Quote a house the way you walk it.
Room by room, wall by wall. Stringline turns a tape measure and your own production rates into a price the customer can accept on their phone.
Quoting today: measure it on site, and it works out the quantitiesWhat Stringline does about each one.
- You priced the whole house in one go and the bathroom took a day longer than expected. Price it room by room as you measure. Each room has its own hours against it, so you can see which one ran over.
- The quote is a PDF, the schedule is a whiteboard, the invoice is a Sunday night. The measure-up, the quote, the job and the invoice are the one job. What your customer accepted becomes the job, and the invoice is built from the same items.
- Three quotes out, nobody has answered, and you feel like a nuisance ringing about it. The follow-ups do the ringing, on the schedule you set, and stop as soon as the quote is accepted or declined.
- You know your m² rate is out. You just don't know by how much. The clock says by how much. Every job compares what you priced against what it took, rate by rate.
What you measure, and what falls out.
Tap the dimensions in on site. Stringline works the quantities out from what you measured, so your pricing stays accurate.
Your rates. Minutes for one of a thing, times what your labour costs.
A rate is how long a piece of work takes you for one square metre, one metre or one of them, and what your labour costs. Multiply it by what you measured, add the materials and your margin, and that is the item on the quote. These examples are made up; yours won't be.
- Walls, two coats
- 4.5 min / m²
- Ceilings, two coats
- 5.0 min / m²
- Skirting, two coats
- 3.0 min / lm
- Door, both faces
- 25 min each
Then your crew's hours check it. Every hour is against the work that priced it, so when a rate is costing you more than you charge for it, Stringline tells you and offers to put it up. You approve it, and every quote after that uses the new rate.
The ones painters ask us.
I do two coats on walls and one on ceilings. Two rates?
One rate. It has its own price at each coat, so you pick the coats as you add the walls and the minutes come from that. Put your labour rate up and one coat and two both come out right without touching either.
Where does the paint go?
Your wall rate already includes what the paint costs per square metre, with your wastage on top, so quoting the walls prices the paint with them. Anything you buy and sell on by itself, a specialty primer or a sundries pack, goes under Materials with a cost and a sell price, and you add it to the quote as its own item.
Scaffold or a scissor lift on one job?
Put it on as a material at what it costs you plus your margin, or as a charge if it is on every job of that kind. Either way the customer sees it on the quote instead of it being buried in your hourly rate.
What painters get today.
The parts worth knowing about before you sign up, all of them in Stringline today.
- Measure-up on a phone, with the quantities derived for you
- Rates per coat, priced from minutes per square metre and what your labour costs
- A proposal the customer accepts online, and follow-ups that stop once the quote is answered
- Quote to job without retyping, crew on a board, clock-on from the van
- Deposit, progress and final invoices off the quote, with overdue reminders
- Rates that tell you when the clock disagrees with the book
- Before and after photos on the job, from the phone
- Materials ordered from the quote and emailed to your supplier, closed off by their invoice
- Card payments on your invoices, and invoices into Xero with the payments coming back
- Quote templates, and a price book read out of your old quotes
- A wishlist board, where you put up what you need and vote on what others have asked for
- Gib stopping on the same account, if you do both
- Scaffold, hires and callouts quoted as their own lines, beside the work you measured
- Extra work priced on the job, agreed online, and added to the final invoice
Something missing? Every account has a wishlist board, where you can put up what you need and vote on what others have asked for.