Job estimating software: pricing work from what it actually costs

Job estimating software turns a scope of work into a priced quote: labour hours at known rates, materials at current prices, subcontractor allowances, plant, overhead recovery and margin. For trades and project businesses it decides profitability before a single hour is worked, because a job priced 15% light cannot be rescued by working harder — it can only be delivered at a loss or argued about through variations.

What job estimating software has to do

• Reusable assemblies: priced units of work — a socket outlet, a square metre of screed — rather than estimating from scratch each time.
• Current material prices, ideally updated from supplier price files rather than typed annually.
• Labour rates that include employer costs, not bare wages.
• Overhead recovery on a stated basis, so quoting does not quietly ignore fixed costs.
• Margin as a separate, visible line — the number most often eroded during negotiation.
• Alternates and options, because clients ask for versions.
• Export to a client-facing quote with clear inclusions and exclusions.

Where estimates go wrong

Three failures repeat across trades. Labour is estimated by the optimistic case rather than the typical one, so any complication eats the margin. Exclusions are vague, which turns every assumption into a dispute about whether it was priced. And preliminaries — access, welfare, scaffolding, waste removal, supervision — are left out because they are not part of the measured work, even though they consume real money. An estimate that lists what is not included is worth more than one that is merely lower.

Price the estimate from your own completed jobs, not from a published rate book. If your last four similar jobs took 20% longer than the book says, your rate is the truth and the book is a marketing document.

Closing the loop with actual cost

1. Quote using named assemblies so each estimate can be compared with outcome.
2. Record actual labour and materials against the same job code.
3. Review estimate against actual for every completed job, by cost type.
4. Adjust the assembly rates when a pattern appears — not after one bad job.
5. Track win rate alongside margin: quoting too high shows up as silence, not as feedback.
6. Keep a note of why each lost job was lost, because price is often not the reason.

Ettex Sheets handles this at small scale: an assemblies tab with labour and material components, a quote builder that totals them with overhead and margin, and a comparison tab fed from completed jobs. It shares job codes with the job costing software approach, which is what makes the estimate-versus-actual review possible rather than theoretical.