Create a House Painting Invoice Example for Management Effortlessly

House painting invoice example for Management

hey what's up guys i'm gonna explain how i like to estimate interior paint jobs now there's a lot of different systems and methods out there that you can use in my opinion you want to consider three main factors when picking which one is going to be best for you the three main factors are accuracy and what i mean by accuracy is the ability to predict how much time it's going to take and how much money you have to spend at the paint store to get that job done the next thing is it's got to be fast you don't want to be spending hours calculating a bunch of numbers and working up different options for a possible client the last thing is it needs to be simple what i mean by simple is you got to be able to show someone else how to do it in a short amount of time you might be a super experienced painter and you can just eyeball something which is pretty fast and you're probably even really accurate with determining how much time and how much materials it's going to take but it took you a long time to learn how to do that it's not simple to just explain to somebody how you're doing that so i've tried a lot of different estimating systems and i was never really able to find one that did all three of those things really well usually like one or two but it was always kind of lacking in some area and just out of running my painting company and having problems was why i was always just kept trying something new and trying to figure out a way to accomplish those things until ultimately i just made it myself so let me just show you what i'm talking about it's just this a google spreadsheet but you know what i love about google spreadsheets they're free and they work on every device you just download the free app and you're good to go you can also access this stuff anywhere you could be at the grocery store and look something up what if you get to a house and you don't have cell phone or tablet service no worries if you just save a couple on your tablet and then click this little make off line button now when you get to one of those houses just use one of those spreadsheets and you're good to go now you might be thinking i mean it's just a spreadsheet how accurate can it be i've tried a lot of different estimating methods program softwares and i don't know of anything that is more accurate than this and i track every hour and every dollar on every single job and if something is off by more than five percent we look at the reason why and sometimes we'll adjust this spreadsheet based on that it's also simple enough that it only takes a few minutes to show a painter who's never estimated before how to use this let me give you a real world example of what that might look like so for this example let's just say it's a subcontractor and they've done some jobs for you they give you a call and say hey um i don't know i just feel like this job's under bid there's a lot more work here than the previous jobs and i was really hoping you could pay me some more money on this one and you can't just say no and maybe they feel like you don't care about them you don't respect them and they're hard work but in this case i could sincerely say oh man i'm really sorry if we underbid it it's no problem at all i promise you we'll make it right let's double check it and then i would tell them go ahead and open up the job folder that we sent you you can go to the prices page and you'll see the list of all the areas we measured and what they were so in this case it's real simple it's just you know number one is a bedroom but if it was a more complicated one you can see number four is the kitchen number six is the master bedroom and they can go to the appropriate page but for this simple case and go ahead and go to number one and those are the measurements we took can you let me know if something's off there sometimes the estimator will mess up and get dyslexic and put like two five instead of 52 or something like that does all that look right do we miss anything and the painter can probably realize like oh this is just each wall but even then if he just looks over here you can see okay they got that much surface area that much ceiling we've got 41 foot of baseboards one door two door frames windows this miscellaneous other feet you might have to explain that that's for the accent wall because you have nine foot on each side to do a tape line to change the colors there and naturally the conversation would go to well i mean it looks like you bit it all right but you just understand like this one takes more time and more materials because of things that's like hard to explain and then i say oh okay great i like when this happens because i am able to refine and adjust my estimating process and i want to make sure this doesn't happen again if you go to the painter sheet you'll see in there how much time we gave you to do all the different tasks that you're doing as well as the materials and then you can ask you can say you know we gave you a little bit over five hours to just do the walls and that's broken into about an hour and a half to tape caulk the walls to the baseboards another hour-ish to hand cut the line from the walls and then 2.64 hours to roll the walls there's also some setup cleanup time in there and you can just see the different amount of times that he was given for each task this miscellaneous would be the extra time to create that accent wall this is more specific and this is more of like a bird's eye view of the different tasks and you can see for a complicated house like this was an enormous home even in the painter sheet it breaks down everything and this also helps budget if you have like six guys on a job you can break it up by like rooms or something it's like hey you're gonna do room six should take 33 hours that's four days you should be done with this with eight hour days and this is when a bunch of different things can happen the painter may realize like this is actually really easy to hit i can do it quicker than that he may say something goes off like well it's gonna take more than five hours to do this and usually that's when like ego starts to come into play because you can say well okay we have a lot of painters that really aren't even that skill that are able to do it in that amount of time what's different about this job like why is it taking longer so he might be wondering well where where is this five hours coming from i can see it's these things but how did you come up with that number and this is really the beauty of this spreadsheet is it's all coming from these this input page so you can see the tape caulk walls to baseboards is coming from this tape line with caulking standard saying that we can do 30 linear foot per hour i do realize if you're looking at these you might think they're easy or hard this is based off of a painter that i'm paying as an employee so i have payroll taxes and workers comp included and i'm gonna pay them twenty five dollars an hour to me they're worth paying twenty five dollars an hour if they can pay at these standards if they paint slower than these standards i pay them less if they paint faster than these standards i pay them more this burden is just payroll and workers comp if they're a subcontractor you can put one and that's really why this spreadsheet is so powerful is you can customize it to your business you know you might use different paints get different prices um let's say that you do something my company doesn't like popcorn ceiling removal is you can easily just come into the ceiling type and enter that in it's just how much square foot can you do per hour let's say it's 10 and now this will work within the spreadsheet and maybe this isn't the best place to put it because you still are gonna have to paint it afterwards maybe prime and paint new texture drywall so you could actually put this standard under miscellaneous square foot per hour and now if we go to a page you can see just by putting it in there it's now a part of the drop down menu i can pick that one but since we're going to paint it after we remove it you'd want to put it in the miscellaneous square foot you can put here you can see one square isn't a lot of room but if you click these arrows here it's going to open up a lot more space underneath to where if you run out of room here you can actually come down here and just continue on and for the square foot of miscellaneous we'll come down here but it's all going to work in the spreadsheet so now i can get a price for these things it's actually telling me to select primer because i said i want to prime and paint new drywall so i'd come down to primer and put like drywall primer and then this miscellaneous when i turn that on it'll say popcorn ceiling removal so now i have a price for that just that quickly you can customize it for your business in this video i'm not trying to explain how this works just give you a bird's eye view you can watch my other video that goes into depth google sheets is free you could build this yourself if you need the standards i either sell them for five dollars or i'll give them to you for free if you like comment and subscribe to this video and then just shoot me an email letting me know you did so that i know to send you the standards i also realize everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses like i can barely spell to save my life but math has always come supernatural to me so if you'd rather buy mine instead of trying to build it yourself i sell it on my website links in the description and again the great thing about this is once you have it there's no monthly fees and i'm not storing all your data like some of the other programs i've used the last and perhaps biggest point i want to mention is how powerful this is with that last feature with being super fast so let me just give you a real world example of what it's like doing an estimate with this you're in a home talking with the client going over everything that's to be painted we only use laser measures because they're super fast accurate and you can get a bunch of measurements at once take a couple measurements that room then put in the numbers that i see on my laser measure tell it what pain i wanted to use and that's it i'm done i now have numbers and prices i can show the homeowner and i can just click them on and off to show them any kind of option they'd want to see without doing tons of math and it helps too if they have like a budget it's like well let me show you if you do this room with this room and kind of make this off that's that's the only way i can get into that budget it's just super helpful and it gives you so much more time to talk about other stuff with the estimate if you're able to show the homeowner a price right then and there and ask for their business i guarantee you'll get more business than if you're going home doing some math and then emailing them later i know from real world experience trust me on that it's a game changer