From Estimate to a Bid the Customer Signs

Most contractors send a bid as an email with a PDF on it, and then guess. Did it arrive? Did anybody open it? Is the silence a no, or is it a builder who has not looked yet? Three screens answer those questions.

What you actually do

1. 1
   Write the bidFrom a takeoff, from a PDF somebody sent you, or by typing the rows yourself.
2. 2
   Turn on online acceptanceOne switch on the bid. It mints the link the customer will open.
3. 3
   Send itFrom your own mailbox, with the quote attached and the link in the body.
4. 4
   Watch the listSent turns into opened when they read it. You are not guessing about silence any more.
5. 5
   They sign, you convert itThe signature is permission. You still choose the day and the crew, on purpose.

The pipeline

Every bid you have out, in the state it is really in: written but not sent, sent, opened, signed, converted to a job, or gone quiet.

A bid sitting unanswered for six months is aged off to "no response" on its own. That is not housekeeping. An unanswered bid left sitting in the open column does two expensive things. It makes your pipeline look bigger than it is, so you plan around work that is not coming. And it never lands in your win rate, which is counted only over bids that actually got an answer. Bury the dead ones and both numbers start telling the truth.

The bid itself

A bid is written in a grid your office already knows from QuickBooks: description, quantity, unit, rate, amount. Your product catalog sits under every row, so picking an item fills in its unit and its price and you type the quantity.

Fill in any two of quantity, rate and amount and the third fills itself. And the quoted total is always the sum of the rows whenever there are rows, so you cannot end up with a bid whose itemization says one thing and whose bottom line says another. That mismatch is the one a customer always finds, usually out loud, in front of somebody.

The page the customer signs

Turn on online acceptance and the email carries a link to a page like this one. It is a public page (no login, no account, no app to download) built to be read on a phone in a truck. The customer reads the scope, reads the total, types their name and accepts.

Three things get recorded when they sign: when they first opened the page, when they signed it, and exactly what they signed: the scope and the total, frozen as they saw it. Afterward the bid’s terms cannot be edited by anybody. Not the rep, not the office, not us.

That last part is the entire reason for capturing a signature instead of keeping an email that says "approved". Six months later, when a builder says the scope was supposed to include the garage, the answer is a page with their name on it and a date, showing the scope they read. An email thread is not that.

Accepting does not send a crew anywhere. The rep still turns the bid into a job, because a signature is permission to start and scheduling is a decision somebody makes on purpose, on a particular day, with a particular crew.

If the customer would rather not

Plenty of builders will just call you. The software treats that as a normal way to do business rather than a workaround.

The office records the approval it was given, along with who gave it, when, and how: phone, in person, email, or on paper. It is labeled as an approval your office recorded. It is never dressed up on screen as a customer signature. Those are two different kinds of evidence and they are worth different amounts if it is ever argued about, so the software calls each of them what it is.

Every screen on this page is the software running, captured from a demo workspace. The builders, addresses and contacts in it are invented; the plan is one we drew. More at Opulence Built.