Estimating software that uses my own prices, not a database of averages

The search says my own prices and page one says our database

Go and read the results for yourself. The top tools answer a question nobody asked.

One of them leads with a preloaded database of twelve thousand parts carrying localized pricing for more than four hundred areas of the country, updated quarterly. Its whole pitch is that preloaded cost data means less manual entry. Read that page end to end and there is not one line about getting your own unit prices in.

Another offers built in cost catalogs, an average price catalog for placeholders, and a database of local labor and material costs. Your own data is supported there. It appears as a single bullet about uploading your own cost file, with nothing about how or how long.

A third, a long comparison of ten tools, gets closest. It says some platforms connect to supplier databases so your material costs stay current, and others let you build your own cost library over time. That one sentence is the entire treatment this subject gets anywhere on page one.

None of that is dishonest. A good cost database is worth real money to a contractor who does not have numbers of his own yet. It is just not what the search asked for.

What your own prices actually means, line by line

There are three different things a contractor means when he says he wants his own prices, and they are worth separating, because software handles them very differently.

The third one is where the generic tools quietly break down. Any of them will let you override a unit price. Replacing their assemblies with yours, so that the list dropping into an estimate is the list you actually build, is where the week goes.

• My unit costs. What a square of tile, an hour of my tile setter, a vanity install actually costs me this month.
• My markup. Not a slider the software applies, but the way you really price by job type and by how badly you want the work.
• My assemblies. A tiled shower surround in your hands is a specific list of items in a specific order, and it is not the list in somebody else's template.

Where our number comes from

Being exact about this, since it is the whole subject of the page.

A submission comes back from the room carrying dimensions and photographs. A vision model reads the photographs. A model writes the scope brief. An image model produces the renders.

Then the pricing happens, and no model is involved in it. The quantities out of that scope are multiplied through your cost book, line by line, and every quantity can be traced back to where it came from. Change a figure in your book tonight and tomorrow's quotes move. There is no average in it anywhere.

Which is why the honest version of the sales line is that the models read the room and write the scope, and your own prices make the number. The second half is the part most of this market cannot say.