EstiMate Tour
Printable Version Of Entire TourImportant Note: This tour refers to EstiMate 2, the current version of EstiMate.
On October 1, we will be releasing EstiMate 2011 and until then we are having a huge pre-release sale.
We are blogging almost daily about new EstiMate 2011 features and you can keep up with the posts here.
Quote
Except for the very simplest quotes, you need well-designed pricing software that allows you to quote jobs quickly and efficiently while giving you numbers you can be confident in.
Constantly Putting Out Fires
There's never enough time to actually get the work done because of all the interruptions, is there? When you get interrupted all the time, you delay quoting jobs, forget the quotes altogether, or you shoot from the hip and lose money – again.
EstiMate changes all that. Rather than be frustrated by the interruption of having to produce a quote - now - you get the confidence that comes with getting the quote in the customer's hands in less than five minutes and coming across as the #1 shop for them to do business with. It's a proven fact that your professional and timely presentation gives your prospect confidence in your work, which gives you an immediate psychological edge.
When you use EstiMate, you experience some very serious benefits:
- Your jobs are quoted in minutes and you win up to 20% more of your bids as a result.
- Your printed, faxed and or PDF-emailed quotes look extremely professional.
- Your proof images are watermarked and can't be scanned.
- Your employees quote jobs (successfully!) while you're in the field or on vacation.
- Your prices guarantee you the profits you require to succeed.
- You don't forget to charge for logo revisions or bags of concrete.
- You enjoy quoting jobs! EstiMate is a pleasure to work with and a real confidence builder.
Where It All Starts: Your Hourly Rate
For more information on why this matters so much, please read this article about why your hourly rate is so important to your business's health.
EstiMate gives you the right tool to figure out what your hourly shop rate has to be to make a profit.
The Hourly Rate Wizard walks you through the steps required to nail down an hourly rate that pays your
overhead expenses, taxes and desired profits – all in the actual hours you can bill to your customers. You'll sleep better
at night knowing that every time you quote a job you are making the money you need to make.
Quote Jobs Anytime, Anywhere.
Your customer needs a quote, and you need to get on site to spec the job. Your employees need to keep using EstiMate while you're away, and you want to take it with you to the job site. Problem? No. Simply check your data out onto your laptop, head out to the job site, and check it back in when you return.
You can even email the merge file back to the shop if you're out of town! The merge file is a simple XML text file that contains the differences between the checked-out data file and the data on your shop's computer.
Best of all, this is built into the Enterprise edition and you don't need to purchase an additional license for your laptop.
EstiMate Makes Quoting Brilliantly Simple
Creating an estimate is a snap. You simply select the customer you are creating the estimate for, and enter an overall description of the job. Then you begin entering line items using EstiMate's pricing plugins.
Each line item is like a separate pricing program for each type of sign you might make - Vinyl Signs or Digital Prints, for example. If you are in an area where you might have to charge different taxes for different things, EstiMate makes this easy by assigning sales tax at the line-item level.
Once you've entered all your line items, you can move them around into the order you want them presented to the customer. Then, select the terms you want on your printout, any discount you might want to offer the customer, and you're done.
Always check the hard numbers before you hit the print button. See how the word "Subtotal" is an underlined link? Click that link to see the following screen...
EstiMate's Hard Numbers give you the low-down on Profits & Expenses.
This screen breaks down the price into very specific areas, showing you how your prices are put together "behind the scenes".
- Material Costs
- Material Markups
- Labor Charges (both towards overhead and profits)
- The effect of discounting on your profits
- Any adjustments (see the Pricing Plugins section).
You can use the Hard Numbers as an on-the-fly P&L Report to quickly check the profitability of jobs at any detail level. Tip: use this feature to identify your most profitable jobs and tailor your marketing to match.
In the "Manage" section of this tour, you'll learn how to turn this feature off for your employees if you want to.
Printing, Faxing Or Emailing Your New Estimate
Fine-Grained Control is in your hands with the EstiMate print options. You can select to include or not the line where the customer signs off on your estimate; the delivery time; the totals (for good, better, best pricing on your estimates); and / or the prices of individual items.
You can even include and exclude specific individual line items on your printout, regardless of what's on the actual estimate, and the totals will recalculate on the printed quote.
Custom messages offer you the opportunity to put stock disclaimers (i.e. "Wipe behind your magnetic signs at least once a week or they will eat the paint off your truck.") on your quotes, positioned where you like, in the header or footer areas.
Use cover pages to distinguish your quotes and connect with your prospects. The cover page editor is a full word processing text editor that allows you to style text any way you like for a professional looking cover page. You can even save cover pages as templates so you can pull them up with just a click for future quotes.
Watermarked proof images prevent your proofs from being scanned and protects your valuable design work. You can attach any number of proof images to your quotes, to show multiple options or multiple items if desired.
Once your quote is ready, you can preview it on the screen, print it to your printer, or print it to your built-in fax driver.
Emailing your quote is as easy as clicking the "Email" button - your quote will be generated as a PDF file and then attached to an email in your usual email program, ready to send to the customer.
Professionalism Pays
Quoting your jobs with EstiMate gives you an amazing boost in your prospect's mind. It solves the problem of interruptions and getting your quotes out on time, with a professional printed quote ready to put in your customer's hands (or email inbox) just minutes after receiving the specs.
You can quote your jobs anywhere (in or out of the shop), knowing that your quotes are going to be spot-on and guarantee you the profits you need in your business.
Finally, once your quote is complete, you can customize it with custom messages, a cover letter, and watermarked proof images!
Next Up: Convert >>
EstiMate Tour
Important Note: This tour refers to EstiMate 2, the current version of EstiMate.
On October 1, we will be releasing EstiMate 2011 and until then we are having a huge pre-release sale.
We are blogging almost daily about new EstiMate 2011 features and you can keep up with the posts here.
Convert
Getting prospects in the door is the easy part - making them into customers is harder.
When you use EstiMate,
converting your prospects into customers is a walk in the park.
It All Starts With The First Impression
"You never get a second chance to make a first impression. "
The quote you present to your prospect is just the first step in the process of getting them to become your customer, but it's definitely the most important. Once you have put together a professional quote for them, and have it in their hands (or e-mail box), the clock is ticking and it's time to use all the tools at your disposal to make them yours.
When a prospect is presented with a professional, computer-generated quote, two magical things happen:
- They are impressed with your professionalism
- They don't quibble about the price.
Seriously! You'd be amazed how the questions like, "can you do a little better than that?" just go away when you present a thought-out quote to them. And when those questions do come up on occasion, you are fully prepared to say, "sure, what would you like me to change?" The printed quote is the first step in converting your prospects into customers.
Following Up On Quotes
EstiMate's "Open Estimates Report" details all the quotes you've given out recently, including the prospect's name, company name, telephone number, job description, the salesperson who gave them the quote, and the dollar amount of the quote (that last one is optional, in case you don't want the employee following up to know the size of the bid).
This lets you follow up with your prospects on any schedule you choose.
Sign Here, Please
EstiMate's quote includes an innocuous looking signature line at the bottom, which is your secret weapon for doing good business:
The signature line does several very powerful things:
- It tells your prospect that you are a serious business
- It tells your prospect that you are a professional
- It tells your prospect that you expect them to be professional
- It asks for a deposit without you having to ask for a deposit
- Once signed, it becomes a contract between you and your new customer.
Congratulations! You Have A New Customer.
Now that the customer has signed the quote, and you are ready to put the job into production, you just open up your estimate and click the "Convert To Job" button.
In the next part of the tour, we'll show you what to do with the job you just created.
Tracking Your Progress
EstiMate includes a special report called the "Estimate -> Job Conversion Report." This report shows, on a customer by customer basis over time, the percentage of estimates that were successfully converted to jobs:
This report also includes at the end a summary of how all your customers converted over time. This gives you the opportunity to tweak your conversion rate.
Remember, the conversion rate you are shooting for is 50/50 - if you get less than 50% of your bids, you need to work on salesmanship - if you get more than 50%, your prices are too low.
Use this report as your business compass!
Next Up: Produce >>
EstiMate Tour
Important Note: This tour refers to EstiMate 2, the current version of EstiMate.
On October 1, we will be releasing EstiMate 2011 and until then we are having a huge pre-release sale.
We are blogging almost daily about new EstiMate 2011 features and you can keep up with the posts here.
Produce
Once you've converted your prospect into a customer and your estimate into a job, it's time to take the next step and track your job through the stages of production.
NOTE: Everything on this page refers to features available in the Enterprise Edition of EstiMate.
Getting Things Done
EstiMate's Job Screen looks a lot like the Estimate Screen but with three key differences:
- Instead of "production days," it has a due date.
- A new place to take a customer's deposit.
- A new drop down list of customizable status flags.
Automated Customer Deposits
EstiMate gives you a place to put customer deposits so they show up when you print the final invoice. This gives you an easy way to track deposits, and if you are using the QuickBooks Link they transfer over to QuickBooks automatically as deposit line items.
Always Know Where A Job Is In Production
Job status flags keep you in control of your job's progress through the shop. Especially when combined with the Multi-User Server in a networked environment, you can always know where any given job is and make sure it will get completed on time.
This is an amazing customer service measure, too, when a customer calls and you can say, "your job is in the printing department right now, and hopefully will move into finishing this afternoon."
Know Exactly What To Do Every Day
The Work In Progress (WIP) report is a report you can print every morning to know exactly what's coming up each day. Sorted by status, you can go one step further and give a copy to each production person and show them their daily workload at a glance.
Many More Print Options
The Job Screen offers many more print options than the estimate screen. You can print invoices, work orders, a job manifest (material list) report, a financial analysis of the job, a packing slip, or a "complete job jacket" which prints all the above reports in turn.
By using these reports you can quickly and easily get materials ordered and jobs flowing through production.
Instant Inventory Reduction
The Job Manifest report gives you all the information you need to place your orders from vendors based on what jobs are in the shop and what work needs to be done in a given day or week.
The report includes all the aspects of required materials for a job, including:
- Overall detail about the job
- Item by item, what materials are required and in what quantities
- What vendors to order the materials from
- Vendor contact information
This report makes it ridiculously easy to take a customer's order, order the materials, and put the job in production, thereby reducing your need to stock inventory.
Meaningful Work Orders
EstiMate's Work Order Report, printable for each job in the system, shows you on an item by item basis what is involved in the job along with any production notes entered for the item.
This gives you the ability to hand off work to your employees with complete confidence that they know what they need to do to pull off a project. In addition, the budgeted design and production times are (optionally) printed on the Work Order. We've heard several stories of shop employees making a game out of beating each other to the finish on production times, thus dramatically improving shop efficiency.
All The Tools You Need In One Place
By giving you all the tools for production management in one place - deposits, job status flags, a WIP report, invoices, job manifests, work orders, and financial analysis reports - EstiMate provides everything you need to take a job and get it done.
Next Up: Manage >>
EstiMate Tour
Important Note: This tour refers to EstiMate 2, the current version of EstiMate.
On October 1, we will be releasing EstiMate 2011 and until then we are having a huge pre-release sale.
We are blogging almost daily about new EstiMate 2011 features and you can keep up with the posts here.
Manage
EstiMate's management functions round out the suite,
putting you in control and giving you the tools you need for
staying on top of things.
User Management & System Security
EstiMate's integrated user management lets you set up users for your system as General Users, Managers, or Administrators.
General Users are prevented from performing the following operations:
- Changing global system settings
- Editing, deleting or deactivating users (except themselves)
- Viewing any financials such as the Hard Numbers, financial reports,etc.
- Editing or deactivating list items
- Deleting estimates and jobs (no jobs done behind your back then removed from the system)
- Adjusting any of the core pricing settings
Managers are allowed to do most of the above, but are still restricted from:
- Changing global system settings
- Editing, deleting or deactivating users (except themselves)
System Administrators are, of course, allowed to do anything.
Salespeople
You can set up multiple salespeople in EstiMate.
This allows you to track who is responsible for quoting a job, and who should follow up with the customer.
It also lets production people the key contact for a project, and gives you an easy way to calculate commissions if appropriate for your shop.
Item Lists
EstiMate's extensive item lists give you deep, sophisticated control over the prices of items in your system, with fast access to everything through the items menu.
Every plugin you add to your system adds additional list items, and every list is thoroughly populated to begin with so you have to spend very little time setting up your EstiMate system.
The vehicle list at left is just one example of how EstiMate's lists are pre-populated. Some more examples would be:
- 26 Vinyls
- 34 Substrates
- 52 Digital Print Media
- 23 Flatbed Printers
Of course, not everything you use will be in there. However, most will, and if there is an item in a list that you need to add it is ridiculously easy to do so. As a matter of fact, due to the fact that EstiMate has QuickBooks-style lists, you can do so without ever leaving a pricing screen.
This means that you can add your list items on-the-fly, and don't have to sit down to do a huge data entry session before starting to price signs with EstiMate.
Importing Your Contacts
You can import all your contacts from any delimited text file, which you can easily export from nearly all contact management programs on the market. This means you don't have to enter any contacts to get started. All your vendors can be imported as well.
Integrated Backup And Restore
Backing up your data files is easy and any user can backup your database (allowing you to delegate this task), but only Administrators can restore your data files.
Data backups are stored in industry standard ZIP files.
System Settings & Configuration
The system settings screen (accessible only to Administrators) is the "cockpit" of your pricing system. This is where you can control a lot of how the system works.
Just some of the options available here are:
- Your company's contact information
- Default estimate terms
- The title to print on estimates
- The usual number of production days
- The signature line for quotes
- Default invoice terms
- The title to print on invoices
- The default sales tax to use on jobs
- The text to use on proof images as your copyright text
- Your units of measure
- Your company logo as well as how it is sized and positioned
- Some advanced settings for how job and estimate numbers are managed
As You Can See, Management Is A Big Part Of EstiMate
With EstiMate you get full control over all aspects of the system, as well as your shop, with features such as user and salesperson managmeent, deep, extensive material lists, solid reporting, contact and vendor imports, data backup and system configuration options.
