Calculators: quote a project from a few measurements
Type a deck's size or a basement's walls and every line the job takes is worked out, priced and explained. Ready-made calculators for every trade, and free ones on our website.
A deck, a basement, a roof or a fence is quoted from a spreadsheet: a few numbers the job turns on, and every line worked out from them by hand. A calculator is that spreadsheet, made to do its own arithmetic. Type the numbers and pick the choices, and every line the job takes appears — its quantity, its waste, rounded up to what you can buy — with how we got this in words beside it: Wall length 130 ft at one every 24 in, plus 1: 66 each; plus 10% waste: 72.6; rounded up to whole each: 73.
Start where you are. Build one from scratch, add one of the ready-made calculators for your trade — basement finish, drywall, decks and fences, flooring, roofing, siding, concrete and pavers, painting, landscaping and more — or bring in the parts list you quote from today, as a CSV or Excel file. Four new trades come with kits of their own: decks and fences; flooring; concrete and hardscape; and gutters, siding and insulation.
Onto the proposal, priced. Add from a calculator fills the numbers from the client’s site measurements where it can, prices every line from your Price Book with the margin before it is sent, and puts the lines on the proposal under their sections. One run prices good, better and best, and the client reads what the estimate is based on and what it leaves out.
Through the job. Accepted, the run goes with the job: its sections become the plan’s stages, its materials the job’s list, and an order rounds them to the supplier’s packs. When the job turns out different, Run again for a change drafts a change order for what went up. And as your jobs record what they used, each line says the waste they really took — Real waste: 11% across 6 jobs — and offers the figure to use.
On Professional, the assistant does the authoring. Describe the job and it drafts the calculator; hand it your parts list’s assumptions and it works out the rules behind the quantities; or just ask — estimate a 16 by 20 composite deck for the Lindqvists — and it runs one for a client. It is never shown a price.
Calculators is a tool on every plan; add it on the Tools page. And every ready-made calculator is free for anyone to try at smgtools.com/calculators, with no prices and nothing sent.