Estimating, job costing, and Jobber quotes in one place

THE PROBLEM

Rose's estimating, job costing, and field tracking were spread across separate tools.

Estimates were built in one place and the work was scheduled, invoiced and talked about in another, and the two did not talk to each other.

That gap showed up as a timing problem. Nobody could see how a job was tracking against its budget while the job was still running. It came out afterwards, once the hours and the invoices had been matched up by hand.

The pricing that decided whether an estimate was profitable lived in a spreadsheet beside the estimating tool, which meant every estimator had to remember to go and use it. The field side was the same story from the other end, with progress and materials coming back on paper.

WHAT WE BUILT

We built one platform that brings them together.

Estimates are assembled work area by work area with labor, material, equipment and subcontractor lines, and the cost and the margin update while the estimator builds. The company's own pricing is built into the estimate rather than kept next to it, so overhead recovery and markup come from settings the office controls instead of from memory.

Approved estimates push to Jobber as quotes, so the client facing side of the business stays where the office already knows it. Contacts sync back the other way so nobody enters a customer twice, and a quote can be revised without throwing away the version before it.

Crews track progress and quantities from a phone. The field view shows the work and not the dollars, and what the crew logs feeds job costing against the estimate by category, by work area and by line item.

Since the first release the platform has taken on more of the operation: material and equipment catalogs, estimate templates with built in calculators, a company store, a crew app with a time clock, and seasonal sign up flows for leaf pickup and snow. AI assisted estimating is built into the Hub and is being introduced with the team rather than switched on all at once.

THE RESULT

Rose runs estimating, job costing and field tracking in one place.

The office can see how a job is doing while it is still open instead of finding out when it closes.

Estimators work from the company's real costs, so a quote reflects what the business actually carries rather than what somebody remembered to add.

The Hub is in production and still growing. New parts of the operation move into it phase by phase, which is how the work was planned from the start.