ZevBit Software Training
Step 3: Writing An Estimate — Full Transcription
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--- CLIP 1: Intro & CRM ---
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So, now that we've gone through the budget, we're going to go through the next step, which is going to be creating the client, scheduling the initial consultation, and then creating the estimate. If you haven't completed the budget, do not worry. You can totally start writing estimates and everything before finishing the budget. It's going to use our default numbers. Once you finish the budget and you save it as default, that's when your estimates from that point forward will begin using the different numbers like labor costs and overhead recovery profit margins from your budget. So let's go ahead and jump into writing an estimate. You can go ahead and get started with that, and you can finish out the budget when you
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have time. Again, if you guys have any questions at any time, feel free to send a message through the support chat down here in the bottom. From there, we're going to now click on the CRM, and you should see the client that you've previously created here. If you don't, just go ahead and create a new client here, fill out the information. Let's go ahead and click into this client, and you'll land here on the dashboard page where you see the overall information for this project. You can always edit this at any time, add additional users, that type of stuff.
--- CLIP 2: Schedule & Files ---
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Let's go ahead and click on the schedule tab where we can schedule the initial consultation. So it'll take you to the month view here by default. You can click right here and switch to week if you want to view it in a week view, and
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you have two options to schedule an initial consultation. You can either click right here and to new task and event, or you can do the new button in the top. So let's say we want to schedule it for tomorrow, and we can click on here, new task and event, and then you can see it opens up this panel where we can choose who's going to that task. So you can select different employees here. You'll see like salespeople and office people that you've added here, and then you can select the type of the task. So it'll give you some different options. These are editable in the settings, which I'll show you. So there's different types of tasks. The most common will be this estimate consultation as the initial meeting.
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You can also add your own custom categories. So for this, let's go ahead and click on estimate consultation. As you can see here, it'll say estimate of John Smith. This will be the client's name here, and then you can confirm the date, time. You can edit the description here, but this will come default based on this type of task, and then you're essentially ready to click save, and here you can see it gives us an option to send out an email to the client with a booking confirmation. So you'll see here it shows that this is a preview of what the client's going to see. You can edit this email template in the settings, which I'm going to show you here in just a second, and you would just click send email, and the customer's going to get an email with
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that confirmation. You can also send a reminder email, an hour, two hours, or one day, whatever you want to set it up before the appointment that goes to the client. So you just click save there, and that will be saved. So now we have an appointment here scheduled for tomorrow where you or one of the team members from your company will go out and meet with the customer and look at the property and get all the scope of work for that project. The next step will be going to the files tab here, and when the salesperson or yourself is on site meeting with the client, you can take any photos, videos, you can get any PDFs, plot plans, whatever it might be, and you can upload those all here into the files tab
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directly with this upload button, and you can do this directly on the mobile app on your phone. So make sure you download the mobile app from the App Store or Google Play Store, and you can come to this client and upload any files directly from there. Going back to the schedule real briefly, talking about these different types of events here, you're going to be able to edit that in the settings. If you go to settings and then go to calendar, you'll see those different types of meetings, and you can click right here to view and edit those email templates. So if you need to make any changes, you can also click the pencil on the left side to edit the default settings and options, reminders, that type of stuff. So just reach out to us if you have any questions. These are all set up for you, and you can add your own as well if you'd like.
--- CLIP 3: Estimates ---
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Let's go back here to the CRM and go back to this client. We've now scheduled the appointment, and the salesperson goes out and meets with them, uploads any files, and we are ready to start on the estimate process. So you're going to click right here on estimate. It's going to pop up. Are you sure you want to move this to the estimate dashboard? Once you click yes here, this client is now going to live under estimates. So you'll see that John Smith is now here under estimates. It'll no longer be in the CRM, and that's done because we are only going to keep the clients in the CRM that are new leads, people you're never able to get in contact with, people you have appointments scheduled with, that type of stuff. Once you start writing an estimate for them, they show in estimates.
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So this list stays organized of people you're actually writing an estimate for. So go ahead and click into the client. It'll take you to the estimate page, and now you can begin adding your line items. So when you go to add a line item, it's going to give you two options. You can do a blank line item or select from templates. Select from templates is going to show those templates that we previously pulled in from ZevBit Marketplace. You can always come here to ZevBit Marketplace and browse templates. And if you search for a template that you don't already have, it'll show ZevBit Marketplace, and you can add those to your account.
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So that's how the templates will work.
--- CLIP 4: Blank Line Item ---
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You can also always create a blank line item. So a blank line item works where you can, and you just click blank line item, it adds this row, and you can put in the name. Let's say this is demo and prep.
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Here in the quantity, you can enter one, and in the unit, all the way at the bottom, there is square feet in each, so one each, let's say. And if you know what you want to charge the demo, you can just type that right in here. If you're not sure what you want to charge for it yet, you can actually have the system help calculate it out for you based on your material costs, your labor costs, and subcontractor costs, that type of stuff. So I'll show you that in just a second. Additionally, you could put this quantity as a square footage if you prefer, let's say 1,000 square feet. So however you want to structure that. This isn't going to be visible to the client, but the price will be. So just keep that in mind. This is for you internally to keep things organized and know what the unit price is.
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From there, we can go and set up how we want to enter in the information. So like I said, you can either type in a price and enter in a description. Let's say we want to say includes demoing XYZ, and you can click enter to add a new line, includes hauling off and disposal. So whatever you want to put in here, you can also do shift enter to add lines inside the same box. And that's how that'll work. If you ever want to plug in this number up here, you could obviously type it out, includes demoing 1,000 square feet of XYZ, or you could use this with the at symbol to pull in the
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line item quantity here. And what this does is when we click preview, it'll show whatever number you have up here. So if you save this as a template, whatever number you put in here will automatically show in the description. To edit it, click edit, confirm, and you'll see this has a tag here that's automatically pulling in this number. So the client won't see this, they'll see what you see when you click on preview. You can also make anything bold. So you can select this, make it bold, select any other text, and make it bold. And then when you go to preview, you can see what that'll look like. So that's how the description will work. From there, you can enter in any materials, labor tasks, subcontractor costs, if you'd
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like, or you can manually directly enter in a price. So if we want to enter in any materials, we can add that here. As you can see, when I click add material, it adds this row where we can enter the material. So let's say disposal cost. Here we can enter the quantity. We can manually type this in, or we can click on this formula icon right here, and we can set up a formula. We can say for 1,000 square feet, it's going to take three loads of disposal. As you can see here, it'll create a production rate. You can also choose rounding here of how you want it to round. So that'll calculate out how many disposal costs you're going to have. You can switch this to a different unit if you'd like, such as loads, but it's not required.
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It's up to you if you want to do that. There's some different units in here. One of them is loads right here, and you can put in the unit cost here of how much it costs. Maybe it's $100 per load. So as you can see here, it'll calculate out $500. Since we set this up as a formula, if I change this to 1,000 square feet, it's going to recalculate to three loads and $300 automatically. The benefit of doing this is that when we save this as a template, from this point forward, it'll be automatically calculated out for you. You can also add any labor tasks that you need by clicking Add Labor Task and putting in the amount of man hours of how long you think that service is going to take. So demoing 1,000 square feet, maybe that's going to take you, I don't know, six hours
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with three workers. So six times three is 18. You can put that here. You can also click on these three workers, and you can edit it here per worker or by the number of days. So let's say we think it's going to take us three days and zero hours. That's 72 total hours. Or maybe three days and a half. So three days plus four hours, 84 total hours. So you can edit from here, and it'll update here, or you can edit here, and it'll recalculate whatever that's coming out to as far as the number of days. So let's leave it at 18 hours, three guys for six hours each. Based on that, it's going to calculate out your cost per hour. This is coming from the budget, or it'll show the default that you have.
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And it'll also calculate out your break-even per hour here. From here, you can either manually enter in the price. Let's say I want to charge $3 a square foot. It'll calculate out $3,000. You can also hover over this and go back to the calculated amount, where it's going to calculate it out based on the profit you have on your materials plus the price per hour of your labor. So in this case, we have 18 hours with three guys, $74 an hour. It's calculating out our price. We also have our materials, which is $300, and we have the net profit here to calculate out the total price for that.
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So you can set this up however you'd like. Maybe I think this is going to take actually a day, so I can click here and make this one day plus zero hours. That's 24 hours. You could also edit it right here if you'd like. And now you can see that's updated the price. So if you want to set this up as a formula, where this is auto-calculated based on this quantity here, you can click on this little calculator on the side. It'll let you say 1,000 square feet takes 24 hours, and it'll calculate out the production rate, how many square feet you can do per hour. You can also choose to round this up if you'd like, hit save. And now if you go and change this, let's say you have a 600 square foot, it's going to recalculate the amount of hours automatically based on that production rate.
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This can help you save time when you're doing estimates and calculate it based on your specific numbers. So that's how it's going to work with materials and labor. Same thing will apply to subcontractors and equipment if you need to add any. Typically in equipment, you would be adding any rental equipment, but if your equipment that you have paid off or owned or financed, if that's included in your budget as overhead, you don't have to add it separately here. We also have the client description, as we talked about earlier, and the crew notes where you can add any notes that your crew will see once this turns into a work order. You can always add these later once the client has signed. You can also add any files that you'd like. Here you can see it says, please save the estimate before uploading files.
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So you just click save estimate here, and you can now see you can click to upload files. You can click right here to upload files, and you can select any files that you'd like, whatever it might be. I have an example file I was going to upload, but it's the wrong file type. So you can upload any types of files you'd like in here. This can be photos, PDFs, that type of stuff, and this will show up on the proposal. So that's how it works with a blank line item.
--- CLIP 5: Templates ---
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You can also use our pre-built templates, like I mentioned earlier. So if we go select from templates, we can select one of the pre-built templates, for example, pavers, and you'll see here that this adds that item to the estimate.
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You're going to click on this little arrow on the left side to open it, and now you'll see different fields that you can input to calculate out your materials and your labor. So the first field is the square footage of the pavers, say 500 square feet, and you can see here we have a drop-down to select the type of the pavers. This connects to your catalog where you can import this from your supplier, and you can also search for specific types of pavers. This will then fill in down here into the material list of auto-calculating all the different materials you need for that patio, and this is based on the template and the formulas that we've set up. We also have linear feet of border pavers, you can add that if needed, amount of cuts,
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we have 10% waste, we also have tabs here to break out excavation access, how you're hauling off the material, your disposal costs, we have base, maybe the haul-off is already covered in this demo and prep, so I don't need to add it separately. We have base, you can see here you can select the type of base. If you want to edit anything here, you just click on the three dots and click update, and when you make any adjustments here, this will update over in the catalog. Additionally, you can edit the depth of the base rock here, and it will recalculate the number of tons or yards based on the template that you have.
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If you make any changes at all, let's say, I don't know, you change this from pick-up to deliver on the base rock, you can go to the three dots and click save as default, if you want to make that a permanent change. In the other tab, we have some additional options for calculating out things that are related to pavers, so you can review these and see the different options and calculations. That all feeds here into the materials, where it's going to calculate out all your materials and your total cost of your materials. This break-even column will only be here if you set in your budget that you want to recover overhead through materials. If you did it only through labor or through subcontractors, then this won't be here for your account. Then you have your net profit.
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You can adjust this by clicking on each one, or you can click the pencil to adjust them all at once. The entire table can be edited by clicking in the table. Just know, if you make any changes here, they'll just be one-time changes. If you want to make permanent changes, you can do that up above. For example, adjusting this polymeric sand cost, you could go to the three dots and click update to make a permanent change in your catalog. Additionally, same thing for labor. You're able to view how many labor hours are estimated for this job. You'll see that the man hours are calculated out here. In this case, it's calculating out three workers for two days plus seven hours and 42 minutes.
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That's essentially three full days. If I make this 72, it's going to go to three days. You can see that that's calculated out here. Then you can always manually adjust this here or by clicking on this and adjusting. Maybe I want to make it three days and four hours, so three and a half days. That's 84 hours, so you can save that or you could just type in the 84 right here. You can also expand the labor task here on the left side to see how the system is calculating this total. This will also auto recalculate based on what you select. For example, if I put the access to very bad access, now we're at four and a half days instead of three days.
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It's going to add additional time on automatically and then you can edit it further. All that really matters is that this total at the bottom is accurate for how long you estimate this is going to take you. If you want to make any permanent changes to these production rates, please send a message to our support team and we can walk you through that. Based on that, it's going to calculate out your total price of your labor and the price of your materials. When those get added together, that becomes the total price of this estimate. You can see it's at $15,000 right now. If I put this back to good access, it's going to drop down to $12,000. That's going to depend on how much labor you have and the different numbers that you have entered. If you click on the profit tab, you can see how much it's coming out to per square foot
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and you can also see the gross profit and net profit numbers for this line item. If you ever want to adjust this, you can't right here, but you can adjust it up at the top. If I want to make this $13,500, you can enter that here. When you go back to the profit tab, you'll see that that gets auto recalculated. Feel free to make any changes. You can also hover over this arrow and click revert to calculated to go back to how the system is calculating the numbers. The overall goal of this is to enter in your square footage of the pavers, select the type of material, and have everything auto calculated for you where you can save time and not have to worry about making sure that all your costs and overhead is being accounted for.
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This ensures that you're making the profit you're aiming for and covering all of your expenses so when you sell this estimate, you know you're going to make a profit on it. That also is important to make sure that you track the job and make sure that you're on budget which we'll talk about in the following steps. From here, the next step is to view the client description where you can see what's really nice is that these templates pre-write this description for you so you don't have to write this out every single time. When you make changes up here, if I go and change this paver to something else, it's going to automatically update in the description for me. You can also add any additional pavers that you'd like or you can click on the three dots
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to edit the pavers that you need. So if you want to put a specific paver name in here, you can adjust the cost as needed and then click update in catalog. That's going to update in the description automatically so you don't have to worry about saving that in the future. If you want to make this a permanent change, you can click on the three dots and save it as default if you want this to be like the default option. Whenever you edit it and you update the catalogs, that's already a permanent change. The save as default just makes it the default option each time that you do pavers. So that's how the templates work and the blank line items. We're going to have a future video for the blank line items going into more detail on
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how you can build out a template, more detail into formulas and conditional rules if you need to build out any custom templates for your company. So please reach out to us if you have any questions with this process. What we would recommend is just start with adding blank line items, entering the info that you need, start getting some proposals out there, and also checking out the templates that we have pre-built for the different services that apply to your company. Reach out to us at any time with any questions through the support chat. We are here to help and happy to go through any details, show you how to customize anything, or answer any further questions. Thank you for your time and I'll see you in the next step.
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End of Transcription — Step 3: Writing An Estimate