What would FieldQuo be worth to you?
8 answers plus 1 you can give us if you know it, 6 line items, and every coefficient behind them published further down the page — including where each one came from and which end of a range we took. We have deliberately left out the things we cannot put an honest number on, and they are listed too.
Your business
Answer in whichever money you invoice in. We do not convert, and every figure below stays in the money you typed.
Anyone in the office or on the road who creates or changes the paperwork. This is what a plan is priced on.
They see their work, clock in and upload photos. They are included free on every plan, so this changes the price only by deciding which plan fits.
All of them, won or not. This drives the largest line on the page, so we ask rather than assume.
Working out the quantities, pricing them, writing it up and sending it. NOT the drive and not the walk round the job — those are left out of this page altogether, deliberately. Leave it blank and we use the figure in the table below instead, and the workings will say we did.
Completed work, not enquiries.
Before tax. In whichever money you invoice in — we do not convert.
Not the time spent writing quotes — that is the question above, and counting it here as well would count the same hour twice. Everyone's hours added together, in a typical week.
Wage plus what you carry on top of it. If it is your own time — and writing quotes usually is — what you would bill that hour at. In whichever money you invoice in — we do not convert.
No figure yet.
Fill in the questions above and the estimate appears here. We will not show you a number built on answers you have not given.
Things we did not put a number on
These are real and included. They are missing from the total because any figure we gave them would have been made up.
The receptionist answering while you are up a ladder
It answers, takes the details and books the visit — but it bills by the minute on top of your plan, and we know neither how many calls you miss nor how many of them were work. Pricing it would be two guesses stacked on a cost we would have had to leave out.
Clients paying by card from their phone
They can, and the money settles into your account. But card processing has a fee, and we do not know what it costs you to get paid today. Counting the speed and ignoring the fee would flatter this total in the one direction it must not be flattered.
The drive out and the walk round the job
The quote line above counts only the desk work — the measuring up, the pricing, the writing and the sending. Getting there and looking at the work is most of a visit and we do not remove it, so it is not in the total. A calculator that counted the drive would be counting time you are still going to spend.
Fewer arguments about what was agreed
Every version of an invoice is kept with the reason it changed and the name against it. What that is worth the day a client disputes one is real and we cannot put a figure on it, so we have not.
Work your booking page and website bring in
Both are real and both are included. How much work they win depends on your area, your trade and your reputation, and none of that is in the answers above.
Every number behind the estimate
These are estimates, and here is exactly what they rest on. Every figure on this page is built from the answers you typed and the coefficients in the table below — nothing is measured from your business, because we cannot see it. Where a number is a judgement rather than a definition the table says so, and where it came from contractors rather than from us the table says that too, with the range they reported and which end we took. Two of the lines are worth less than they look and are counted that way: money arriving sooner is worth the cost of waiting for it, not the money itself, and a job you have not yet won is worth its margin, not its invoice. Two others are worth their full value and the table explains why — work already done and never billed has no cost left to net off. If a line looks wrong against your own books, your books are right.
| What it is | Value | Why that value |
|---|---|---|
Desk time an estimate takes you today, when you do not tell us The part of producing one estimate that happens at a desk — working out the quantities, pricing them, writing the thing up and formatting it. Not the drive and not the walkthrough; those are left out of this page entirely, and the note further down says so. | 120 minutes Contractors' own reported figures | Raised from 45, because 45 was under the published floor rather than conservative. Blaze Estimating puts the range at 120–180 minutes — most builders spend two to three hours building a single detailed quote (blazeestimating.com/how-long-does-a-construction-estimate-take). One contractor's own experience agrees with the bottom of it: FieldQuo's owner runs a cabinet business, prices jobs weekly, and puts the same work at about two hours with no travel in it at all — quantities, pricing, writing it up, sending. We take that bottom end, 120. The top of the same published range, 180, is equally reported and would make this line half again as large; taking it would be the drift this table exists to refuse. The scope of the row has not changed and travel is still excluded — only the number moved. If it is wrong for your trade, the box above this table is where you say so, and your answer replaces ours. |
Desk time the same estimate takes with a price book The same desk work, when the rates, the material quantities and the wording are already saved and the measurements did not have to be taken by hand. | 1 minute Our estimate | Lowered from 15, and the reason it moved is that 15 described a different product: it cited contractors working from saved templates in OTHER software — an honest source for a weaker mechanism, and not for this one. What FieldQuo does is not a template. Your rates and material recipes are already in the price book, a roof or a lot is measured off the address rather than by hand, and one button sends it in your colours. A minute is FieldQuo's owner's figure for that path on his own jobs. Marked as OUR ESTIMATE and not as contractors' reported figures, deliberately, and the distinction is the point of this column: it is one operator's number with no range behind it, and a row that claimed a survey it does not have would be exactly the citation-shaped sentence with no citation this table refuses. Not marked as read off our own price list either — the interactions are countable and we counted them (a roofing quote is about four, because one satellite click fills the sloped area and the pitch together and the tear-off, the steep-pitch surcharge and every linear-foot detail price themselves; a staircase is about the same, because one complexity pick seeds all seven rates) — but how long four interactions take a human is not something a codebase can measure, and we are not going to dress a judgement up as a reading. Which way it leans, since that is what this basis owes you: generous. An interior painting quote still needs the dimensions of every room typed, and a countertop still needs a supplier cost per line, because stone has no rate card to default from. One number across four trades flatters the slower two, and what would move it is splitting the row per trade. |
Office time reclaimed — paper and spreadsheets today The share of the remaining office hours you told us about — scheduling, invoicing and chasing the paperwork, NOT writing quotes — that stops existing when it is one system instead of three places you re-type into. | 30% Our estimate | Raised from a quarter, and only because the question underneath it changed: writing quotes is now its own line and has been taken out of the hours you report here. What is left is the part we remove hardest — an approved quote becomes the invoice with nobody re-keying it, and the job carries its own schedule — so it is a larger fraction of a smaller number. It is still not everything: the phone calls, the chasing of materials and the answering of clients are in there and they do not go away. |
Office time reclaimed — separate apps today The same share, for a business already running a few apps that do not talk to each other. | 20% Our estimate | You have already bought back the worst of it. What is left is the copying between apps, which is less than the copying from paper — so this stays well under the figure above rather than being a token reduction, and it moved by the same amount for the same reason. |
Work you did and did not charge for — paper and spreadsheets today The share of a year's work that was inside the job you agreed, was done, and never made it onto the invoice: a line item dropped when the invoice was typed up from memory, a material run nobody put against the job, hours nobody logged, the wrong tax rate for where the work was. | 1.2% Our estimate | The comparison this page sits beside puts this at 1.8% of a year for a business on paper. We are not in a position to verify their figure and we do not need to: what we can defend is the part of it our own mechanism reaches. The invoice is generated from the approved quote rather than re-keyed, which removes the commonest error outright; costing runs against the quoted price so work that ran over is visible before the invoice goes rather than after; materials and hours land against the job that incurred them; the tax comes from the service address. That is most of the list but not all of it, and none of it makes anybody log an hour they chose not to log — so this is set at two thirds of the figure the comparison rests on rather than matching it. |
Work you did and did not charge for — separate apps today The same, for a business already invoicing from an app. | 0.6% Our estimate | Half the figure above, on the same reasoning that halves it in the comparison: an app already catches some of this. The re-keying between the quote app and the invoice app is what it does not catch, and that is the step this removes. |
Extras agreed on site and never invoiced — paper today The share of a year's work that is extra the client ASKED FOR after the price was agreed — the scope grew — which was done and never added to the bill. | 1.4% Our estimate | This is not the row above and the two must not be read as one: that one is work already inside the job that fell off the invoice, this one is work the job did not originally contain. Extras go unbilled because at the moment they are agreed the paperwork is already out, and redoing it feels like a bigger job than eating the cost. Amending an invoice here takes about a minute from a phone, keeps the original version, and records the reason and the person — so the reason it goes unwritten is the reason that is removed. The comparison puts this at 2% of a year; ours is set near seventy per cent of that, because a fast amendment removes the excuse but still needs somebody to open it. |
Extras agreed on site and never invoiced — separate apps today The same, for a business already invoicing from an app. | 0.9% Our estimate | Lower for the same reason as the row above and by the same proportion against the comparison's own 1.25%: an app makes a second invoice easier than a duplicate book does. What it does not do is keep the first version beside the second, which is the part that stops the conversation about what was agreed. |
Days sooner the invoice is raised — paper and spreadsheets today How much earlier the invoice goes out when it is built from the approved quote the moment the client approves, rather than written up when someone next sits down with the paperwork. | 5 days Our estimate | This is about when the invoice is RAISED, not how the client pays it. A paperwork evening that happens about weekly means an average job waits several days for its invoice; five is under half a week and ignores the jobs that wait a fortnight. |
Days sooner the invoice is raised — separate apps today The same, for a business already invoicing from an app. | 3 days Our estimate | An app you already have shortens this but does not remove it, because the invoice still has to be typed from the quote by hand. Three days is the conservative end. |
What waiting for your money costs, a year The annual cost of not having money you have earned — what you pay to borrow it, or what it would have earned working. | 8% Our estimate | We do not know what you borrow at. Eight per cent is at the bottom of what a small trades business pays for operating credit; an overdraft or a card costs several times that, and a business that is never short of cash values it at less. We would rather be under for everyone than right for some. |
Quotes that went quiet and come back when chased Of the quotes you send that do not turn into work, the share that turns into work anyway once a scheduled follow-up chases them for you. | 4% Our estimate | We have no measurement of this and will not pretend otherwise. Raised from three in a hundred to four, deliberately: a sequence that fires on its own schedule and never forgets is a different thing from a contractor who means to ring back and does not. Four is still below every figure published for follow-up sequences that we are aware of and would not cite without having read, and what comes back is counted at margin, which is what keeps this line from carrying the total. |
The share of a job that is actually yours What is left of a job's price after the materials and the labour to do it. | 30% Our estimate | A job you have not yet won is not money in your pocket — you still have to do it. Counting a recovered job at its full invoice value is the single biggest way a calculator like this inflates a total, so recovered work is counted at margin only. Note that this coefficient does NOT apply to work already done and never billed: there the cost is already spent, so recovering the bill recovers all of it. Thirty per cent is conservative for trades where materials and labour dominate; if you know your own, it is the number to substitute. |
Weeks in a year Turning a weekly figure into an annual one. | 52 A definition | A definition. It is not discounted for holidays, which would cut the office-hours line by a few per cent — the hours you gave us are a typical week, and pretending you take five weeks off is as much an invention as pretending you take none. |
Months in a year Turning a monthly figure into an annual one. | 12 A definition | A definition. The jobs and quotes figures you gave us are treated as a typical month and repeated twelve times; a seasonal trade has a busy half and a quiet one, and we have no way to ask about that without turning the questions above into twenty. |
Days in a year Turning a cost of money per year into a cost per day waited. | 365 A definition | A definition. Calendar days rather than working days, which is the conservative choice here: counting only working days would make each day of waiting worth about forty per cent more. |
Minutes in an hour Turning minutes saved on a quote into a share of the hourly cost you told us about. | 60 A definition | A definition. It is here rather than written into the formula because a bare 60 inside a multiplication is indistinguishable from a coefficient somebody chose, and this file's whole argument is that you can tell the difference by looking at the table. |
The honest way to check any of this is on your own jobs.
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