4:10
01 — Set up your business
Logo, licence, default markup and which cost types your state taxes. Ten minutes once, then never again.
Help
Help
Learn it in an afternoon.
A short guide, a video for each screen, and answers to the things people ask on day one.
The guide
Getting started, in eight pages
From a PDF of the plans to a priced quote, and knowing afterwards whether you made money. Written for builders, not for software people — it covers the workflow, the traps, and why markup is not margin.
- 1Setting your business up once so it carries onto every quote
- 2Scaling a sheet and measuring rooms, counts and lengths
- 3Structuring an estimate, and what assemblies are for
- 4What to show a client and what never to send
- 5Tracking cost so the next estimate is better than this one
Getting started
From a PDF of the plans to a priced quote, and knowing whether you made money.
8 pages · PDF
Training videos
Three to five minutes each
One per screen, in the order you would actually use them. Not yet recorded — the list below is the series as planned, so you can see what is coming.
6:35
02 — Your first takeoff
Open a PDF, set the scale from the printed ratio, fill the rooms, count the doors and windows, send it to costing.
5:20
03 — Building the estimate
Categories and sub-categories, markup inheritance, assemblies, and the review pass before anything goes out.
3:45
04 — Sending a quote
The three print presets, what each one shows, and the one you must never send to a client.
5:55
05 — Cost tracking weekly
Entering invoices, setting percent complete, and reading the forecast before the job gets away from you.
4:30
06 — The programme
Building a schedule from the estimate, chaining trades, and keeping it honest once work starts.
Replace these cards with real
embeds once the videos exist. Each one is a <iframe> swap.
Day one questions
The things everyone asks first
What is the difference between markup and margin?
Markup is added on top of your cost. Margin is what is left as a share of the price you charge. An 18% markup gives a 15.3% margin. If you need 18% margin you have to mark up 22%. Getting these confused is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in the trade.
The room fill leaked out and grabbed the whole floor.
That space is not fully enclosed on the drawing — usually a doorway with no threshold line. Trace that one by hand with the Area tool. The fill only stops where the drawing actually has walls.
Why are my imported unit prices blank?
On purpose. The takeoff gives you quantities; the prices are yours. There is a switch in the import dialog to fill placeholder rates if you would rather start from something, but you will need to reprice them anyway.
Can it pull prices from Home Depot or Lowe's?
Not today. Neither has a public pricing API, and scraping their sites breaks constantly and violates their terms. Import your supplier's price list as CSV instead — that gives you your account pricing, which is better than retail anyway.
Does my work sync between my laptop and the office?
Not yet. Everything is stored in the browser you are using, so each machine keeps its own projects. Export a CSV of anything you cannot afford to lose.
Which plan do I need?
Foundation covers takeoff, estimating, quoting and cost tracking. Scheduling and variations start at Pro. Master adds up to five logins. Most one-person outfits start on Foundation and move to Pro when they are running more than one job at a time.
Still stuck? Ask us directly — a builder answers, not a ticket queue.
The shape of it
Where everything lives
Five screens. If you know what each one is for, you know the software.
One set of numbers the whole way along. A quantity measured in step 02 is the same quantity invoiced in step 05 — nothing is retyped between any two boxes.