Yours. A generic cost database does not know your suppliers, your market or what you actually charge, and an estimate built on one is worse than no estimate. We build against your price book and your past jobs.
That is extremely common and not a problem. A spreadsheet you already trust is a better starting point than a system nobody has adopted — we build around what your team actually uses.
It can draft. It should not send. We deliberately build a review step in front of anything that goes to a client with a number on it, because the cost of a wrong quote landing in someone’s inbox is not recoverable by an apology.
Next Step
What could you stop doing by hand?
A free consultation — we'll look at where your team's time actually goes and show you exactly what we'd automate first. No pressure, no jargon.
Free consultation · a reply within one business day · no pressure, no jargon