Job Quote Calculator

Quoting forward is not checking a bill backwards

They look like the same arithmetic and they are not.

Checking a bill is subtraction — here is what was charged, here is what it should have been. You have every number already and you are looking for a difference.

Quoting is a build. Hours you have not worked yet, at a rate, plus parts you have not bought yet, plus a markup, plus whatever it costs to have the truck at the curb at all. Every one of those is a decision, and they get made standing in somebody’s kitchen with a phone in one hand.

That is where quotes go wrong. Not from bad arithmetic — from four decisions made quickly, in the wrong order, with nothing to check them against.

The four things, in the order they apply

Labor. Hours against your rate. The simple one.

Parts. What the supply house charged, plus the markup your shop settled on once and has kept since. Shown as two figures rather than one, because a customer who asks what the part cost is asking a reasonable question and you should be able to answer it without doing division in your head.

The call-out minimum. A fifteen-minute visit still pays for the truck being there and for the hour of the day it consumed. Where a line was lifted to the minimum, this says so on the line — not in a footnote at the bottom, on the line — because that is the number a customer queries.

Travel. Attached to the job it belongs to, not floating at the bottom of the quote where it looks like padding.

When the markup would price a part below cost

It happens more than you would think. A percentage markup, a part that came in dearer than the last time, a number typed in a hurry.

This says so rather than quoting it. A quote that prices a part under what you paid for it is not a tight quote, it is a mistake you are going to honor, and you will find it when the supply house invoice arrives three weeks later.

The two decisions nobody can make for you

Your rate. What an hour of your time is worth depends on your license, your years, your insurance, your van, and what your town will bear.

Your markup. Same. It covers your carrying cost, your returns, your trips to the counter, and the fact that you warranty the part.

Those two decisions are what a shop is actually paid to make. Any tool that suggested them would be handing you somebody else’s answer to your own business’s question — and it would not know whether that somebody else was making money.

This knows nothing about what anybody in your county charges, and it will not be adding it.

What it replaces

The quote worked out on the back of a card in the van, and the one that comes in over the phone an hour later after a lot of arithmetic. Or the spreadsheet on a laptop that does not come to the job.

You set your rate, your markup and your minimum once. Each quote is the hours and the parts.

Who it is for

HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance repair, landscaping — any trade that prices a job before doing it and lives or dies on whether that price was right.

What it will not do

It suggests no rate and no markup. Stated twice, because it is the one thing everybody expects a quoting tool to do.

It does not know what the job involves. It prices what you tell it. It has never seen the crawlspace.

It is not an invoice and not a contract. It is the arithmetic of a price, with the working shown so you can defend every line of it.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The arithmetic runs in your browser — which also means it works in a basement with no signal. Close the tab and it is gone.