July Customer Training Webinar

Hey, guys. Thanks for joining in. My name is Michael. I'm here with Clear Estimates customer success. Just waiting a couple of minutes for viewers to join in with us, and then we're gonna go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for joining.

While we're waiting, there should be a chat feature over on the right side of your screen. You might need to enter in your name in order to see that chat messenger, but then please just feel free to use that. Let us know if you're having any trouble with sound or anything like that.

But then also as we go along today, just feel free to add in any questions you have into the chat. We're gonna be getting to as many of those as we can as we go along. And I'll probably have a dedicated q and a at the end for anything remaining.

I'm also gonna be sharing a link if you would like to set up a one on one training call with us that is included in your subscription, as well as the free trial. There's really no limit to those calls. So I'm gonna be sharing out a link at the end if you would like to set up a one on one with us.

But the idea here today is really just to give you a thorough walkthrough of clear estimates.

So we're gonna be talking about how to get started. We're gonna be talking about how to navigate clear estimates.

We're gonna talk about how to search for parts, how to create an estimate. We're gonna talk about saving time with templates. And then from there, we're gonna build a very small sample job in Clear Estimates. I had a customer reach out, ask if we could cover a deck estimate this month.

So that's what we're gonna do as we're getting it here deeper into the summer season. But we're gonna build that kind of small sample job. We're gonna talk about settings, and we're just gonna give you a tour of the system overall. So if you're a newer customer, this should be a great introduction to clear estimates.

And if you've been with us for a bit, this should be a really nice refresh on how to use the system and how to navigate Clear Estimates.

So let me go ahead and stop my camera here. That way you can see the full slideshow.

Let's go ahead and talk about clear estimates here for a second. So this is a great tool for any remodeler to streamline their estimating. It includes a library of locally sourced cost data that you can use to build your estimates and it's cloud based. So it's gonna keep your estimates easy to access, organized, accurate, really a tremendous time saver when it comes to these estimates. Now, before we get into the application itself, it's really important to understand how the software is set up and how our library of remodeling costs really works. So just some core concepts to keep in mind as you're diving into Clear Estimates here.

Number one, Clear Estimates is made up of what are called parts. Now parts are line items. They're the building blocks of your estimate.

They price out a specific task like installing some framing, hanging drywall, maybe painting a wall. Really any individual task that needs to get priced out in your project can be thought of as a part. And we offer a library of around thirteen thousand or so parts that you can use to build up your estimate. Now each part in your library is going to contain cost data for the task itself. So that means material costs, labor rates, labor hours.

And this data is locally sourced from the area you input when you sign up. You can adjust your location anytime if you did need to estimate in different cities or states.

And Clear Estimates also comes with over three hundred prebuilt templates. Now in Clear Estimates, a template is just a list of parts.

They're really designed to save you time. So this way you're not searching for parts one by one, you're not forgetting anything you commonly need. Now these templates are gonna be intended kind of as a starting point for you to get eighty or ninety percent of the way through with your estimate, and then you're gonna be able to fine tune them for what your job needs. So estimates are really just built up using parts and templates in Clear Estimates. Now, after we build our estimate, it's going to generate a proposal for us automatically. So it's gonna save us the time of researching costs, typing out proposals. And with all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and jump into Clear Estimates here.

Great.

And when you first sign in to Clear Estimates, you should be seeing something that looks just like this. This is the homepage and it's kind of your dashboard for recent estimates you've worked on. So your five most recent projects you've edited in any way, you're gonna be able to see them here. These are all going to be the project titles. You can click these project titles and it'll open up any of these estimates. So it's gonna show you recent estimates here, right on the home screen.

You can also click these customer names if you wanna open up their customer profile. Each customer you add into clear estimates is gonna have their own profile stored here in this customer's tool. So I'm gonna get to that in just a sec.

You can also search through your whole backlog of projects and customers using this search bar here. So if you wanna type in a customer name or a project title, it'll pull it up. This is also where we can start a new project. So you'll see a new project button right here. And there's a convenient tutorial, kind of a crash course on clear estimates, super handy tutorial there.

Now, before we get into actually setting up a project here, I do wanna give you a little bit of the layout of clear estimates, just so you understand where everything is and kind of how to think about the layout of clear estimates here.

So up in the top left here, we're gonna see four buttons, home, customers, projects and reports. And the way you wanna think about these four buttons is that they relate to a specific project we're working on. So here we can see I have Bob homeowner, three hundred square foot deck open.

And this is the project title I currently have open. So this lets us know which project is open.

And then these four buttons always kind of relate to whatever project we're working on. So home is where we can pull up projects. It's also where we can start a new project. Customers is gonna be our full backlog of customers.

So every customer we add into Clear Estimates is gonna have their own profile here. And then within their profile, there is going to be a series of job cards. So if we scroll down here, for example, these are all different projects. We can open these up just by clicking them.

This is by the way also where you manage your customer's contact info and details that appear at the top of your proposals in this edit button. We're gonna get into this a little later.

Now, just to the right of the customer's tool is the projects page here. And you'll see that this kind of looks like a briefcase. Now this is where we're gonna be spending most of our time in the presentation today. And it's also where you're gonna spend most of your time in clear estimates. This is where we build the estimate, manage the estimate, all takes place right here on projects.

And reports are where we're going to be able to export different styles of proposals, set up invoices, set up contract language, once again, all specific to a project we're working on.

Now up in the top right corner, you're gonna see four blue buttons, parts, templates, options, update. You wanna think about these four buttons as account settings. These are all global kind of account level settings for clear estimates. Parts tool, this is where you manage the library of cost data.

It's not where you build an estimate, but it's where you could go in, you can add permanent custom parts into your library. This is also where you can adjust pricing that we provide on a permanent basis that all takes place in parts. Templates is template settings. So this is once again not where we're building an estimate, but where we can manage the settings for the templates in Clear Estimates, both the ones that we create and any that, Clear Estimates provides.

So in the templates tool, you could do something like take one of our templates, make a copy of it, customize it a little bit so you have your own unique copy of one of our templates. That's something you could do in templates. Again, not where we build an estimate, but just where we manage those settings.

Options is gonna be all of your account options. So this is gonna be subscription settings, report settings, labor rates. We'll get into all of that in a little while, as well as things like integrations, account management, and what have you, that all takes place in options.

And then update is where we're going to manage what location we're using for our pricing. So if you remember, we talked about we price out material and labor to over four hundred locations nationwide. If we click update, we can see which location we're using. It would have asked you when you signed up what location you wanna use for your pricing, but you're not locked into that.

So I'm set up here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I could see that because I'm checked here in gray in the active column for Ann Arbor. And that lets me know I'm using Ann Arbor pricing. Now, if I wanted to estimate in a different city, that's no problem.

So I can just click add location, search by city or zip. Right here, it's gonna show us the closest locations available. And then we'd be able to click this plus to add a location into our list. And then once added, we can just click refresh and sync our library to a different location.

This is forward facing. So if you've already set up an estimate, let's say in Cincinnati, and then we refresh to Ann Arbor, it's not gonna sync our Cincinnati estimate with Ann Arbor pricing. So it's all forward facing, just the next estimate we work on would use the location we set up here. So once again, that's an account level kind of setting there.

And then at the very top of clear estimates, you'll see a couple of drop downs tools. This is where we can import and export parts.

The support dropdown is where we're going to find support information. We do have a really comprehensive library of tutorials, support articles, webinars, super helpful information here.

Down at the bottom, you'll see we have a community board and a feature request tool. This great if you want to request a feature or vote on a feature that other customers have requested, you can do that there.

And lastly, what's new dropdown here. This is all just gonna be news updates. If we release a new feature, you can find out info about that here. Also, every time we release a price update, you'll get news about that here. Just kind of an overview of what's changed, and a link if you'd like some more information at the bottom.

Alright. So that gives you a little bit of a tour of clear estimates and the general layout and how you wanna think about it. So let's go ahead.

Sorry about that minor technical difficulty there. Hopefully everyone can see the screen again. Okay, great. So what we're gonna do at this point is go ahead and jump in and start a new project. So let's go ahead and click new project right here. We're on home by the way, and we're gonna go ahead and click new project right here.

Now, I click new project, it's just gonna ask for some details about the client. So first name, last name, email, project title and description. So I'm just gonna set up a dummy customer for us to work today. I'm gonna call this John homeowner, and then we'll give him just kind of a dummy email.

It does ask for your client's email. It's gonna use this to send out the proposal later. I'm just gonna use a dummy one for our presentation today. I'll just call this john at homeowner three two one dot com.

Just kind of a dummy email here. And then we're gonna give this a title. I'm gonna call this three hundred square foot deck. And there's also project description field.

This just gives you an opportunity to give a little more detail kind of an overall project description. So if I wanted to say something like three hundred square foot, cedar deck, build and stain, really any kind of descriptor you want to give it. So next, I'm gonna go ahead and click continue. Now when I click continue, I'm gonna see this, this new window pop up and it's gonna ask me a question.

Will this project contain multiple components? So great question. What does that mean? So in clear estimates, a component is an organizational feature.

It's used to organize a proposal by room or by phase. So let's say we had a kitchen and a bath and the same estimate, maybe we want those line items organized under each room and maybe a subtotal for each room. So that's exactly what a component will do. Now you could set this up ahead of time when you're first setting up the project, we can say yes, tell it how many rooms or sections and name them and create them right in the beginning.

But just to keep it simple for right now, I'm gonna say no. And I'll show you in a little bit how you can add these in. You don't have to do this right at the beginning. You can always come back later and add components if you'd like.

So let's go ahead and click continue. This is gonna take us into the projects page, which like I said, is where you spend most of your time in clear estimates. Projects page is where we build the estimates, where we manage the estimate. Really anytime you're estimating a job, you wanna be right here on projects. Now, before we get into the process for adding parts and templates, I just wanna give you a little bit of an overview of the layout of the projects page, just so you know where everything is. Like I said, you're gonna be spending most of your time here.

So top left of the projects page, we're gonna see our project title. Keep in mind, we can always click this and edit it. So if I wanted to change my project title, you know, I wanted to say Cedar Deck or something like this, I can change that project title right up here. Same thing with the description, you can just click into that and make adjustments.

Over on the right, you're gonna see a handful of tools for when you're building your estimate.

The most important of which is this blue eyeball button right here, view report. This is how you're gonna preview your proposal before you send it off to your customer.

So really important to just kinda take a look at that before you send it out. And you can always do that from view report, print to PDF. You can also save these to Word.

Once you're ready to send your estimate to your client, you can do that from send to customer and send report to customers. So we'll do that in a little bit.

Export project, this is where you can export the details of your estimate to different formats. Usually, is for your own records keeping.

Typically, these documents aren't gonna be as client facing as the proposal that you see in view report. But the export docs are just more detailed breakdowns, so kind of more of a column view, a breakout of material versus labor versus subcontractor cost and what have you. So you can save those to PDF, Word or Excel. This export dropdown is also where if you're a pro user, you can export to builder trend or it's where really any customer can export to QuickBooks.

In the more dropdown, we're gonna find even more tools such as duplicate project. This is a super handy feature if you're doing a lot of similar jobs, why build the same estimate twice if you can just make a duplicate, make a few changes and get that out the door. So super handy feature there. We can also archive projects when we're done with them.

You can even save completed projects as a template. So very handy time saver there as well. This is also where we can create and view invoices on the job. Just so you know, we're not gonna get too much into invoicing today.

I do have webinar we did on invoicing. I'm gonna share a link to that at the end, but we could spend a whole hour just on invoicing.

And then beyond that, let's go ahead and move down the page a little bit.

Right here at the top, you're gonna see a couple of buttons and a search bar. And this is what I like to call the part search interface. And this is how we're gonna build the estimate. This is how we can search for parts by name. Browse part library button is actually gonna open up the full catalog of cost data from clear estimates. So you can kind of go through the library of costs, find what you need, and add them in.

Create custom part is how we can add in our own line item. This is great if you just wanna add something in very quickly or if there's something you can't find in the library, you can create your own items and really define any description and cost that you'd like.

And lastly, there's add template, which like I was saying, we have about three hundred or so prebuilt templates, just a great starting point for an estimate. So we're gonna cover all of this here.

Once we start adding parts into this project, they're gonna land right here in this project parts window. And we'll be able to see and manage all of the parts in our estimate here once we add some.

Below that is your markup tool. This is how you account for your own profit. None of the costs in clear estimates include markup. They're all pre markup pretax costs. So you can use these markup toggles to add in an extra percentage for your own profit and markup and overhead.

So it's all based on percentage for material and labor costs, And you can sort of set those percentages right here. And those will get totaled into the project cost.

Below that there's going to be alternates and components. Components are what we were just talking about these, this is how you can Great.

Sorry, everyone. Keep losing the screen share here today. I think we might be having some connectivity issues, but what I was just saying is below the markup tools, you're gonna see alternates and components. And these are, like I was saying, components are subsections of your estimate. It's a way you can sort of organize the estimate by room or by phase, You can have sort of different sections for let's say, bedroom one, bedroom two, bedroom three, and we're gonna show you these in a bit. Alternates are very similar except they don't get included in the project cost. These are for building change orders on the estimate, and it's also for if you wanted to show some options to a client on the proposal.

So also a subsection of the estimate that just doesn't get included in the project cost.

We'll get into that kinda toward the end as well. Last thing here is miscellaneous items. This is for things like sales tax, discounts, really any extra percentage you wanna add into your project. Our part costs don't include sales tax, so you would wanna add in maybe a miscellaneous item for sales tax, so that gets included in your project cost.

Great. So that gives you a layout of the projects page.

And at this point, we're just gonna go ahead and check-in with the audience, see if any questions have come in so far.

I'm not seeing anything.

So great, so now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna start talking about how to start building an estimate and we're gonna do this very simple. We're gonna start with just adding single parts into the project and then we're gonna move into templates. And then from there, we're actually gonna build our mock estimate here. We have a deck we're gonna be building.

This is a takeoff list I set up for it and we're gonna use that to build the project. But first, let's just talk about the very basics of adding parts to your estimate. Now, of course, there is the search bar. So if I wanted to just click into the search bar and begin typing, I can search for terms and have parts pop up.

So I could search drywall and it's gonna return me all kinds of results for drywall parts. But what I'd recommend starting with is browse part library. And the reason I recommend starting with this is because it's a little more straightforward how you can just navigate through rather than scrolling through long lists of parts. You can actually kind of sort through the categories of cost data and find what you need a little simpler here.

So if I select this category drop down in browse part library, it's gonna show us all of the categories that make up clear estimates part library. Everything really is categorized on a very basic level by scope of work. Should also be roughly chronological to the way you'd be thinking about the work in the actual job, right? So we're starting off with project prep, then there's gonna be a bunch of different cost categories for different types of demolition.

Further down, we get into the building portions, things like concrete for foundations and masonry and framing and roofing and gutters and exterior and interior doors, windows, decks, skylights, and what have you. So there's so much kind of built into it already and all set to go here. Now what you can do for any of these categories, we can go ahead and click it. So let's go ahead and click ten wall framing. Let's just say we wanted to price out some wall framing in this estimate, We're gonna go ahead and grab ten wall framing. And when we select that, it's gonna show us all of the parts that are built into ten wall framing. So we can see the part description, we can see the category information here in the middle.

And then on the far right, we're gonna have the cost data. So in the cost column, we're seeing the cost per unit for material. So for example, this first part, two by four sixteen inches on center wood frame wall up to eight feet tall, eighty three cents per square foot, that's going to be our material cost. And then in this hours per unit column, we're going to see the labor hours that are built into the parts. That lets you know labor cost is included as well. So it's the labor hours per unit, as well as the material cost per unit here.

Now you might notice there's just so many parts built into ten wall framing and you might think to yourself, well, don't wanna scroll through all this. Well, that's no problem. That's why we have these other drop downs up here at the top so you can kinda narrow your search. So under each category of parts in clear estimates, there are subcategories that let you get more specific.

So under ten wall framing, you know, I can sort by wood wall framing, sheathing, columns, knee ball, furring, and so on. So let me go ahead and grab ten wall or I'm sorry, wood wall framing here. And we're in ten wall framing. And now I'm just looking at wood wall framing parts.

And then a lot of times you can use part groups to get even more specific. So for wood wall framing parts, I have two by fours, two by six, two by eights. Let me go ahead and grab two by four. And I'm looking at a much smaller list of parts here for me to choose from.

And so then at this point, I would just kinda go through the list and find what I need. So let's say I did wanna go ahead and grab this part, two by four, sixteen inches on center wood frame wall up to eight feet tall. What I'll do is I'm just gonna click this part with my mouse, and that's gonna pull up this part preview. Now, in the most basic sense, all I need to do as an estimator at this point is just plug in my quantity.

So helps to have your measurements all set to go. So you know how much of everything you need. In this case, it's looking for the wall area, so kind of the the the length times the height of the wall. And let's just say, for example, we needed to price out eighty square feet of wall framing.

We're gonna plug that right into this blue quantity bar. That's gonna price out material and labor, Once again, pre markup, pretax here. And then we're gonna go ahead and add the part.

Perfect. A little bit of a delay there. Like I said, I think we're having some connectivity issues here.

But that's really just that simple. We just sort of clicked the part, we plugged in our quantity, and then we added the part into the job.

Now there's more you can do here though. So let's do another example. Let's say I wanted to price out some wall I'm sorry, some let's say we wanted to price out some drywall just for example.

So I'm gonna click this category drop down again. Also keep in mind, you can kind of quickly filter through categories. So, you know, most of the drywall costs are in either wall coverings or ceiling coverings. So if I just type in coverings here, it's just gonna filter those categories and then I can quickly grab wall coverings.

And then keep in mind when you select one of these categories, if you then wanna just click up into the search bar and type in something like drywall, now we're only looking at wall coverings parts for drywall and that makes it just a little more simple as well. So that search bar is especially helpful if you selected a category already and then you search a term.

But what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and pull up some drywall.

And let's just say this was moisture resistant drywall.

And then we have a couple of parts for that. I'm gonna go ahead and click this part, install half inch drywall taped and finished, moisture resistant.

And keep in mind when we're adding these parts, we can make on the fly customizations to the part before we ever add it to the estimate.

This does not change the default settings for the line item in our library. So it gives you this flexibility to really change anything you'd like about the item and then add the cost into your estimate.

And you can really change anything you'd like, it's not gonna override the default settings. So what I'm gonna do is just kinda walk through this entire tool with you and tell what tell you what everything does here, just in case you do wanna customize any items that you're adding into your project.

So up here at the top, you're gonna see that this part has this description field. You can think of this description here at the top as kind of your internal clear estimates description. There is kind of a character limit here because it's built to fit into your part search. But this is really just the description for the item you see in clear estimates.

What actually shows up on reports for your clients is gonna be down here in report text. And you'll notice that there's three different boxes here, preliminary, formal and subcontractor, and that they all have preloaded text for this specific item in my estimate. What they are preliminary is a proposal that just doesn't include as much detail. It doesn't include unit types, it doesn't include exact quantities, and it's usually used for a rough kind of initial estimate.

And then there's also this subcontractor proposal. This is just basically the same scope of work, but with no project cost. That way a sub could give you a cost to do the work.

But most commonly you're gonna use the formal proposal. When we're looking at that view report button here on the projects page, that's gonna be the proposal we'd see is the formal proposal. This is what gets sent to your client from send to customer. So if you wanna adjust the language for one So if you want to adjust the language for one of your items on your proposal, you could do that right here in this formal text box.

Keep in mind, there's gonna be some insert buttons that will insert various information about the part, provide an install, quantity, unit type, and part description, and it would just auto fill that information. When you click part description, it would just kind of auto fill this description from the top.

So that's how report text works. And it's convenient because this means, you know, you can add a part to a project once and then there's three separate styles of proposals you can automatically print from the estimate.

Just below that description is gonna be the unit type, and this tells you how the part is priced out. So for example, this part, we have a cost per square foot from clear estimates. And we can see that down here in material, how there's a specific material calculator we're seeing seventy four cents per material. That means it's seventy four cents per square foot. So it's already got a unit type sort of defined. Now you can customize the part if you wanted to, let's say at a linear foot cost for installing drywall.

You could change this unit type over to something else. Just keep in mind, it's not a conversion calculator. It's not gonna change the square foot cost into a linear foot cost. You would have to just come down here and redefine what that material cost is.

But you can certainly switch between those. And the unit types, square foot, this is commonly seen for things like framing and drywall and flooring. Linear foot, this is typically you're gonna see things like baseboard or anything that goes around the perimeter of the room is typically priced by linear foot. Cubic yards, this is gonna be things like earthworks and debris removal.

You'll see a cubic yard cost for a lot of those. Pieces kind of your catch all for anything not priced by square foot linear foot or cubic yard. You'll see this a lot for things like doors or windows or sinks, or really anything you just need one of, is usually priced by piece. And so just give you a little overview of these different unit types.

And then below that we have the different cost calculators in the park. So again, there's three separate ones, material, labor and subcontractor. The material calculator, it's gonna show your cost per unit for material right here. And just keep in mind, it's gonna multiply this by the park quantity, you know, so if I put in a hundred square feet of drywall here, it's gonna take seventy four cents, multiply that by my square footage and give me a material cost.

Below that's gonna be the labor calculation. And what we do is we provide hours per unit, labor hours per unit. So what happens here is it's gonna take this figure here, and it's gonna multiply it by the part quantity that you input. And then it's gonna multiply that again by a labor rate.

So you can almost kind of imagine sort of an invisible triangle here. This is how the hours per unit calculation works. So it's just a number of labor hours that gets multiplied by the square footage. And then once again by a labor rate.

Now you can customize labor rates if you click this little dropdown here, you can select a different rate from in your account. In your options tool is gonna be all of your default account rates, and you can edit them there, and I'll try to get to that toward the end.

But you can always choose a different labor rate. You can actually click into this labor rate column and just plug something in if you want. It'll let you do that. It'll warn you, that it's not the diff the the typical value or the default value for the part, but you can really just kind of adjust your labor cost however you'd like here.

There's a couple of different options too. Maybe you don't wanna use labor hours. You click where it says hours per unit in blue here, you can change the calculation type for labor costs. So let's say we had a cost per square foot for labor, I can actually switch this over to dollar per unit, and then just say, you know what, I just wanna charge two dollars per square foot for labor. Don't wanna worry about a labor rate, don't want to figure anything like that out. It's just two dollars per square foot. And then we see that reflected here.

There's more options too. So if you just wanted to plug in a flat cost and just sort of add in a lump sum cost for something like labor, you could do this for material as well. And just say, you know what, it's gonna be five hundred in labor cost regardless of the quantity, regardless of the labor rate. I'm just plugging in five hundred and it's just gonna be a static flat cost of five hundred. And lastly, if we just wanted to multiply a number of hours by a labor rate, we know this is gonna take us two hours to do it. We can just plug that in, multiply that way.

Do want to apologize sincerely, we keep losing our screen share today. I think we're having some kind of either connectivity issues or it might be a problem with the screen share tool. But I'm gonna just try to stay on top of that, I got my eye on the screen here. So so sorry for the occasional interruptions we seem to be running into today.

Lastly, there is subcontractor cost option. This is optional. None of the costs we provide to you are assumed to be sourced from a sub. So if you have a sub that you're working with, and you just want to plug in their costs, you know, you can uncheck these different cost types, which also by the way, it really easy to customize the part.

Let's say we're doing a labor only estimate, for example, we could just uncheck material, but maybe we wanted to uncheck material or labor or both, and then just plug in a subcontractor cost for this, we would just enable the subcontractor cost. If we know what their cost per unit is, we can plug that in. I think more commonly with a subcontractor, they've probably given you just a total price to do the job. So in that case, you might just wanna choose lump sum here and say, you know, my sub gave me a cost, a price rather of eight hundred dollars to do this work, we're just gonna plug that in here as our lump sum.

So you can really kind of fine tune these parts however you'd like and then add them into your project. And once again, you know, if we click that part again, it's the same part it was originally before we customized it. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in the estimate to make those adjustments.

Alright, checking in with the audience quick, see if there's any questions so far.

Not seeing anything. So let's just take a look at what we did here. So I'm gonna close out of the Browse Part Library tool, and we could see we have a couple of items we added here into our estimate. We see the description, the quantity. Keep in mind, a lot of these columns are clickable. So if I just wanted to make quick adjustments to my part quantities, I can do that here.

Same thing with material and labor cost, we wanna make quick adjustments to that, we're able to do that. And of course you can also just click this pencil over on the far right and open the part right back up and continue to make adjustments however you need. This trash can will delete the parts from your estimate.

And then keep in mind, you can also adjust descriptions from this description column if you need.

Great, so now that we've added some parts to the project, we can kinda see what's going on here. So we have our actual project total. So this is the total before markup.

Below that in blue text is gonna be the dollar amount of markup being applied. So remember that comes from this markup tool. We set this based on a percentage.

And that right here in blue text, we're gonna be able to see the markup percentage. And then down here in orange is gonna be the base bid. So this is the number the client sees. So it never shows your client, your markup, it just kinda rolls that into the total project cost here.

Cool. So the next thing I wanted to cover was just maybe kinda give you a crash course on how to use templates and then we're gonna get into this deck finally.

So let's go ahead and just kinda talk about templates for a second. Once again, templates, they're just sort of prebuilt estimates, kind of starter estimates. They're designed to get you eighty or ninety percent of the way through with the job or a section of the job. And then you can fine tune them for what your job needs. When you wanna add a template to the project, you wanna be right here on the projects page and find this add template button right here.

So when I click add template, it's gonna pull up this new window.

And you'll see that there's this select a category drop down. So very similar to the parts, the templates are also categorized. So there's gonna be templates for additions, bathrooms, demolition, decking, kitchens, floor systems. Further down, you get into room remodels like basements or bedrooms or living area, roofing and gutters and what have you. So there's plenty built in here about three hundred or so prebuilt templates.

So let's say we wanted to take a look at some bathroom templates. I'm gonna go ahead and select bathroom.

And then using this middle drop down, I can select a specific type of bathroom template. So this will show me all of the templates available for bathrooms.

You'll you're gonna see some smaller templates in here for things like replacement work. So tub door replacement, tub replacement, exhaust fan, shower, surround, and what have you. Further down, we get into complete new build bathroom templates. And then below that are some remodel templates in a couple of different grades. And this just refers to the quality of materials here. So let's say for example, we wanted to take a look at this template, bathroom remodel average grade. We're gonna go ahead and click that.

And what you'll see is when we click this template title, now it's gonna show us all of the parts that make up this specific template down here and we can see them all here. What you'll see is that it's all just a list of suggested parts that are commonly seen in this kind of a bathroom remodel. And it's gonna try to cover as much ground as possible. So we're looking at costs for things like demo, we're looking at plenty of different items for plumbing, for things like sinks and vanities and toilets.

And then further down, we're getting into things like electrical work, wall coverings for things like drywall, as well as ceramic tile walls and what have you. And then further down, we get into things like flooring materials, tile flooring and painting. So it's gonna try to cover as much ground as possible, but you do wanna think about a template as a starting point. It's just designed to save you time since every job's a little different.

That said, what's really cool about these templates is that all of these parts that you see in the clear estimates templates have special formulas attached to them that tie back to this template quantity that you see right up here. So what this allows me to do as an estimator is just click into this template quantity and say, okay, I've got a ninety square foot footprint on that bathroom. I'm just gonna plug in the square footage of my bathroom here and click calculate quantities just below. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna use those formulas to figure out suggested part quantities for each of the parts in the template based on a ninety square foot bathroom.

So it's meant to get you in the ballpark. What you wanna do at this point is double check all these quantities against what you have in a set of plans or in a takeoff list like this and make any adjustments as needed. So let's say, you you measured, it's actually seventy five square feet of ceramic tile floor that needs to get pulled out. You can just very quickly make those adjustments right here in the template. We haven't added this template to the job yet. We're just kind of staging it, getting it ready, fine tuning it to add into the job.

Now let's say there was something in the template that we didn't need. So let's say maybe a different contractor was coming by to do all the electrical and we didn't need to price that out in our project. You can also uncheck any of these parts that are not gonna be relevant to your estimate using these check boxes here on the left. And this just makes it so those don't get added in with the rest of the list. So you can kinda see, you can go through, you can adjust any quantities, you can remove any parts you're not gonna need. And then if there's something that you do need that isn't in the template, once we go ahead and add this into the job, we'll then be able to go into the part library, find anything else remaining and just save us the time of searching for all of these parts.

So once everything looks good, you'd have some choices in terms of where to add the template. It's gonna show you the approximate total of the template right here. And then you can add it in the main window as an alternate if you wanted to use it for a change order, as a component if you wanted to create a a section of the estimate using the template, or if you have a section already set up, you can add them to existing sections. So I'm just gonna go ahead and add this domain window.

And when I click add template here in the bottom right, you're gonna see it's gonna copy and paste this entire template into my project. And then from here, I could of course go through, make any further adjustments, adjust any quantities, make any changes, add more parts from the library. And so that's pretty much how templates work and we are gonna use a template to help build our job today. Really quick before we dive into this deck project, just gonna check-in with the audience, see if there's any questions that have come up so far.

Not seeing too much coming in yet.

Okay. Great. So what I'm gonna do at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and delete all of these parts in my project and let's get us a clean start to our deck estimate today.

And to do that, keep in mind, you know, like I said, you can delete parts one one using this trash can, but there's also these check boxes if you wanna do any bulk actions in your project. So you can actually select multiple items and this is gonna enable this kind of actions button. And this is cool because this is gonna let you move parts around to different sections of your estimate or to different projects. You can make copies of parts in bulk and you can also delete in bulk.

And that's what I'm gonna do. I'm actually gonna use this top checkbox. This is gonna select all of the parts in my estimate and then I'm gonna go actions and delete. And this will allow me to bulk delete the whole project.

Just be careful when you're doing this.

Don't accidentally delete all the parts in your project here.

Great, so now we've got a clean slate here, we can start on this deck build.

And so this is the deck we're gonna build today. This is a takeoff list. I put this together at the client's house just kinda went through, we did a consultation, figured out all the dimensions, sort of drew up some plans. And then I created this takeoff list based on those. And this just makes it easy to estimate and clear estimates if you already have your measurements and quantities sort of defined.

So this is what we're gonna build here today. It's a three hundred square foot, it's gonna be a floating deck, it's gonna be cedar. And then we're actually gonna come back and stay in the deck after six weeks. So we're gonna use both parts and templates to build out this estimate.

The deck template isn't gonna include every single thing that we're gonna need to price out in this takeoff, but that's why we kind of emphasize that those templates are just a starting point. So we are gonna build this estimate out with the help of one of these templates. And there's a lot to do here. We've got a little bit of prep work, we're gonna be doing some framing.

We're also gonna be installing a railing steps, some painting work, and then we're also gonna be doing some cleanup. So let's go ahead and start up here at the very top of my takeoff. I need to pass on costs for a set of plans, building permit, and travel costs as far as my prep work goes. So I'm gonna head back into clear estimates.

First thing I'm gonna do click browse part library.

Now most of the prep work I'm gonna need is gonna be found right here in project preparation. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab project prep.

And then I'm gonna use this middle drop down. And the first thing I needed was a set of plans for this job. I've estimated it's gonna be roughly sixteen ks.

So I'm gonna search through my list.

Here is plans on-site survey fourteen to sixteen thousand project costs. I'm gonna click that part. And how many of these sets of plans am I gonna need? Probably just the one. So I'm just gonna leave that at quantity one add part.

We also needed that building permit fee. So I'm gonna click my middle drop down here again, we're gonna switch that over to building permit fee.

Same idea here, rough range of costs about fourteen to sixteen ks. And we're gonna add that in.

And then we also wanted to pass on time and fuel for the travel. This particular homeowner lives a little bit far away and we're gonna be coming to the site a couple of times here. So we just wanna pass on some of those travel costs. Now there is a line item here if I just wanna search travel.

We do have something in our library here, travel charge, it's fifteen minute increments. So each quantity one is fifteen minutes. So if I wanted to price out half hour of travel time, I could just do quantity two. But I think this is a good opportunity to show you how you can just very quickly create your own part.

So for my travel cost here, my travel charge, I'm gonna go ahead and grab create custom part. And this is how you can just quickly add in your own line item into the Astabit. There's two ways you can do this. You could do this in simple mode, and this is really easy.

You just select a category, plug in a description and cost and save. And you can also click standard and this is gonna give you all of those calculators we were looking at before.

In this case, I'm gonna keep it simple. I'm just gonna add these the this particular line item into my project prep item, project prep category, and I'll just call this travel charge. And I'll just charge them a hundred and fifty for labor, and we'll save that.

Great, so now we've got those couple of items added into my project. Now keep in mind, you know, if I didn't want this to be first, these dots over on the far left to let me rearrange parts in my project, you can kind of you'll see it's gonna give you this little red indicator where it's gonna drop the part and then you can drop it. What's important to remember about that, you'll see all of these parts are in project prep, and you can only rearrange parts within a specific part category. So if I had some demolition costs in this project, it wouldn't let me take my my building permit and drop it into those. However, you can always make quick on the fly adjustments to the part category. So for whatever reason I wanted to do that, we can just customize the category and then it would let us drag it wherever we wanted.

So just wanted to mention that you can also kind of rearrange what order these lines fall.

So that's all my prep work. So let's get into the framing costs. So we're gonna be doing a couple of things here, we're gonna be digging some footings, we're gonna be adding some concrete tubes, filling those with concrete, and we're gonna be installing some posts in those.

We're gonna be installing some joists as well as Cedar Deck Band. Now what I could do if I wanted, I could go into browse part library here. There is a specific decks category right here. It's number eighteen decks and porches.

And all of those costs are included in this category. So we're gonna see specific subcategories for framing, for things like posts and joists and band.

But I kinda wanna save myself a little bit of time here. So for most of this deck, I'm gonna use one of the prebuilt deck templates to kinda get ourselves a little further along.

So once again here, I'm gonna click add template.

And I'm gonna use my select category drop down, we're just gonna find some decks.

And in this case, it's a cedar deck. And it's gonna be a floating deck. So let's see what we have for cedar.

And it's gonna be a three hundred square feet. So we have a couple of deck templates here and you'll notice they have different ranges of square footage here. And the reason for that is the template part formulas that determine how much of the part to add.

They are pretty dependent.

Sorry about that. They're pretty dependent on how big the deck is, right? So there's gonna be a lot more waste factor in a smaller deck than there is in a larger deck. So that's why there's different kind of ranges here. In this case, I'm gonna go ahead and grab deck Cedar over one hundred and eighty square feet since it is a three hundred square foot floating deck here.

Now I've clicked that and now we can see there's a handful of items in this deck template. I'm gonna go ahead and plug in that square footage here. So that's the surface square footage of my deck, three hundred square feet and calculate.

And now we've got some suggested quantities for each of these parts. So I'm gonna go ahead and compare these to what I've got in my deck takeoff here and just make sure all of the quantities are correct for what I need and that everything I need is included. So let's start with this first item, dig thirty six inches footing and add concrete tubes.

We also needed to fill ten inches tubes with concrete. Now let me take a look in here.

We have note parts in this template for digging the footing. And I think the reason for that is because there's a lot of different situations, lot of different dimensions of footings you might need.

So it's gonna give you the kind of the power to go back in the library and choose the ones we want. Since I don't have anything in the template for digging the footings or filling them with concrete, I'm gonna go ahead and mark this on my takeoff. I wanna look through the library later, find parts for that and add it in. But let's see what else we have here. So I do need to make sure I have installed Cedar posts in concrete and thirteen of them.

And I need to make sure my dimensions match up. So let me take a look.

And first part here is install cedar posts, four by four, eight inch tall and concrete. So this works really well and it has exactly the number I need here. Keep in mind, these template formulas are based on actual contractor projects that have been surveyed. So they've been pretty dialed in over time. So this actually works for what I need here.

Next install joists two by ten doubled in three hundred square feet of those. And I do have a part right here up top three hundred square feet of deck joists, and it's exactly the dimensions I need. But if it wasn't, I would just uncheck this and find a different.

Alright, let's see what's next. Cedar deck band sixty four sixty linear feet of a one by ten band here. So let's make sure we've got a one hundred ten one by ten band and we do and at sixty linear feet just like I need.

And then we have our deck surface at three hundred square feet, we can just kind of assume that's correct there. So I will double check my dimensions make sure that matches up.

And that'll work.

So next we have some railings, forty two inches tall deck railing with pickets, I need fifty two linear feet of each. Let's see what we've got in here. And I do have a part that kind of works here install deck railing with pickets. So you'll see this a lot.

A lot of the parts in clear estimates are kind of you can think of them as assemblies, where they're gonna include all of the costs for a specific task. So in this case, it includes the railing, the pickets, all of the materials, but it's suggesting fifty four linear feet. And if I look at my takeoff, I have fifty two linear feet that I measured. So slight difference there.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and make an adjustment there for the railing, I only need fifty two linear feet of railing.

Alright, so that's railing. Let's pick it. How about deck steps we need four cedar steps are going to be open riser.

And I do have a part for install cedar step with open riser, but there's closed riser parts in the library. If I needed a different kind of riser, I can just uncheck this neat different kind of step, I should say I can always uncheck this at a different step from the library. And it's four of them. So that's just what I needed.

So I just made one small adjustment to one of these parts, everything else kind of looks like it's gonna match up with a lot of what I have here. But that's the end of my template list. And we still have a couple of things that need to get priced out. So you can see the template just kind of gives us a starting point.

We can kind of set this up, stage it, get it ready and it just saves us the time of finding these items. So this should be a great starting point. I'm gonna go ahead and add this into the project here.

And that's gonna go ahead and copy and paste that entire template here.

But we're still not done. So we still have all of this paint work we have to do, we're gonna be staining the deck, as well as some finalization work, we're gonna be dumping some debris and doing some cleanup outside.

And then of course, we also have these two items that I still haven't priced out under framing. So this is gonna be DIG thirty six inches footing rather and add concrete tubes. So I'm gonna come back into clear estimates. Let's get this into our estimate. I'm gonna go ahead and type in dig footing.

And a handful of items come up. And let's just double check what I need here. So it's gonna be thirty six inches footing And it's going to be ten inches tubes. And these are more of those assembly parts where I see the tube.

And digging the footing is all included as one cost. So let's see here thirty six inches place twelve inches tube.

Alright, dig footing up to thirty six inches place ten inches tube or concrete.

And that's just exactly what I need. Okay, perfect. So let's go ahead and grab that.

We are going to need I believe thirteen of those.

So we'll plug in thirteen here as our quantity add part.

And that takes care of these two different items.

So next I had down here at the bottom, some painting work I still haven't priced out. So this is gonna be deck staining.

I'm gonna come back into clear estimates.

And right now I'm kind of in search mode and keep in mind, you can always click browse parts over here on the top right of the search. You can kind of toggle these back and forth between search and browse.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and get into browse here. And let's go ahead and surf down to exterior paint.

What we're looking for is some deck staining right now.

Using my middle drop down, I'm just gonna type in deck.

Let's actually type in stain deck. Great. So now we have stain deck and porch floor, railing and steps. So let's start off with the deck flooring here the deck surface. So I'm gonna stain deck porch floor.

And it's we're going to be it's going to be a brush, we're going to use that kind of an application and two coats three hundred square feet of that. So let's see what we've got for brush in two coats right here.

And that's gonna be three hundred square feet of deck surface.

So I'm gonna plug that into my quantity that's gonna price out my costs. Let's add that part in.

I also have deck, stained deck railing with a brush in two coats here. So let's go back into stained deck.

Here's the railing.

Brush three coats. I need brush two coats right here.

Brush two coats. And I measured it's gonna be a hundred and eighty nine, square feet of deck railing.

And we're gonna add that part in.

Now we need to stain the steps. It's gonna be a roll and it's two coats. So we're gonna roll on two coats of stain there for the steps.

And it's gonna be sixteen square feet of steps. Let's see roll.

We're looking for two coats here.

Wait, I think that was brush. Nope, that was roll two coats. Great.

And what was my square footage? Sixteen. So we're gonna plug that in as sixteen. So you can see I'm just kind of referencing the takeoff and then using that to plug my measurements or my quantities into each of these parts, we add them into the project.

And then lastly is gonna be just a little bit of cleanup work. We're gonna be dumping debris And, we're also gonna be cleaning up the worksite.

Most of that stuff's gonna land in finalization. So that's category number thirty seven for project finalization.

Middle drop down here, we're gonna find load haul and dump debris.

And keep in mind, there's plenty of other finalization, you know, for things like dumpster cleaning, labor, general cleaning, as well as budgetary items and cleaning supplies all here in finalization. In this case, we're just gonna grab a load haul and dump debris.

And then how much debris do I need to remove? I'm looking at four to five cubic yards I've estimated here. So let's go ahead and grab this one, load haul and dump clean construction debris four point five cubic yards. Now sometimes you'll see it where it actually tells you the quantity right in the part description.

And when you see that these parts are almost universally priced by the piece. And what that means is quantity one of these parts accounts for four point five cubic yards of debris removal. So I can just add this in as quantity one and call it a day. Or if I wanted to estimate nine cubic yards, could do quantity two.

So this might get confusing if you're a new customer. Keep in mind, if it actually says what the quantity is in the description, that just means add in quantity one and that's how much it accounts for.

So let's go ahead and add that in.

And then we had a little bit of cleanup work. I'm just gonna surf down to general cleaning. And then in my park groups, I should have deck or porch cleanup in different square footages. Same idea here, we see we see kind of a range of square footages for some of these parts, you know, a hundred and to a hundred and fifty, a hundred and fifty to two hundred, those are all priced by the piece.

Here where you see it says decker porch cleanup over two hundred and fifty square feet, that's where it's gonna actually let us plug in a square footage. So same idea here where it actually defines what that quantity is right in the part description. So I'm gonna grab this one over two fifty. We're just gonna add in three hundred square feet of cleanup, and then we'll add that part in.

Great, so I think that's just about everything we needed to price out for this deck.

We're still not done here though. So before I send this off to a customer, there's gonna be a couple of things I wanna check. Now, number one is gonna be the markup. We wanna take a look at these costs, see what the cost is. Do we wanna make any adjustments? Do we still need to make any adjustments to the parts and kind of review it at this point?

Now, as far as markup, the system defaults to a fifty percent markup. That's not a suggestion. It's just kind of the system default. You can really account for markup however you see fit. We do have some resources on that. If you're interested, I'll share our contact info. I can send those over to you.

But this is how you can just define your markup percentage. So double check your markup here before you send it out to a client, make sure that final price looks good.

And before we send this out, we also wanna just preview that proposal. So to do that, I'm gonna find this eyeball button up here, view report and print a PDF. And And this will pull up the proposal that we'll be able to send over to the homeowner.

Perfect. So this is the formal proposal. When I signed up, I plugged in my logo. I'll show you how to adjust that here in a second.

Below that is my submitted to and by section. So that's my client's contact info as well as my own. One of the things I'm gonna wanna do here is plug in John's address, make this look a little more professional, add his contact info here.

Below that I have a paragraph of legal language I've included with all of my proposals. I'm gonna show you how to set this up. If you wanna add in your own contracts to appear up at the top, you can certainly do that.

And then below that, we're getting into the contents of the estimate itself. And you could see that we didn't type any of this in, we didn't look up these costs. Clear estimates just automatically produces a sentence of text that explains the project in detail to your homeowner. And it's even kind of organized by scope of work here. So very readable, very easy for them to understand.

And then we have our total project costs down here. Now, one thing I wanna do is add in a line for sales tax. So we're gonna do that. And then there's a convenient place my client can sign the agreement.

So let's make a couple adjustments here before we send this out. So first thing I wanted to do was add in John's contact info. So to do that, I'm just gonna head back into my project. Then I'm gonna click customers. It's gonna know what customer I'm working with. So it's gonna pull John's profile right up. Then I'm gonna go ahead and grab edit, and then I can just plug in his street address.

And we can plug in his phone.

And if you ever wanted to add multiple phones or multiple emails, maybe, the homeowners are maybe a married couple and you wanna have both of their contact info on there, you can add multiple phones. Maybe you have a couple of different clients who own a few different properties. You wanna have a couple of different phones and emails. You can always add more emails and phones. But I'm gonna go ahead and save that. I just added in his address and his phone.

And then the other thing I wanted to do here before I send this out was add in a line for sales tax. And then I'll get into some of these settings here. But to add sales tax, what I'm gonna do is scroll down to the very bottom of my project here, and we're gonna go ahead and find miscellaneous items. And we're gonna go ahead and click the plus to create an item. This is super simple to do. It just needs a description and a value. So I'm gonna plug in sales tax.

And then over here I can choose between a dollar amount or a percentage. I'm gonna set this up based on a percentage and I'm gonna call it a six percent sales tax here.

Now you'll see there's a dropdown if you wanna choose where your item calculates. You could do this based on the actual total cost before markup.

You can also do it based on the base bid, which is the final number after markup. You could do it based on the markup total, or you could do it based on material labor or sub cost either with or without markup here. So I'm just gonna leave that at actual total cost. But just keep in mind, you can use these items for a lot of different things.

I see some clients who do kind of like cost plus estimating use, miscellaneous items to show a profit margin, for example, that's another use case. This is also great for discounts since you can actually plug in negative values here and have it deduct as well. But in this case, I'm just gonna add in six percent sales tax and we'll save. Keep in mind, it's gonna show us the value of the item right here.

So that's eight hundred bucks I wouldn't wanna leave on the table. So we went ahead and grabbed that sales tax item, added that into our estimate.

And let's go ahead and preview this proposal one more time, just make sure everything looks good. View report and print to PDF.

And this should reflect all of those updates.

Great, we got John's contact info, everything looking nice and professional here. I've got my sales tax accounted for total cost and a signature line. So everything looks good. At this point, I could go ahead and send this over to my customer to do that, I'm gonna just go ahead and exit preview, get back into clear estimates and go send a customer see this little envelope and send a report to customer. This is gonna pull up a little dialog box where it's gonna have a subject line and a body for the email, and it's gonna include your proposal as a PDF attachment here.

Now you might be tempted to click into here where it says customer name, company name, and change these to your own customer name and company name.

But you actually don't have to. These are what are called variables. This is gonna pull your customer's name from the customer's tool, and it's gonna pull your company name from your options tool. So when this email gets delivered to your client, it's automatically gonna have those details.

If you wanna see that ahead of time, no problem. Just change this to field up here to your own email address and you can actually see exactly what the email is gonna look like when your client gets it and just send yourself a copy. So that's how you can actually send the proposal out.

And then once we send the proposal out, there's gonna be other things we can do. You know, if we wanted to save this completed estimate as a template, we could do that. If we wanna begin billing and invoicing, we're gonna be able to do that.

And of course we could also duplicate this project.

So that is really about what the process looks like. It really just comes down to searching through the library, finding parts, finding templates, creating anything you need, and then just kind of managing the costs here, double checking everything, make sure everything looks good. And then you can very easily send this out to a customer.

Next, I'm gonna get into the settings and some of the things we didn't get to cover today, but I do wanna just double check-in with the audience again and see if we have any questions.

It looks like I got a question that just came in here a few minutes ago from Jorge.

And you're asking, can you mark up info? I'm not sure if following that exactly, but, generally, you can really mark up just the costs in your project. I'm not sure, maybe you're talking about individual line item markup here. That is an option.

So for any of these parts in your estimate, you can open these up with the pencil. And if you don't wanna use the global project markup, and please let me know if, if this isn't really what you're asking about, Jorge, but, you can actually adjust the markup for an individual item as well. So you've got that global project markup, but then within any part, you can markup these items separately. So let's say I wanted to markup the material cost for this OpenRiser differently from the rest of the project.

You'll see there's a little blue markup button here, and I can click where it says markup in blue. You'll see right here, it's got use project markup, we can uncheck that option.

And then I can say, you know, maybe I wanna markup this material sixty percent for whatever reason.

Then I can mark that cost up separately, and I could do the same for labor if I wanted. And then we can go ahead and save it. So now this part uses a different markup setting and it'll even let you know there'll be kind of a blue dot here. And if you hover over it, it'll give you the markup summary.

It was just letting us know the markups different from the project markup. But yeah, you can markup individual line items. I'm not sure if that's what you're asking about, but please feel free to clarify. So sorry if I misunderstood your question here.

All right, anything else coming in?

Not seeing too much. So a couple of things we did not cover today.

Number one was components and alternates. So I'm just gonna give you a quick crash course on using components. This is great if you have a multiple phase estimate, especially if you're doing a whole home remodel.

Components are gonna be super helpful for you. So here's how components work. I can go ahead and create a component just by clicking the plus.

Oh, no worries.

Yeah, if you do have any other questions, just let me know. And then also I'm gonna share out a link at the end if you would, where you wanna book a call, we could even jump on a call.

But that said, let's go ahead and dive into components a little bit here.

And we're gonna go ahead and click the plus to create a new component. So this is great if you have a multiple room or multiple phase estimate here.

And when we click new component, we're gonna see that it's gonna create this new section, we're still in the same project, but we're no longer in that main estimate. There's no longer any parts here. And we can see it's got component highlighted at the top, and then we can actually title the component here. So let's say we wanted to add on something like what would make sense for a deck.

Maybe they were going to be doing the front porch as well and we wanted to have a separate section for that. I could just plug in porch here. I can add in an additional description if needed.

And then I can go ahead and start adding parts and templates the same way into this specific section of the project for the porch. So let's go ahead and grab add template here. And I'm just gonna use one of the porch templates to save us a little bit of time.

Let's see what we've got for porches, replace porch on concrete slab basic.

Keep in mind when you click these template descriptions, sometimes it'll have instructions here in the template description. This is actually your instructions that you can kind of look at or really your description for the template. You can adjust these however you see fit, but it does kind of tell you what's included in the template. And sometimes it has instructions if there's multiple items and you need to select different ones.

So just be mindful of what this says. Sometimes there is instructions up here for you how to use the template.

Usually, what that means is, let's say there's couple of different types of flooring, then you have a choice between, removing different styles of flooring. Really, all you'd need to do is just uncheck items that you don't need, which is best practice with a template anyway.

All of that being said, let's just go ahead and just say, we had just kind of a tiny porch, seventy square feet, calculate.

Of course, you'd wanna adjust any quantities, kind of fine tune this and then we can add that template in.

And just wanted to add some parts into this component so you can see what this looks like on the proposal. So I'm gonna go back to main project. Before we look at the proposal, this is something really important to understand about components. So if you're doing a multiple phase estimate, keep in mind this main projects page is gonna show you all of the parts in the estimate whether they're in a component or not.

So you'll see that some of these parts on the far left have C zero zero to the left of them. And what that is is a component code. It lets you know that these parts are in a section or a room of your estimate. And if we scroll down to this components list, we see porch right here, And then we see the value right here of the porch that I already plugged in.

So we can see that all of those parts that are in this main estimate are actually in that room component or that section. And we can always just kind of reference which section they're in. So for that reason, to avoid getting confused or maybe deleting apart from the main estimate thinking it's a duplicate, I always suggest if you're doing a multiple room estimate with multiple components, just scroll down to this components list, you'll have them all listed here and you can just open them up one by one with a pencil. This way we're only looking at each bedroom or each section or for example, this porch, we're only looking at the porch items at any given time.

And then we can always go back to the main project, if we wanna manage everything else. So that said, let's go ahead and see what components do on a report. So I'm gonna go view report and print a PDF. It's gonna pull up that proposal again, just so you can get an idea of how this actually works on your report here.

Perfect, so now we can see we have a section for the porch. Keep in mind, there's an option in your options tool if you wanna hide that component code. So that way it just says porch, there is options for that.

And then we see all of the line items specific to that porch. And then down here at the bottom, we have a subtotal for the porch. So that's what a component will do. And you can imagine you get up your whole entire estimate built this way with, you know, room one, room two, room three, and a subtotal like this for each. Another thing about components that's kind of cool is that if you set up a couple of different rooms, you can also save these as templates. You can open up one of these components, save it as a template, you can duplicate a component to a different project.

So it's cool, you can copy, move sections around.

It's really built to be as flexible as you need it to be.

Now, alternates work very similar to components. The only difference is that alternates do not get included in the project cost and they have their own document you can send out because these are chiefly used for change orders or if you wanted to show some options on your proposal.

Very similar process to creating a component, we just click the plus, we can give it a title, maybe they wanted to see a different style of deck and wanted to know what that would cost, or they changed their mind on something else. We can set up a change order or maybe a couple of different options into an alternate. And then it's got its own document for change orders and on the proposal, it would just show the cost for this section without including it in the project. So other than that, it works just like a component, just sort of a subsection of your estimate that's not included in the project cost.

If you did use this for change orders, you can view report and print a PDF, it'll actually show you a change order document which you could send over. And then you can sort of choose what your status is, is the change accepted, is it declined undecided?

Let's say they accepted a change, you can actually toggle back and forth between alternates and components. So they wanted to go ahead with a change, you send out a change order, they sign it, then you could convert it to a component if you wanted that included with the project costs.

So you could do those, you can kinda toggle those back and forth alternates and components. So if I click that porch component and I actually wanted to use this as a change order or an option, I can just sort of swap back and forth here.

Any questions on that?

All right.

Next, we didn't cover that contract language at the top of the proposal. And that's always gonna be set up here in reports.

So reports is where you can export different styles of proposals, you'll see there's different tabs, different pages here. The cost status tab is where you set up invoices and manage payments on the estimate. Obviously, there's a couple of different styles of proposals.

And then boilerplate is just another term for legal language, contract language, legalese, any kind of agreement or addendums you wanna include on your proposal can be thought of as a boilerplate. Now when you're in this boilerplate tab, you just wanna scroll down here to these bottom two windows here. And this is how you're going to adjust or manipulate your boilerplate.

For each of these titles here, these are all separate contracts. And when you first sign up, these are all just examples. They're not real contracts. They're not vetted by any attorney or legal body. Just examples to show you that you can have a couple of different contracts here. But what you'll see is we click the titles of each of these contracts, we see different text pop up here on the right side.

So we click these titles and then we can see the text within in the text box.

So if we wanted to add in our own legal language here, what we could do right down here at the bottom, you'll see where it says add heading, we can go ahead and click add heading.

And then the next thing I'd wanna do is go ahead and click it. And then we're gonna see it's gonna populate this over here and then we can give this a title. So maybe I wanted to just call this contract or, you know, agreement or, general conditions, really anything I'd like, I can title that here. And then I'm able to either type or paste my contract language right into this box here.

So if you do have that in a PDF or something like this, you could paste in, copy and paste the language here or just type it in. There is gonna be tools if you wanna format that contract language, you can also adjust things like the size. And then there's also variables if you wanna quickly insert things like the project cost, date, title, first or last name of a client, you're able to do that. You know, if I wanted to click project cost and then click this icon right here, you'll see it's gonna add in that variable.

And you can just kind of plug in your contract language right here.

Now once we've done that, we just need to tell Clear Estimates where to put our contract. And you'll see that there's, to the left of each of these titles, three different check boxes, p, f, and s. And what that stands for is preliminary, formal, and subcontractor. And as we've discussed, those are your different report styles. Obviously, preliminary and sub reports are printed here. There is a formal report tab, but that's really just kind of a shortcut to what you see on your projects page. So most of the time you use your formal proposal.

So you just wanna make sure you type in your contract language here, and then you can just make sure you select F most commonly or really any of the proposals that you wanna see that language on.

Now, when I was looking at Hime proposal earlier, I was seeing this general conditions language that I added in. I know that because that's checked in my F column, for my formal proposal.

That said, you have a choice between an intro and an outro boilerplate. Now intro is gonna be anything before the line items in the project. So this is basically the top of the proposal. And outro is anything below the project content. So this is gonna be things like that signature line or any of this acceptance of proposal language. This can all be adjusted right here in the outro. So you have intro and outro boilerplates, outros land at the end, intros land at the beginning.

So you can always make those adjustments here to any of that, and that'll translate to all your reports.

Very good. No questions that I'm seeing so far. Just last thing I think I wanna cover today, before I give you some time back here is just your account options. So there's a lot of report related settings, account related settings up here in the top right corner in options.

So let's just go through a few of these. So here in the options tool, this is of course where you can set up your company logo or swap it out. So if I click options, it takes me right to company info. And if I wanted to plug in a different logo or if I didn't select one when I signed up, I can just click set company logo and then I would just choose a file from my drive.

Once you select that file, it'll stage it here for you and then you just wanna scroll down to the very bottom right and click save. This is the most important step. This is how you finish the logo import. So if you're having trouble with logo import, just always make sure you scroll down, click save, that should update the logo.

You'll also have choices, for things like the positioning as well as the size of the logo. Generally try to keep your logo about the size you wanna see it on the report when you upload it, but you do have some, customizability there as well.

Below that's all of the contract or I'm sorry, the contact info rather that appears on my contract. So this is my street address, my license number, city, state, zip, phone and email. So you can always adjust any of this info here. Once again, just make sure to click save after just about anything you do here.

In the menu on the left second option down is gonna be our labor rate editor. And this is how you can adjust default labor rates for your account. So if you have different rates that you wanna use, you don't wanna use our suggested rates, that's totally fine. You could just click into this labor rate editor. Rather than doing this part by part, this is gonna globally update all of your labor rates if we do it from this page.

Here, what you'll see at the top is suggested labor rates for your market. So these aren't the labor rates that are being used by your account, although they will be preloaded for you if you just signed up. It's gonna populate these suggested rates, but it's always just gonna show you what the suggested rates are for your area for these different trades. Now you do wanna hover over this rate blue text here. It's gonna give you a little info about what's included and emphasizes that it doesn't include overhead or profit. And it lets you know that they're not assumed to be sourced from subcontractors except in very specific cases. So a little information about the labor rates, if you wanna get a better understanding of what's included, you can always just come into options, labor rate editor, hover over this, it'll give you some info.

And then we see the suggested rates for Ann Arbor. And this is gonna correspond to whatever location you have set up in your update tool. It'll show you the suggested rates for that market.

However, down below, we're gonna actually see what rates the account is using. Now, in my case, I'm using the suggested rates and those are preloaded for me, but if I wanted to make adjustments, I can do that here on this page just by clicking into this rate column and making adjustments for the truck driver, for the general laborer, tile setter, concrete worker, carpenter, and so on painter, we can make adjustments to any of these rates. What's important you don't do here is don't delete these rates. The reason is all of these rates are tied back to all the parts in your part library.

So if you start deleting rates, that can cause issues. So instead, just click into that rate column. You know, I wanna change this to forty six dollars an hour for a trucker. I can just change that here and then just save changes.

And now any parts that use that rate are gonna be updated automatically going forward. So next time I add one of those parts to a project, it would use my updated rates. So just once again, make sure you save changes here. If you wanted to add more labor rates really to choose from, you can just click add new record here.

This will just give you a blank, column here, blank row, I should say. And it just needs a letter, a title, and a rate.

And then you can just save those changes, and then those would be available for you to select in a project.

Very cool.

Any questions on labor rates or customizing those? No questions.

Alright. A couple of positions down here, we're gonna get into report settings. So I'm gonna go into report settings general. This is how you can adjust things like the font, the color of the text in your proposals, the size of the font.

You can kind of adjust that text size here.

And this is also where if you ever wanted to backdate a proposal, you can uncheck this option to use the current date. And then in your more dropdown in your project, you could select a different date. If you wanted to backdate an estimate, you can do that as well. Once again, after any changes here, make sure you click save.

And then you'll have individual settings pages for each of your different reports, preliminary, formal and subcontractor.

If I click in the formal proposal, we can see what kind of options we'd have for that. You know, you can pick and choose if you do want your logo included or not, as well as things like the submitted to and by section. So that's once again, your customer's details and your own.

You can hide the project cost if you wanted. Like I was saying earlier, the sub proposal doesn't even have a project cost by default. So you might wanna lean on that one instead, but you can always turn that option off if you wanted.

You can also do things like hide subtotals. There's a lot of customization depending on how you want these reports to look.

If you Let's say you set up an estimate by component, but you didn't want it organized that way on the proposal, you can uncheck this option.

Or there's other component related settings, maybe I don't wanna see the component subtotals, I can hide those.

I can also hide the line items in component that would make it, you know, for that porch example, it just say porch and have a total, you can hide the line items in those components.

You can include the cost of each individual line item by default if you wanted that would show the after markup costs for each individual line in the report.

And then there's also financing options if you wanted to offer financing to client. Then down here at the bottom, you can customize the report title if you don't want it to say formal proposal, you can adjust that, you can adjust the project specifications title, all of that's possible right here. Once again, we're in options and formal proposal.

And we just wanna make sure we save after any changes.

Under the preferences section here in your options tool, I'm gonna go ahead and draw your attention to a couple of things. There is rounding options. If you wanna round your base bid, you can make it kind of round itself off to the nearest dollar, ten, a hundred dollar. Make sure you click save there after you change any of that. We do have an option if you wanted to have some kind of a project numbering system, you can create that here in this project number manager. If you did wanna set up a project number for your estimates to use.

And then under miscellaneous, this is where you can adjust things like the default markup. So maybe I always use a sixty percent markup rather than fifty, or maybe it's any combination of markups. We can kind of set this by default so that way every time we create a new estimate, it knows to use our markups. So we could set that up here.

This is also where you can add something like sales tax. If I wanted a default line for sales tax, that's always included with every new project, I can just set this up here and then go ahead and save it. And then each new project I would create beyond that would use fifty percent markup, it would have that sales tax item. So some of these things you can kind of do by default right in here.

And then lastly, under integrations, this is where you can do things like log into QuickBooks Online. Our QuickBooks integration is really just used for invoicing. So it just sends over the project totals, just material labor and sub.

But you can log into QuickBooks Online, send your costs over to there. This is also if you do get set up with payable invoicing, we offer through our partner company, Clearant, this is where you could plug in your API. That way your invoices you send out have a payment terminal for your client.

Interested in any of that information, I'm gonna share my email and my phone here at the end of the presentation, if you have any questions on that. And then finally under your account, this is where you can do things if you're a pro user, you can add multiple users to your account.

This is also where you can do things like change your password or if you wanted to upgrade your plan, you could do that in managed subscription as well.

All right, and I think that's about everything we really need to cover in here, barring any questions. Let me just go ahead and take a look back at the chat messenger, see if anyone has any questions.

Alright.

Still not seeing too much. So that really kind of wraps up the presentation today. I know we covered a lot.

At this point, I am gonna share out a couple of additional resources for you.

So let's go ahead and jump back into my slideshow. Number one, if you're interested in setting up a one on one training call with us, feel free to do so. You can actually scan this QR code with your phone. It'll take you right to our schedule where you can schedule some time with us.

There's really no limit to these calls. You can book as many training calls as you need. It's about a thirty minute call. We'll just connect to your screen, walk you through the system, make sure your questions get answered.

And then I'm also gonna share a direct link to my calendar in the chat messenger as well. If you'd like to book some time with me, please feel free to do so. Or you can do that at clearestimates dot com slash call schedule.

Now, you haven't signed up, if you're just kind of previewing the software, just wanted to see how it worked today, feel free to sign up for a thirty day free trial. It is the full version of Clear Estimates free for thirty days. It's a really good opportunity to try out the system to really its fullest extent. You can scan this QR code with your phone. It'll take you right to our checkout page, or you just go to clearestimates dot com, you'll see a start free trial option right there.

And lastly, if you have more questions about the presentation, if there's still anything unclear, maybe you have suggestions for future presentations you'd like to see us cover, or if you just have questions about the the software overall and you need that calendar link sent over, just reach out to me. You can reach out to us at support at clear estimates dot com.

Also, if you're working in Clear Estimates, there is gonna be a little blue chat messenger right down here. We're available for live support nine to five Eastern. Just feel free to send us over a message and we'd be more than happy to jump on, make sure we can address any questions you have and anything that's giving you trouble. So I do wanna thank everybody so much for joining in today.

Hopefully this was helpful for you. Like I said, we do do these every month and you can feel free to book some time with me as well. And thanks so much again for joining in. I hope everyone has a spectacular weekend and thanks again.

We'll catch you next time.