Unlock Efficiency with the Carpenter Bill Format for Businesses

Carpenter bill format for businesses

[Music] hey guys welcome back to the channel today we're going to be covering uh how I do my bids and estimates as a trim Carpenter and really it doesn't matter if you're trim Carpenter a roofer whatever your occupation is in the construction business even if you're a full-blown contractor today's video has something for you today we're going to be doing two real world bids two two bids that that I would do all the time and have done all the time and matter of fact both bids are actually bids that I've already done uh one's a simpler bid and I'm going to recreate that bid for you from scratch and do it live and then the second bid is is a much more complex bid with stairs and all kinds of crazy things going on and in that bid we're going to look at it as an overview we'll dive into certain parts of it to show you how um my process works but uh come along and then enjoy the video previously I did it all on paper uh believe it or not and that opened myself up to some costly mistakes um I've used the excel in the past um and that was a better step than the paper I used QuickBooks and tried to create my estimates from there but um it just wasn't what I needed to really be accurate and save time doing it so in today's uh video I'm going to show you how to do my bids I'm going to show you um how what software I use and how I go about the process I just wanted to say before we go too far far into this video that the video today is sponsored by clear estimates it's a topshelf um estimating software for people like me all the way up to full-blown contractors as mentioned earlier and um we're going to have Michael from Clear estimates come in later in the video and um he's going to show you know give me some tips show me some more time-saving features that I probably don't know about I've been using the software for a while but I don't explore it enough you know when I'm building I want to get in and out so I you know I learn a little bit here and there uh but Michael's going to come in from Clear estimates and show us really an overview of the program the power of the program and uh what you can benefit personally out of the program and uh let's uh jump right into the software I'm here at the portal I'm getting ready to log in and create this estimate by the way this estimate is for a guest house just wanted to mention that uh so it is a small job small estimate and I'm going to sign in so I'm just going to go in hit new project I'm going to say this is the guest house I can type so I'm going to hit uh continue so it's customer Joe Smith Guest House continue all this can be changed at any time this is asking me if I want to do components uh Michael will talk about those later this is just a simple bid but it's it's simple but it's very very uh similar to what I do on a on a regular basis um the more complex bid you'll see there's things like stairs and all kinds of crazy stuff but essentially uh the items in the bid are called parts and they live in a library so I'm going to open up that I'm going to select a category which I created called basic trim I've created all the custom products in here and so I'm going to go through my list and I'm going to say okay all the trim which would be the casing I will have from my notes 307 square feet of that add the part go to the next part which would be the jams for any case openings this would be for the windows and the pack out on the two sliding doors and I have a total of 101 linear feet on that and by the way I tend to break mine up into um unit types of pieces and linear feet we'll cover that later but for right now just hang with me as I do this quote I've got pocket door so I had pood door stops I had 18 ft of that add the part I've got the base baseboards and I have 146 linear feet of that add that part now we're going to look at hanging hanging the doors so I have a part for that um I have an interior if you look look at the top left interior prehung door split jam up to a 3068 for the labor and I had three of those I don't know why I'm clicking the plus symbol usually I just tab through this and I've got three of those so add that part I'm also going to hang a pocket door so I'm going to put the labor to do that there just one of those and that gets me the basic bid so I'm going to close my library and my categories my parts and folks you're looking at um a finished bid right and we're looking at a total of $1,938 so we're looking at in markup the cost material labor and you know I know that when I was there on site and I did my checklist that I'm going to have to make some custom cuts on some doors because there's not an allowance for a full piece of trim so I'm going to mark this thing up 75% and cover myself with this particular contractor as well I have 22.8 hours down here under total for labor I have a price of $1,272 111 if you look at my parts individual totals they're also showing a reflection of the 75% markup so I went from $85 for instance on the door to hang it hang the uh split jams with a markup I went to 149 total uh to hang those doors so if you look down here it's also going to give you this really nice tally of $545 120 we'll talk about components super useful alternates awesome super useful uh Michael will dive into that and the more complex bed that I'm going to show will also uh show the use of components in action so that is everything displayed with markup so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to uh viewer report so in the reports we're on the formal tab I want to send this first I want to look at it right so I'm going to hit print preview I can do a PDF or a Microsoft Word so I'm going to say you know give me the print PDF and I apologize I do not have internet I'm in a rural part of North Carolina that doesn't offer it so I am on a personal hotspot off of my phone running my inter internet for this video it's kind of scary isn't it so this is a very simple one by Design uh this particular contract contractor I work for hates detail he just wants a basic overview of what's going on and then he's really most concerned about the bottom line obviously starting at the top left submitted to his name address phone number all that kind of stuff submitted by me um the product specifications in general project contents is coming out of my basic trim package and here you see all the items so if we go through you know just real quick and look at one the interior prehung door there are three of those to do uh split Jam so forth so on and then just go linear feet 18 linear feet of door stops for the pocket doors the cost is $1,272 so I would take that email that to the client hopefully uh win the bid and start the job all right the best part we need to get paid how do we get paid so I'm inside the project uh called guest house that we've been looking at and I want to create an invoice so I will go to the top right of the screen and click on the more icon and I will do create an invoice two tabs here uh from a payment schedule which will go into a little bit more when Michael's on board I'm going to create a manual one for right now to show you how that works it has today's date which is nice it automatically populates the date current date the due date anything you want has a calendar pop out really sweet and I'm going to say that we're billing for the full amount so if you look on the right we have project summary we have the cost we have payments so I'm going to go [Music] 1,272 and 11 I'm going to put complete so he knows everything has been done and I'm going to hit save so we created uh the invoice and we get this cool popup window which is really nice it gives you a uh link that you can email to the client or you can view the invoice as a PDF this particular contractor wants me to hand deliver the invoice in a print format he doesn't want it emailed so I'll view this invoice again we're on a personal hotspot still pretty quick that tells you how fast the program is right there um and then has Guest House description is complete here bottom left has the amount page 101 I would simply um print that out take it by and get paid so that gives you a good overview of um what's going on with the software how easy how quick it is uh we went from a a bid to the proposal to doing the work and then sending an inv voice it's really that easy and that quick all right guys we have Michael kouto um with us today from Clear estimates uh he's an expert on the product he he's a trainer he creates all the content for the site and much more and uh we're just very very excited to have him here today how you doing Michael doing so well thank you uh for having me with you today Dan I am Michael I'm with the customer success team here at Clear estimates um I work alongside contractors on a daily basis bis helping them learn and understand the software um been able to see how helpful it is in the field for a contractor both for trim contractors and remodelers in general uh so excited for you to see the software in action today on this trim estimate uh Dan's going to take the wheel and begin estimating the specifics of this project and I'll jump in from time to time with any tips share some pointers for Saving Time avoiding repeat work um so really excited to get into it thanks again for having me today Dan oh it's my pleasure Michael and it's it's like having your your teacher here you know I don't want to mess up so um as you guys saw earlier in the video we did a little small guest house and um I'm going to open up uh a little bit larger bid and show you some of the extra power and components and like Michael said he'll jump in at any time so the the cool thing about the software as you saw in the smaller bid it works the same way in a bigger bid there's just more parts and things going on um everything flows the same there's no different Dynamics as far as that's concerned and so here's the power of components so let me scroll back up here if I click here in the top left under project Parts it will categorize each one of these um items that are belonging belonging to a component so Michael uh you may want to talk more on that but it's like c0000 that is going to be for the component called stairs um and then then if we go down c01 that's all my casing and so forth and so on C2 would be the the windows and so if I scroll down to the components then these components I I look at them as like different sections or parts of the job I don't know what what you would call it but there's that c0000 that identifies this as the stairs component and when I click in there then all my parts which you saw earlier all grouped in here and I like this a lot because it allows me to you know show a contractor or Builder you know what is all included cuz on I can't imagine building a house and having you know hundreds if not thousands of Parts but in a trim job they're like what am I paying for on those stairs well here's what you're paying for um and then this is you know the cost on that and you don't have to leave the project you can bounce around in the project which I like um Michael you want to jump in yeah yeah certainly and that's exactly uh the way you want to think about components they're really just an organizational tool to organize the different phases or rooms of an estimate so you can set up different components for really um really anything it could be different phases or different rooms even I've seen it used for different dates of the job um so sort of almost in a scheduling um sort of workflow so really however you want to think about it it's just going to organize the line items for each section most commonly by rumor phase and as Dean is mentioning here uh each component has its own code so you can kind of see which items because on this main project overview still going to show us everything that's in the estimate overall so that way we can look at everything we have going on um but as Dan showed you can scroll down to those specific components open them up so that way you're only looking at um you know a room um maybe it's a living room or a kitchen or a bathroom or in this case you know you have the interior doors or the windows or the exterior doors that way you're only looking at those groups of parts and the main benefit of those components also is on the proposal where it's going to keep those section organized and give you a sub total for each scope right here's uh here's what you're talking about I believe if it'll come up yeah there it goes so like um I did custom closets for this particular client and you know they wanted to know the cost of the master versus the pantry and it it allowed them to go well and they they W wound up doing everything but from what I hear you saying Michael they could say well I don't want to do the the guest room right now but I do want to do um in that is where I probably should have used alternates rather than just moving it correct yeah so there is a a separate tool specific uh specifically used for showing options to a client and alternates work very similar to components and um as as you can see here up here at the top you can convert alternates back and forth so an alternate the difference with an alternate it's the same thing except that the cost of this section is no longer included in the project cost as an alternate rather what it'll do on the proposal is just populate this alternate cost at the bottom so that way your client can look at the agreement here's a list of different options and if they say Okay I want to go ahead with that then you can actually convert it to the component which is going to Total into the project cost um and the other benefit of alternates is they also have their own sort of Standalone change order document you could send out so they can be used either for options or they can be used to show um or they can be used to set up a change order on a project yeah that's I haven't actually used that yet but actually I didn't know that you could do that until I talked to you before the before the video sure but yeah so that's that's cool man so I've got you know the guest room over here is an alternate and then obviously like you said all I got to do is hey you're going to do that U great make a component out of it and uh do it that way that's that's really sweet I like it absolutely yeah and then it's great because then if you had set up a couple of different options and they only went with one of those options but you still want to have a record of those somewhere you can sort of keep them in the project you do have options on the proposal whether or not you want to include the alternate section uh so it just gives you a convenient place to kind of manage those different um those different Scopes very cool uh one thing I didn't know until I had to use it um had one uh Builder contractor whatever you want to call him and he was complaining about the price so I was able to put in a negative labor which I didn't think it would do okay absolutely and that's kind of the idea with it is that you know we're going to provide to you at least with the pre-built list of costs and Dan has done um I think some some some edits and kind of set up his a few of his own items here but with the cost that we provide from our library it's all pre-mark up and pre-c cost or pre-tax I should say it's just the cost to you uh as the Builder um so that allows you to do a lot with that markup so you can mark it up you can reduce the markup if you'd like uh generally we we recommend including some kind of markup since it doesn't include any profit uh for you in those costs but you you have full control over how you set up the estimate if you need to dial that price back you can certainly use the markup to do that um I've even seen certain customers um use the markup to do a labor only or material only estimate if they've added all the items that for both material and labor you can just negative 100 either material or labor if you just want um you know a material or a labor only uh estimate and cost and the cool thing about it is you know you can take that part that you that you like or you find that's useful and then duplicate it make it your own part you know like you were saying earlier absolutely yeah the library is really yours to do with as you please so you can take our items you can edit them you can adjust the uh the descriptions you can even adjust the cost if you need um and then yeah you can actually make your own unique copies not just of our parts but even with our templates and I'll get into templates here in a little bit for you um just so you guys get an idea what those are and what they do but um it's fully customizable you can really take these uh these these items you can make copies of them you can adjust them however you see fit it's really build to be customized to your business yeah it's pretty cool um so I guess Michael I'll I'll turn it over to you thanks again Dan um so I think we can wrap it up today just by kind of giving a quick overview of clear estimates on how it works and what you can expect as far as plan options uh and getting started and like we're seeing here the the whole idea behind clear estimates is really just to save you time um so clear estimates you're going to start off with that library of around 13,000 parts or line items in each of those parts that we provide um includes locally sourced cost data to avoid the process of researching the cost of every single scope that you're adding in um and what's also nice is that the parts already have that sort of pre-built proposal text so that you're not typing anything you're not researching the cost of everything um and really it just boils everything down to a process of finding the parts you need and adding them into an estimate so you're going to have this up-to-date library of costs you can kind of add in your own items and Save them for future use um like we were seeing with Dan he's he's got a number of customized items um even set up sort of a custom category and you could do all of that so there's a lot of flexibility there um and you can create your own items you can edit the items we provide duplicate them and for a trim Carpenter out of the box there's already going to be a lot included um so there's costs for things like casings and baseboard variety of molding types chair rail um even templates for common job so I'm going to get into templates here in just a minute uh and as you've seen it really just comes down to finding the items you need adding in your quantities defining your markup uh and sending out the proposal um so let's go ahead and just do a quick uh Deep dive into the software it's actually going to be a little more of just a crash course uh there is a lot of options and tools in the software and a lot of different ways it could be used um so this is just going to be kind of a quick overview um when you're getting started though there is a lot of help available I do want to let you know um we have support that's available it's free it's included in your subscription even during trial supports always free and available um and we're available 9: to 5 Eastern Monday through Friday uh we also offer full training calls uh with your trial subscription or really whenever you'd like as a subscriber we can set up a consultation call with you and kind of walk you through the system and help you get started um and then while you're actually in the software and here let me just uh show you this up here we actually have this help center up here with a lot of detailed guides so this is in support support information if you're logged into clear estimates it'll take you right to The Help Center you don't have to be subscribed to look at these heal videos we have a whole library of guides that walk you through it Dan was just telling me he was uh taking a look at some of these before he even started with clear estimates um so these are available really for anybody if you're curious about how clear estimates works or if you'd like to just get an idea of what you what what you can expect when you're subscribed you can always uh come to this help center we've got guides on pretty much every aspect uh of the system here um but with that all being said I do just kind of want to give you a quick overview of where everything is and kind of what the general process looks like when you're working in the tool um so right here I'm logged into my account um this is the home screen this is the first place you're taking after you log into clear estimates it's kind of your dashboard for recent estimates you've worked on um so it's going to show you your five most recent estimates right here um and then let me just give you a quick overview of kind of the layout here uh you're going to see these four buttons home customers projects and reports a home like I said is where we can find recent estimates or start a new project uh customers is kind of your whole backlog of customers each customer you create is going to have their own sort of profile with their own estimates stored within it um and then within each customer's profile you're going to be able to store things like the street address client address phone email really all of their contact info can be sort of managed right here um and then once we kind of get into the the estimating itself that all takes place on this projects page you saw a lot of this today in the videos this is where all the estimating takes place um so I'm going to head back here in just a minute there's also the reports tool this is where you can export different styles of proposals uh this is also where you can set up what's called boilerplate this is just another term for legal e or contract language or any kind of agreement you want to see at the top of your proposal can be thought of as a boiler plate so you can have a couple of different contracts set up and then you can kind of use these buttons to pick and choose which contract to include on the proposal oh that's cool I didn't know that that's that's really neat absolutely yes so you can have a few of these here and then the uh each of the different proposal Styles preliminary formal or subcontractor each has their own check box you can use to kind of toggle on and off different contracts um and include these the different Burbage on your different reports so super helpful tool there yeah certainly and then um here also in the reports tools where you can export different styles report it's all still specific to the same estimate so you can always kind of check what estimate you have open here in the top left and then any of these reports are going to be specific to the project you're currently working on uh lastly there's sort of a cost status page this is where you can create invoices um record payments for the invoices you create and send out you can also sort of print what's called a cost status report showing you what's been invoiced on this project what's still due just great for bookkeeping or sometimes if you want to share that with a client these reports are always yours to keep so cool yes so just wanted to give a quick overview of those different tools here um and then you know kind of what we're what we're discussing here about a customizability you have a lot of different control options in terms of the part Library itself the templates um the account options report settings all of all of your account options kind of live up here in the top right you have a parts tool where you can um take a look at the default price list that's provided by clear estimates within there you can create your own items set up your own categories you can make copies of the parts that we offer um and all of that takes place in Parts you can also also set up your own custom templates or edit any of the templates we provide um and like I was saying with your account options proposal settings that all just kind of takes place up here lastly there's this update tool which is where you can use pricing from different locations so if I wanted to do a job in a different city you can see I have here an arbor and Columbus um stored in my account we can add additional locations and if I wanted to sync my library with an arbor pricing I can just go ahead and choose that update it it's going to update for my selected location um and that's just going to update the full list of pricing uh from Clear estimates to match an Arbor's uh an Arbor's costs dang that is that is sweet yeah I like that certainly makes it super easy especially if you're working in different markets um sometimes you know maybe you're traveling for a job so you can sort of use pricing from these different locations and then once you do that it's also going to show you new recommended labor rates and again what I'm doing here is I'm coming up to options and going to my labor rate editor and it'll show you the suggested labor rates for your area right up there at the top and then if you want you can kind of reference these and plug them in so you know it's suggesting maybe I need to Bill out 45 52 for a trucker I can just kind of use that suggested rate just kind of copy and paste it into my rate column and then I'd be using that rate going forward so it's just to it's built to just save you the time and take the guess work out of a lot of these different um different elements so with that all being said um I'm going to go ahead and open up this uh quick estimate I created I hav actually added anything to it uh I called this a trim estimate I'm just using that very Loosely just because we're we're very specific to trim here in the estimates we've done today but um I'm going to try to show you a couple of different things that might deviate a little bit from a trim estimate um but just want to kind of give you an overview of what these tools are and how to use them so um again this is the projects page as you were seeing when Dan was working this is where you spend most of your time in the software it's where all the estimating takes place and uh as we add Parts we're going to be able to see them here in the project parts list now there's a couple of different ways we could add parts to an estimate uh we can search for them by term there's sort of a search bar you can click browse part Library this is like opening up a catalog of parts so all of the parts that are in the library you can sort of navigate through them by clicking that button if you wanted to add your online item you could do that using this create custom part option so a really great way to just very quickly add something if there's something you can't find in the library or maybe you have an item for something like travel cost you just want to plug something in you can very easily just click create custom part and add that in and then templates are essentially just pre-built estimates there are a way you can add a whole group of parts to a project all at once without searching for them all one by one um so we provide about 200 different pre-built templates um and you can also create your own and like I said you can also edit the ones we provide so um a lot of flexibility with that so let me just kind of give you an overview of the process and a lot of this I think you've seen so I'll try not to recap too much here um but I'm going to go ahead and click browse part Library like I said this is like opening up full catalog of pricing from Clear estimates and we can sort of select a category using these category drop downs up at the top so the library of cost we're providing it's all categorized um I'm basically a a a an organizational system that should roughly line up with the way you'd be thinking about the work in your actual project so we're going to start off with project prep then we get into all of our different demolition costs further down we're going to find pricing for things like uh concrete and masonry and frame so really all the building portions coming down here um and for a trim contractor there's a couple of different places you can look um so number one is going to be category number 20 for exterior trim uh and then for interior trim work you're going to come down here to 31 interior trim and when we click that category it's going to show us all the line items that make up this specific category of Parts you can see there's a lot of parts even in just this one interior trim category you've got a lot of different pricing in here um and you can see we have a cost per unit that's provided for our specific location for each of these different items now since there is so many different items uh we make it a little easier to sort of navigate through this you can use these other dropdowns to get more specific so under trim work I can sort by casings jaming casing shoe mold uh wood base is going to be all of your baseboard Parts uh crown molding chair rail and so on so for example if I were to go ahead and grab wood base it's going to show us all of the different wood base options that are available uh and a lot of times you can can use this part group to get even more specific so we have options for Pine or Oak baseboard I'll go ahead and grab Oak and then from there it's just a matter of looking through the items available choosing the item you need and then when you click the item it's going to kind of give you this little preview of the part so this is this specific item we can see the description it's going to give us a unit type in this case it's square or I'm sorry it's linear feet uh and this is what clear estimates is going to give us as far as cost for this item is a cost per linear foot for material here and then it's got a labor hour number which all of this gets multiplied by your part quantity so really all the estimator needs to do is just pick the part they want to add the estimate and then plug in their quantity so let's say we were doing 30 linear feet of baseboard we can just plug that in here it's going to use that pricing we're not typing anything in we're just very easily going to be able to select the items we need and quickly add those into the estimate um so you can kind of do it this way where you're navigating through these uh different categories seeing what's available you know there's going to be a lot included both for a prim Carpenter and for a remodeler in general um we have electricians who use this plumbers there's a lot of different contractors a lot of different situations it'll handle um and as Dan mentioned a little bit ago we have a whole library of handyman pricing as well in certain cases you might find some of the trim items you need down there um really that's just a difference in categorization usually smaller scopes of work or repair work are going to be in these handy band categories um but you have both a remodeling library and a handyman library to uh to choose from when you're building your estimate so I'm going to close out of there and we can just see what we did we just added that single item a lot of this is repetitive you've seen this a little bit here in the video today but uh just to give you an idea we have our description quantity of units we can kind of see all of the information about the part listed right here in the project as well as this cost information and it's great because it gives you a lot of flexibility in the estimate now that the parts in the estimate we can do things like change the quantity very quickly um if you want it your part to use a different part category you can change how it's categorized on the document you can click these various columns and just sort of make quick adjustments to the part or open it back up and adjust any of the settings and um a little bit ago we touched on alternates and components um I can kind of show you quickly what each of these does here um so for alternates I'll go ahead and create an alternate and I'm going to kind of Devi deviate away from the uh the trim element of this job here and I'll just say maybe my client wants to see the cost of a bathroom or model and I'll just call this alternate bathroom and to save a little time here rather than search for the parts I need one by one I'm just going to use one of our bathroom templates to very quickly um fill out this uh bathroom alternate here so I'm going to click this add templates button and like I said you have about 200 different uh templates for common remodels already built in when you get started um so there's going to be templates for things like additions and bathrooms and decking and kitchens and floor systems for a trim Carpenter um there is going to be a couple of templates available I think think those are all going to be down here in siding and exterior and you're going to see some exterior uh trim work templates included there um as well as things like sofit replacement siding replacement and what have you uh so for each of these template categories you're going to have a group of templates you can choose from uh to build out your estimate and these are really just a nice starting point for a project so in this case we're doing a bathroom I'll go ahead and grab bathroom use this middle drop down it'll show me all the different templates we provide for that a lot of different replacement templates for things like bathtub doors or sinks or shower surround uh scroll down a little bit there's going to be complete new build bathroom templates and then a series of different remodel templates so I'm going to go ahead and just grab this bathroom remodel average grade when I click that we can kind of see what it is that makes up this templat so these this is just a list of suggested parts that are commonly seen in a bathroom remodel it's just meant to give you a nice starting point to avoid searching for items one by one and what's nice about these templates we provide is that all of these template Parts have these special formulas that patch that tie back to this template quantity uh right up here in the top right what this allows an estimator to do is just quickly choose this bathroom template and just plug in the footprint square footage of that that specific space um so we'll just say this is a 90 foot bathroom we'll go ahead and calculate it and then what it's going to try to do is figure out the quantities of each of these parts based on 90 square feet uh so at this point the estimator would just kind of go through this list of parts if you need to adjust any quantities you can kind of Click into this quantity column make quick adjustments um if there's something not relevant to the estimate so let's say we weren't going to be doing any electrical work I can scroll down to my electrical parts and just uncheck those and if something's not included in the template we need then we can just add it from the library later so it just gives you a quick um easy way to sort of add all these parts to a project all at once uh and avoid that process of searching for them one by one yeah that's really really because you know as a trim guy I don't use that but man that's extremely powerful wow absolutely and you know if you do have a common trim work even if it's just a handful of items some of our templates are only one or two items um and what you can do for either a component or your main estimate is you can actually create your own templates so if we click this more drop down you can do this from the main estimate or from within an alternate or component you can save it as a template um and then you can just choose which parts and it's just going to have you decide how you want to handle your quantities I've got a special guide I can uh share out with you if you do have questions about this I can walk you through this whole process but just very quickly give you an idea and it'll just create this group of parts and know to group these together for future use so even though we added these from a template it's just going to look at what parts are in our project and we could save that as a template to use down the road tremendous time yeah that that is I learned a lot there okay cool yeah sure yeah super handy especially if you just built up a couple of estimates you're like you know I'm getting a lot of calls for the same type of work why not just save this as a template and then I can pull it into a project add in some quantities and just call it a day so makes it super easy to do that yeah no doubt I'll be using that one certainly uh so yeah and in it within the alternate so we're setting this up as a bathroom alternate and this could be used either to show them the option on the proposal um what the bathroom would cost if they want to go ahead with it or it can be used as a change order so if we did want to add in items specific to a change order we're going to have our own specific report that we can print specifically from this alternate um which can be used as a change order here and here's what it looks like just alternate work order I actually have a setting turned on that just hides the line items and just gives a cost but you could include the full details here if you wanted um similar than what you're seeing on the actual proposals um so these are great and then in you know let's say they uh went ahead with a change or they wanted to go ahead with an option then you can kind of convert this to a component by clicking component and that just turns it into one of those subsections of the estimate that actually do total into the cost um and just so I can give you an idea of what the components do on the report I think you've seen this as well um I'm going to go ahead and add in another component here we'll just call this kitchen I'll just very quickly add in a kitchen component I'll click add template pull up my kitchens uh we'll pull up one of the remot and you can see there's a lot of different kitchen templates a lot of replacement work dishwasher replacement fixture replacement you're looking at Remodel and new build kitchen templates but we can go ahead and grab one of these remodels just say kitchen remodel average grade plug in my square footage again the estimator would kind of double check this list you know it's just a starting point designed to get you 80 or 90% of the way there you can still go through here adjust any quantities remove any parts that you're not going to need and add that in um and then of course you could add additional Parts as well and you know what why don't actually just leave this one as an alternate just so I can show you on the report what this is going to do um really quick before I get to that point as Dan was mentioning you kind of adjust your markup settings down here this is going to give you a breakdown of your actual total cost total cost of markup and then the cost at the end of the day for the client right here gives you a great uh sort of dashboard you can look at that I also added in a miscellaneous item these are for things like sales tax or discounts I've seen clients use these for a profit margin in certain cases just a just a quick way you can add in just sort of a percentage item um and just have it calculate based on the total cost of the project either before markup after markup or you can calculate it from just the material or just the labor just the subcontractor cost so this is a great way to add in an extra percentage usually for things like sales tax or discounts um but you can also use this for profit margin or really anything you need um so you can see I have a line for sales tax included down here at the bottom very nice yeah so let's just really quick just uh take a look at what the report looks like for this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here to view report and print a PDF this is going to pull up the proposal essentially the document that we'll send out to our client it's going to include any contract verb you can see I have my logo set up here up at the top it's going to show us our client's contact info as well as our own uh and then you can see I've already kind of added in a contract so this is what that boilerplate tool that we were looking at earlier will do it's just a place you can put in any kind of agreement or uh Provisions that you want to appear at the docu at the top of document and then you can see that you know we didn't type any of this stuff in it's just sort of automatically going to print out a sentence of text that the homeowner can understand it's going to communicate the scope of work to your client in way that uh is going to make sense to them you're going to see it's going to categorize everything so they can see the Scopes of work really Broken Out In a detailed way and then as you can see here so we have this bathroom component uh and what this is exactly what this does it gives us the section for the bathroom we're seeing all of the line items specific to the bathroom and then a subtotal and then just below that we just have that single item we add it into the main project it's giving us a subtotal for that as well we see my sales tax is itemized down here um so you know we didn't spend much time setting this up and I know this was just a quick walk through in a real estimate you'd be doing a little more work but not that much more time uh to get the same result here and then down here at the bottom they have this separate cost for a kitchen you could also include the line items like I said I have a setting that's um not showing the line items in the alternate but we see the cost of the kitchen alternate so they could come down here and see okay these are my options if I want to go ahead with that kitchen this is how much it's going to be um you know okay let's go ahead and do that kitchen as well then I can just close out of this uh very quickly open up my alternate here we'll convert it to a component just by clicking component go back to main estimate and we'll print that uh report out again and now it's going to be the same exact proposal only this time it's going to include that kitchen in the total project cost and really list out all the details here so now we can see we have a section for my bathroom subtotal for that and then it's going to dive right into the kitchen after that so we're starting kitchen all of those line items and a total cost for the kitchen as well you can see that my project cost increased so just a lot of really handy ways you can take the guess work out of these processes and it's really just meant to speed up that estimating process so with that all being said uh like I said just a quick overview and we can always you know if you are interested in getting set up uh we can walk you through the software give you a little longer overview of how uh how all of these different tools work there's a lot of different things you can do um but I just want to quickly talk about the process for getting signed up if you're interested in getting started with clear estimates we do offer a 30-day trial for to all new users uh it's the full version of the software free for 30 days gives you a nice amount of time to check it out um you just kind of come here to our website you're going to have this pricing link up here at the top you can look at the different plan options um everything that we saw today is included in standard plan the Pro Plan includes a couple of additional Integrations things like Builder Trend integration is available on Pro that's more of a project management Tool uh if you do use Builder Trend you can uh integrate with that them um and also it has the option to add additional estimators so it really just depends on the size of your business and what all is going to be involved there the standard plan everything we've looked at is available so you can just go ahead and start a free trial here I do have a special offer uh for Dan's viewers here today if you do sign up just go ahead and use this coupon here try three free all one word and this will give you two additional free months to try out clear estimates before your UH before your first uh before your actually subscription is actually going to start um so it'll give you two additional fre months there so just sign up with that coupon code that's just try three free and then you basically you just fill out your information you start your trial you get a email with a link to set up a password and then you can log in and get started right away um I do also want to let you know that um you know there's month-to-month or annual plans available the month-to-month billing uh there's really no contracts so we have a lot of seasonal subscribers so you know maybe it's not a situation where you need an estimating tool every single month of the year you can subscribe for a couple of months and cancel and return as long as you sign back up with same email you're still going to have access to same estimate information you're not going to lose anything uh there's options to pause without billing for a few months if you're interested in that so it's meant to be as flexible as needed you know especially if you're a seasonal contractor you don't need an estimating uh tool expense every single month um you can kind of sign up cancel as needed you know we have a lot of seasonal clients um so there's a lot of flexibility with that and it's like I said really easy to get started you're going to have chat support in the system uh you can also give us a call uh so support's available it's free it's included included in your subscription even during trial so if you are interested in taking a look at the system do recommend getting signed up uh go ahead and use that code for a couple of free months and we'd be able to touch base with you and help you get started with that I I just want to kind of wrap it up just by saying thanks so much for for having us on on board here today Dan this has been a lot of fun it's been great to be able to see you using the system out in the field and be able to give you kind of an overview of what uh what to expect as a contractor using the system hey Michael I appreciate it and I've learned quite a lot today um which is been awesome and also I'll have a link directly to uh your site decar estimates.com in the description and I'll also put that uh that was it three free months yeah it's uh basically your 30-day trial plus two additional free months basically just get 100% off your first two Billings uh again you can cancel any time if you're not looking to go forward with it so it gives you a good three months to try it out um be mindful when you sign up it's still going to say 30-day trial but with that coupon code you just get two additional free mons on top of that um essentially a three month trial yeah I'll put the coupon code in there as well um yeah and and I didn't say this it you know at the beginning or anywhere in the video but I I actually tried three other estimating software packages um priced you know similar to what you guys have some a little bit more and um I just found it clunky and the flexibility the one thing that I love about clear estimates is the ability to create those custom parts custom temp templates you really allow the estimator to have pretty much full control yeah and you guys update the software on a regular basis correct yeah always always updating it always adding in new features uh that's another thing I shouldn't mention um if you can still see my screen up here at the top yeah there's a support and then there's a whole feature request page where U customers can come in they can request features they can vote on different features um and you can kind of see what's trending as far as what people have requested um this is always in here if you do have suggestions on how we can improve um we use that in our development process to just try to make improvements to the system how is it going to be easier to use for a contractor in the field yeah that's a that's a key thing um whenever you see the word community and feature request on a vendor's website that's a huge thing uh because in the past I've the other softwares that I was talking about the only way I could figure out how people were liking the software what was coming up in reference to updates was Google it you know and the fact that I could come here and see oh yeah they've already thought of this and they've added this and they're on a uh a schedule to launch these new um updates and I've gotten I I can't tell you how many updates probably a dozen in the last year you know where I here's what's new you always provide if it's something really new you know that takes explanation you always provide a video uh and then a great written how to on it as well and if most people are like me the videos that you create are excellent and I can just go there and watch a you know was it like two minutes 3 minute video and know all about the new feature so I appreciate that again thanks for being here today man and no I was just gonna say you know Dan I think uh think um if you'd be interested we we'd love to do a webinar with you coming up maybe your viewers would like to tune in for that as well um so maybe you and I can discuss that if you'd be interested oh totally man I'm up for yeah absolutely love it well thank you so much again for having me today Dan this been a lot of fun and uh we appreciate being a part of it