Help

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.

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.

A takeoff measures; it does not price. Anything the sheets on your job can answer is filled in for you — a supplier line matched by description and unit, a subcontractor rate quoted per square foot, a trade rate converted from hours. What is left is work nobody on this job has priced, and the estimate says how many lines that is rather than showing a total that looks finished.

Tick Fill in rates where you have them and whatever is still blank gets a rough placeholder. Leave it off and those lines stay empty for you to fill.

A header row, then one row per item. You do not have to convert anything first — it reads a yard’s price list, a labor rate card and a subcontractor’s unit quote, and works out which it is from the columns.

It needs two things: a column naming the item, and a column with a price. For the item that is Description, Product, Item, SKU or Work Item / Scope. For the price, Price, Rate, Unit Price, Labor Unit Price, or the low/typical/high columns a rate card uses. Punctuation and capitals do not matter.

Worth adding: Unit (or Quote Unit), because a price with no unit cannot be checked against what you measured and will not be used. Also Supplier, so a file naming several becomes several lists, and Quoted Date, which is what makes a stale price announce itself later.

Units are read however you write them — SF, sq ft and square foot are one unit, so are per hour, hr and HOURS. A row with no price is skipped rather than imported at zero.

Both, by two different routes. If your subcontractor quotes per unit — $2.45 a square foot to hang and finish drywall — that prices a measured line outright, with nothing to set up. Ask for prices that way and a takeoff arrives costed.

If the rate is per hour, it cannot reach a line measured in square feet on its own: how long the work takes is a fact about your crew, not about the rate. Set that once under Production rates on the dashboard and the two combine — 663 sf at 120 sf an hour is 5.5 hours, priced at whatever your card says an hour costs.

One thing to avoid: putting a combined labor-and-material figure in as the labor rate. The estimate already measures and prices its own material, so a combined number gets counted twice. Those rows are refused on import and named, rather than quietly inflating the job.

Yes. The templates bring the lines a job needs but no prices — prices come from the lists you import, so a file of market figures works the same way as a supplier’s.

If you import a file of market figures rather than a real quote, tick These are starting prices, not a subcontractor in the import dialog. Everything goes in under one name you choose instead of whatever the file’s supplier column says, so your supplier list stays a list of people you actually buy from.

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.

Yes, when you are signed in. Your jobs and estimates, takeoff measurements, price lists, site diary, purchase orders, progress billing, recorded costs, change orders and the schedule are saved to your account and come down on any computer you sign in on, usually within a minute. If two computers change the same list of POs, pay apps or costs, both sets of changes are kept. The estimate and the takeoff are one person at a time: whoever opens one first has it, teammates see it read-only and can ask for it, and who is in which part of the job shows next to the job name. If the same estimate or takeoff changes on two computers anyway, one of them offline, Quote60 keeps both and asks which to keep. Plans up to 25 MB come down with the job too; a larger one stays on the computer where you opened it, so open the PDF once on the other machine and your measurements line back up on it.

On Job costs, in the bar at the top of every job screen and on each job card. It compares what you priced in the estimate with what the job has cost so far, category by category, with purchase orders counted as committed until the supplier’s invoice comes in. Change orders are on the same page.

Reports lists every job with its cost to date and a Budget vs actual link, so the job running over is easy to spot.

Bid covers takeoff, estimating, quoting and cost tracking. Scheduling and change orders start at Job. Office removes the seat limit. Most one-person outfits start on Bid and move to Job when they are running more than one job at a time.