Estimates and Proposals: Pricing Work You Can Defend
Build a price from material, labour, subcontract and overhead — then send a clean proposal, and turn the accepted one into a work order without retyping anything.
A quotation produced by adding a margin to a guess cannot be defended when the customer pushes back, and cannot be learned from when the job loses money. An estimate built from its parts can do both.
Built from the parts
An estimate is a tree: sections, work packages and lines. Each line carries material, labour, subcontract or expense, with quantity, unit and rate. Labour can be priced in hours, days or visits. The total is a consequence of the parts rather than a number somebody reverse-engineered.
Rates come from the catalogue, so a rate revision propagates rather than living in one person's spreadsheet.
The proposal is what the customer sees
The estimate is what you know. The proposal is what you send — the same work, priced, with your cost structure kept to yourself. Several proposals can come off one estimate as you negotiate, each numbered, so "which version did they accept?" has an answer.
Acceptance creates the work order
When a proposal is accepted it becomes a work order — carrying the value, the scope and the dates forward without anybody retyping them. That work order is then what the project is delivered against and what invoices are billed against.
And afterwards, you can learn from it
Because the estimate and the actual cost are held against the same job, the question "did we price this right?" is answerable. Estimated against actual, by line, is the feedback loop most companies never close.