Built for a phone, not squeezed onto one
Most estimating tools were desktop software first. Somebody shrank the screens later. You can tell, because the parts you need on a job are buried three taps deep and the parts you need once a year are on the home screen.
BidRise starts at the job. Open it, hit record, and walk the house describing what you are going to do. Water heater, expansion tank, new shutoff, haul the old one off. When you are done talking you’ve a priced estimate on screen that you can edit, send, and get signed.
What you can do from the truck
- Talk the job through. Describe the work out loud. The app turns it into line items with quantities and prices.
- Shoot photos and video. Attach them to the estimate so the office and the customer see what you saw.
- Price from your own book. Your flat rate prices, your markup, your sales tax rate.
- Offer three options. Good, better and best, laid out so the customer picks one instead of deciding yes or no. There’s more on that on the good better best pricing page.
- Get it signed. Send a link. They sign on their phone and you get told.
- See what went quiet. Estimates that have sat too long get flagged so you chase the winnable ones.
What it doesn’t do
Better you hear it here than three weeks into a trial. BidRise doesn’t do takeoffs off a plan set. No parts catalog. No live pricing from your supply house. It prices off the numbers you put in it, and that’s the whole trick.
If you’re bidding commercial work off drawings, this is the wrong tool. If you’re a residential service and replacement shop writing estimates in a driveway, it was built for you.
Getting your prices in
You can type your price book in, upload a spreadsheet of it, or take a photo of the printed price sheet you already use and let the app read it. Most shops are set up in an evening. The plumbing price book page walks through how to build one that holds up.
Teams
Add your techs and they can write estimates under the same price book. Owners and managers see everything. Techs see their own work. Nobody can quietly change the shop’s pricing from a truck.
