Winning the work.
An enquiry turns up, and a quote comes back accepted with the deposit already raised. It's the first four steps of how it works, in detail.
However it arrives, it lands in one place.
Put the enquiry form on your own website as a link, an iframe or a script, whichever your site will take, or use the hosted page if you would rather not touch it at all. What the customer typed arrives on your lead board exactly as they typed it.
Accepting a lead matches it to a customer and a property, by email first and then by phone, so the same person enquiring twice stays one customer with one history. Leads you take on the phone go on the same board by hand.
The form can price itself as well. Mark a rate as one you offer online and your customer can pick that work and say how many: an annual service, a mixer replaced, a downlight. Accepting the lead turns it into a draft quote off those same rates. Whether they see a price while they pick is yours to decide.
Rates, materials and templates. Only rates hold a price.
A quote is built from three separate things, and keeping them separate is what lets you change one without redoing the others.
Your price book
What each kind of work costs. "Walls, two coats" per square metre: how long it takes you for one of them, what materials it uses, and the level it's done to, which is coats for a painter and finish level for a plasterer. What you charge for it comes from that time, your hourly rate and your margin, and you can set a price by hand on any one of them instead.
A quote template
The shape of a job, with no numbers in it at all. A three-bed interior repaint is a list of rooms, and for each room the price-book items that are usually ticked. No measurements, no prices. Most get made by pressing "Save as template" on a quote that looked like the last four.
The measure-up
The quantities, taken on site. Start from the template and the rooms are already there with their ticks on; you tap each room's measurements in as you take them. What you measured, at the rate that prices it, is the line on the quote.
A template never holds a price. Put your rates up and every quote made from that template after it comes out at the new price, without you opening one. Retire an item and it drops out of the templates that used it.
Parts sit beside the price book: things you buy and sell on, at a margin or at a fixed price. Checklists are a different thing again, and go on jobs rather than quotes.
Upload your old quotes and the price book writes itself.
You quote from day one off a price book built out of your own work. Upload a handful of quotes you've already sent and they're read into a draft price book: the work you charge for, what you call it, and what you charged. You review it before a line of it is kept.
It's an AI model that does the reading, and it can misread a bad scan or a lump-sum quote, which is why none of it reaches your price book until you've been through it.
After that it keeps learning from real work. When a job is finished, the hours your crew clocked against each quoted item are compared with what the price book expected, and Stringline proposes the rate changes for you to approve. It never changes a rate by itself. See what the clock tells you.
Your customer accepts it on their phone, and the deposit is raised automatically.
The quote goes out by email, with a link to it and the PDF attached. Your customer opens the link, ticks any options you offered, and accepts by typing their name. The charges you add to every quote and your usual discounts are applied for you.
The deposit percentage rides on the quote, pre-filled from your default and removable on the jobs that don't need one. The moment the customer accepts, the deposit invoice exists; whether it emails itself is a setting. Quotes nobody has answered get chased on the schedule you set.