Where the hours go in an estimate, and what a computer can do faster
The bids come in faster than your estimators can turn them around. There's a plan set on the screen, a pricebook in another window, and a spreadsheet in a third. The estimator counts doors. Counts fixtures. Flips back to the pricebook, types a number, flips back to the plans. Three hours later there's a quote. And four more plan sets are waiting behind it, each one with a due date that doesn't care how backed up you are.
Here's the thing. Most of those three hours isn't the part you're paying an estimator for. The judgment, knowing what's going to be a headache on site, knowing which sub to trust, that's the valuable part, and it takes a few minutes. The rest is counting line items and looking up prices. That's clerk work wearing an estimator's hat. It's slow because a person is doing by hand what a person is bad at doing by hand.
A commercial estimating team had the same jam. We built them software that reads the plan set, pulls out every priceable line item, matches each one to their live pricebook, and spits out a client-ready quote. The estimator stopped counting and started checking. Same people, same desks, far more bids going out the door. No new hires to clear the stack.
Leave it alone and the cost isn't just slow. It's the bid you never sent. Every plan set that sits past its deadline is a job you didn't even get to lose, you just forfeited it. Count a month of those. That's real money walking out while your best people type prices off a screen.
If your estimators are drowning and the fix is faster counting and automatic pricing, that's the kind of thing we build as a custom app, the one your business actually runs on, fixed scope, about eight weeks. Reply and tell me how long one bid takes right now and how many are in the stack.
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