June Customer Training Webinar

​​Hey folks. Thanks for joining in.

‍

Just waiting for a few more viewers to join in with us today. And then we're gonna jump in here in just a sec. Thanks so much for joining.

‍

Okay. It's about a minute after here. I think we're gonna go ahead and jump in.

‍

Thanks so much for joining in. My name is Michael. I'm from clear estimates customer success.

‍

And while we're waiting here, for some more folks to join in with us, there should be a chat feature over on the right side of your screen.

‍

Let us know if you're having any trouble with the sound or anything like that. You may need to enter in your name there in order to see that chat. But then as we go along today, just feel free to add in any questions that you have into that chat messenger. We're gonna be getting to as many of those as we can throughout the presentation, and then we'll probably have a dedicated q and a right at the end as well.

‍

I'm also gonna share a link at the end if you do wanna set up a one on one training call with us as well that's included in your trial and your paid subscription. So if you'd like to schedule some time with our team, that's certainly available.

‍

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

‍

So we're going to be talking about how to get started in clear estimates. We're going to talk about how to navigate the system, how to search for parts and how to create an estimate.

‍

And then we're also going to talk about saving time with templates. From there we're going to build a small sample job in clear estimates, talk about settings, and we're going to give you a tour of the system overall.

‍

So if you're a new customer, this should be a great introduction to clear estimates overall. And if you've been with us a bit, should be a nice refresh on how to navigate clear estimates.

‍

So let's go ahead and talk about clear estimates.

‍

It's 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 up your estimates, and it's a cloud based tool. So your estimates are gonna be easy to access, they're going to be organized, they're gonna be accurate, and it's really just a tremendous time saver for these types of jobs.

‍

Now before we get into the application it's really important to understand how the software is set up and how our library of remodeling costs works.

‍

So I do want to start off here with just some core concepts to keep in mind.

‍

I'm gonna go ahead and stop my camera also so that way you can see the whole slideshow here.

‍

But the first thing I'd like you to understand is that clear estimates library is made up of what are called parts. Now parts are line items. They're essentially the building blocks of your estimate. They price out a specific task like installing some framing, hanging some drywall, painting a wall, really any individual part or any individual task rather in your project that needs to be priced out can be thought of as a part. And we offer a library of around thirteen thousand or so parts that you can can use to build your estimates, and they all contain cost data for the task itself. So material costs, labor costs, labor hours, and so on.

‍

Now this data is locally sourced from the area you input when you signed up, and you can also adjust your location anytime. So if you need to estimate in different cities or states, you're able to do that.

‍

And Clear Estimates also comes with over three hundred pre built templates. Now templates are a list of parts. They're designed to save you time. This way we're not searching for parts one by one. We're not forgetting anything we commonly need. So these templates are intended as a starting point. Kinda get you eighty or ninety percent of the way through with the estimate or a section of your estimate and then you can fine tune them for your exact job.

‍

And in clear estimates, estimates are really built up using parts and templates. Now once you build your estimate, it's gonna generate a proposal for you automatically.

‍

So it's gonna save you the time of researching costs, typing out proposals.

‍

It's really a tremendous time saver for projects like this.

‍

And if you're just jumping in here, I do wanna remind you there's a chat messenger, over on the right side of your screen. If you do have any questions, just feel free to enter in your name there. You might need to enter your name to get into the chat. But feel free as we go along to ask any questions.

‍

We're gonna try to get to as many as we can throughout the presentation and then like I said, we'll have a dedicated q and a right at the end as well.

‍

So with all that being said, let's go ahead and pop into clear estimates and we'll get started here.

‍

So when we first log into clear estimates, we should be seeing something that looks just like this. This is the homepage and this is kind of your dashboard for recent estimates you've worked on. So your five most recent estimates you've worked on in any way, you're going to be able to see them here in, the home page. And you can click these project titles here to open those projects up. You can also click your customer names to open your customer profiles.

‍

Now if you've just signed up, you should just be seeing some sample estimates here. They probably all say Steven Sample, and those are just some sample estimates you can open up and take a look at. But this home page is just kind of your dashboard for recent estimates. You can also search the full backlog of projects and customers here from this little search bar.

‍

This is also where we can start a new project just by clicking new project right here, And you also see a really convenient tutorial over here. Just a quick crash course on clear estimates.

‍

You can view that here on the homepage as well. Now before we dive into a project, I do want you to just get an idea of the layout of clear estimates. Understand where everything is. Just a just good idea to have a general idea of the layout here.

‍

So in the top four, in the top left corner of clear estimates, you're going to see four buttons. Home, customers, projects and reports. And you can think of these pages as they relate to a specific project you're working on. You can always see which project is currently open.

‍

It's going to have bold text right up here. I have a demo estimate for a porch, open right now so you can see which estimate we have open. Now home like we discussed, this is where we can start a new project. Customers on the other hand, this is gonna store your whole backlog of customers.

‍

All of your customers are gonna have their own profile here in this list. And when you click into their profile, they'll have all of their projects listed agreements. We're going to cover that in a little bit.

‍

Back to home.

‍

Just to the right of the customers page, you're gonna see the projects page. Now this is where you spend most of your time in clear estimates. Most of the presentation today is gonna be on the projects page. This is where you actually build the estimate, make any changes, manage the estimate while it's underway.

‍

And then the reports tool is where we're going to export proposals, different styles of proposals. This is also where we can set up legal language, for our contracts. And this is also where we can set up things like invoices and payments. But again you want to think of these four buttons as they relate to a specific project we're working on.

‍

Up at the top you're gonna see a tools drop down. This has options for exporting and importing part lists.

‍

The support drop down, this is really great support information. We have a whole library of tutorials and articles on just about everything there is to know and clear estimates here in the support drop down. This is also where you can get webinars. There's also a community board and a feature request page where customers can request features.

‍

This what's new drop down is where you're gonna see news and updates. So this Anytime we make a change or even if we release a price update, you'll get news about this here. For example, here's our April price update. Just kind of an overview of that for you here.

‍

Now in the very top right of clear estimates, you're gonna see four blue buttons. Parts, templates, options, and update. Now you could think of these buttons as account settings. These are global account settings that really apply to the account overall, not to a specific estimate.

‍

Parts is where you're going to manage your price list. This is the default settings for all of the library of items, in clear estimates. This is where you can permanently add new parts or permanently change any parts. It's not where you build an estimate, but it is where you manage the defaults for all your parts.

‍

Templates is where we're gonna manage template settings. This is where we can create a new template, edit the existing templates, duplicate one of the clear estimates templates and make adjustments to that. All takes place in templates. Again, not where we're building an estimate, but but where you can manage your templates.

‍

Options is gonna be all of your account settings. This is gonna be subscription settings, your report settings. There's gonna be a number of report setting options in options here. This is also where you're gonna set up things like company information, company logo, all of the details about your company that appear at the top of your proposals.

‍

That's going to be set up in options and we're going to be heading in there in a little while here. An update is where you manage what location we're using for our pricing. So like I said when you sign up, you choose a location. It is locally sourced cost data, and if we click update we can actually see which location we're currently using.

‍

I'm priced out in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I can see that because I'm active here. I have active checked in the active column. But you can estimate in different locations, different cities, different states.

‍

All you have to do is just click add location if you wanna search for a different location to estimate in. You can search by city or zip here. It'll show you the closest available And then you would just click the green plus to add one of those locations into your list. And then if you wanted to refresh to that location you would just click that blue refresh button, click update and it would sync your price list with that city or zip.

‍

So again that's kind of an account setting that's gonna apply to the account overall.

‍

Keep in mind if you do that it doesn't adjust your previous estimates you know to match a new location. It's all kind of forward facing. So if we created a new estimate after refreshing to Cincinnati for example, we'd be only using Cincinnati pricing for that estimate. It's not gonna go back in time and make any changes there.

‍

So let's head back to home. And that just gives you a brief layout of how the, how you can kind of navigate through clear estimates here. But let's go ahead and get this process started. So what I'm gonna do once again, I'm here on the home page and I'm gonna go ahead and click new project right here.

‍

Now when I do that, it's going to pull up this little box. Just needs to know some information, about my project here. It needs my customer details specifically. First name, last name, email address. You do need to enter your customers email because it's going to use this to email the proposals or any reports, later on. And then project title and description. So let's just fill in just some dummy information here.

‍

We'll just call this John homeowner.

‍

We'll give him kind of a dummy email here.

‍

And then I'm gonna call this bedroom remodel.

‍

And project description, this is an opportunity if you want to put a little more detail in, you can do that. So if I wanted to say something like bedroom remodel, two hundred square feet, solid wood flooring. So really any descriptor you want to give your estimate, you can do that.

‍

So next we're going to click continue.

‍

And then it's gonna ask us a question. It's gonna say will this project contain multiple components? So that's an interesting question. What are components? So in clear estimates, a component is an organizational feature. It's a way you can organize your scopes of work on your proposal by room or by phase.

‍

So you know, let's say you're doing a full home remodel and you want a section on that proposal for each bedroom, or maybe you're doing a combination kitchen bath estimate, you might want a subtotal for the kitchen and the bath. So that's what a component will do for you. You can set these up ahead of time. Just tell clear estimates how many sections and then name them. But to keep it simple, I'm gonna say no because we can come back and add these in later, and I'm gonna cover that in a bit. I'll show you how you can add in components if you need.

‍

So let's keep it simple. We'll say no and we're gonna click continue.

‍

And then that's gonna take us to the projects page, which like I said is where we're spending most of our time in clear estimates. This is where we're building the estimate. This is where we're managing the estimate. Any changes to the estimate. So if you're working on a job, nine times out of ten you wanna be right here on this page.

‍

Now I'm going to kind of start going through the process of adding parts and templates into a project, but before I do that I'm going to give you just a brief layout of the projects page itself. Like I said, you're going to spend a ton of time here. It's important to know where everything is and what everything does.

‍

So top left of my projects page, we're going to see the project title. Keep in mind you can click into your project title and make adjustments. Of course it's gonna let you know still in bold text which project is open. We see my bedroom remodel I just created is open right now. But if we wanted to change that title, we can click here and do so.

‍

Same thing with that description. We want to make any adjustments to the description. We can do that here.

‍

Top right corner. Four blue buttons And these are just various tools related to your project. The most important of which is going to be this blue eyeball right here. View report because this is how we're going to preview our formal proposal before we send it out to our client.

‍

So when you're building your estimate, if you wanna preview what the proposal looks like so far, you're just gonna click that eyeball, print to PDF.

‍

When we're ready to send our proposal out to our client, we previewed it, everything looks good. Then we can click send to customer, send report to customer, your client. So we're gonna get to all of this.

‍

In the export project drop down, this is where you can export more detailed reports of your estimate detail, estimate information.

‍

You can export the full project details to pdf, word or excel. This is great for records keeping. Some clients use these for insurance estimating, just because they're so much more detailed.

‍

But they're just intended as internal reports that you can print. You can save these to pdf, word or Excel. Now if you're a pro user, this is also where you can export to builder trend. That's available on pro plans, and this is also where really any user can, export to QuickBooks online or desktop.

‍

And then the more drop down here, this little ellipses, various project tools, duplicate project. This is a super handy feature especially if you're working a lot on a lot of similar projects.

‍

The ability to just make a copy of a project for a new customer, major time saver. We can also archive a project if we're done with it. Save a project as a template, another great feature here. You know if you want to create a template from your existing jobs, you do have that option as well.

‍

And then further down we'd have options to create and view invoices. We're not going to cover invoicing too much today. I do a separate presentation on that and we'll probably do another one of those coming up. But we can do a whole hour just on invoicing if we if we have the time here today.

‍

And so that kind of covers this top band. Below that you're gonna see what I like to call the part search interface. And this is how you're actually gonna add, parts and templates into your project. There's a search bar if we wanna search them by name.

‍

Browse part library is how we can open up the full catalog of cost data provided by clear estimates.

‍

If we wanted to create our own line item for the project, we can do that with create custom part.

‍

And then we also have all of those different templates that you can browse through, to save time on your estimate. And that's gonna be found in ad templates.

‍

Now I'm gonna come back to all of this, but let's keep going here. I just want you to know where everything is, what everything does.

‍

This project parts window, this is actually where we're gonna see our estimate content. So as we add parts into the project, we're gonna be able to see them here in project parts list. This is also where we're gonna make any edits to those parts after they've been added.

‍

While you're building your estimate, if you wanna see a summary of your costs, you can click summary, and I'll show you this in a bit. This is just more a breakout at the category level rather than each individual line item. We'll talk about that. Just below your project parts list is going to be your markup tools.

‍

Keep in mind that the parts and clear estimates don't include any markup, or profit for you. So you always want to add in some kind of a markup percentage to account for your own overhead and profit. And it's all based on a percentage. So you can tack on a percentage for material, labor, and there's even ways you can designate parts as a subcontractor cost.

‍

Let's say you're working with a sub, they've given you a cost to do the work. If you add a part that sort of reflects their cost, you can mark up their, their costs as well.

‍

Just below that we're going to see alternates and components. Components, like I said in the beginning, these are just sections of your estimate, and a way you can sort of organize your proposal by room or by phase.

‍

Alternates work very similar to components except that they're not included in the project cost and therefore creating change orders or showing some options on your proposal. We're going to get to all of this as well.

‍

Miscellaneous items. This is for things like sales tax and discounts. There's no sales tax included in the item costs either. So we can always create these items, to reflect our sales tax in the estimate and have those itemized on our proposal.

‍

Great. So that covers the layout of the projects page. Just double check-in the chat. See if we have any questions so far.

‍

Nothing so far. So let's go ahead and get into the nitty gritty here. I'm actually gonna start adding parts into this, project. Let's just kind of walk through the process for adding a single part into your estimate.

‍

I'm I'm also going to do a quick crash course on templates, and then we're actually going to get into estimating an example job here. So when we want to add parts to our estimate, there's a few different ways we can do it. You're going to see there's this search bar if we just wanted to search by term. Now you can do this.

‍

So if I wanted to type in something like drywall, I can search the library for drywall costs. The thing is there's over thirteen thousand line items in your library across multiple, multiple categories. And when we search with this search bar, we're looking at parts across every single category. You can see the category column here.

‍

And we can see this covers a lot of different areas and there's a lot of items that might have drywall in the part description. So what I'd like you to kind of start off with is browse part library right here. What this button does is it opens up the full catalog of pricing from clear estimates. So if we go ahead and click that, this is gonna pull up this window here where we can begin browsing through the library of costs.

‍

Now all I really want you to focus on is this select a category drop down right here.

‍

Everything in clear estimates is categorized.

‍

And so if we click this drop down, we're gonna see all of the cost categories that make up the clear estimates library. And you can see there's tons built in here. So it's organized on a very basic level by scope of work, and it should be roughly chronological to the way you'd be thinking about the work in your project. So we're gonna start off with project prep. Further down, we're getting into demolition cost categories, concrete framing general.

Further down we're gonna get into the actual building portions such as, you know, concrete and masonry and framing.

Further down we're gonna have items for things like roofing and gutters, doors, windows, skylights, windows, decks and porches, exterior trim, interior trim, siding and awnings, kitchen and laundry plumbing, h vac, electrical.

‍

And then wall coverings and ceiling coverings. This is typically where you're gonna find things like drywall costs, tile.

‍

Plenty of categories for or general interior work such as trim, cabinets and countertops, floor coverings, exterior painting, and so on.

‍

I do see a question coming in here now from Dennis. You asked if you can add your own category. You absolutely can.

‍

Give me a second here. I'm gonna go through this prop first, but in a little bit I'll show you how you can customize the part categories.

‍

Perfect.

‍

Alright, great. So like I was saying, we're looking at this drop down here with all these different part categories. Now what we can do is we can select a category. So let's say I wanted to price out some wall framing.

‍

I'm going to go ahead and grab ten wall framing here. Now when I click ten wall framing, it's gonna show me all of the parts that are in ten wall framing and we can see there's tons built in here. So we're seeing the descriptions. In the middle we're seeing those categories, where those parts exist.

‍

Over on the right side we're seeing our cost per unit. So this is your material cost per unit. This is the cost. This is the unit type.

‍

So square foot, linear foot, cubic yards, whatever the case may be. We can kind of see the material costs here. On the far right column here you'll see hours per unit. This is the labor hours per square foot or per linear foot, whatever the case may be.

‍

So this reflects your material costs. This is gonna be your labor hours and then all we really need to do is click one of these parts. However, there's tons and tons built into ten wall framing. So if I wanted to get a little more specific, I can actually use this middle drop down up here, all subcategories to drill down even further.

‍

So if maybe I wanted to isolate wood wall framing parts away from sheathing or columns or knee wall or furring. I can go ahead and grab wood wall framing, and then a lot of times you can use these part groups to get even more specific. Right? So maybe I only wanna see two by four or two by six costs.

‍

So I'm gonna go ahead and grab wood wall framing two by four. What you'll see is this really narrows down my list of items. So I'm only looking at a handful of different on centers and different wall heights here. Now when I want to add one of these parts to this estimate, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click the part with my mouse and that's gonna pull up this part preview.

‍

Now in the most basic sense, all you need to do as an estimator is plug in your quantity. That's really what's required with clear estimates. Have a good idea of your measurements and your quantities when you get started. And then when we click these parts, we can just plug in a quantity.

‍

Now this is an eight foot tall wall. Let's say it was eight by ten. So we're plugging in the square footage of the wall area here. Just for example eighty square feet, we would plug that here.

‍

And then we're gonna see it's gonna immediately calculate material and labor costs pre markup, pretax. Just the cost to us do the work, based on eighty square feet. And then we could just add the part into our estimate like so.

‍

So on the most basic level, that's how you can add a part quickly into your estimate. That cost data is all set to go for you. The labor is all set to go for you. However, if you wanted to make any adjustments, you could.

‍

So let's do another example here. So I'm going to go into, I'm going to try to find some drywall for us. Now a lot of times drywall is in the coverings categories. What's cool is when you're navigating through this library, you can actually click this part category here and do something like this. Just type in coverings and you're gonna see it's gonna filter those categories. So nice little shortcut here. We can just shortcut right to wall coverings.

‍

And then once again I'm gonna use this middle drop down. Let's just say I wanted to find some drywall. We're gonna type drywall. There's drywall.

‍

And then let's just go ahead and grab some standard drywall here.

‍

So if we wanted to, we can customize really anything we want about these parts. So let's say I click this part here. Install half inch drywall taped and finished over three hundred square feet. I'm gonna click that.

‍

And then in this this window here, we can make any adjustments to this item that we need for our estimate. However we see fit, specific to this project. Anything we're doing here on the projects page is gonna be only for this estimate, so it gives you that flexibility to make any adjustments with these parts however you see fit. It's not going to change anything about the default setting for the part.

‍

So let's talk about, this entire window here.

‍

So you're going to see the part description. This is your part description in clear estimates. It's kind of a little more brief. It's built to fit into your search tool. And this is kind of your internal description.

‍

What actually shows up on the proposal for this part is gonna be all the way down here under report text. So you'll see this at the bottom of every single part in your estimate. And there's three text boxes here, preliminary, formal, and subcontractor, which is neat because that means you can export three different styles of proposals from any job just by adding the parts. You build it once, you have three different report styles.

‍

But I'd really just want you to focus on the formal proposal. This is the default output of clear estimates. This is what gets sent from send to customer. So if you want to adjust that verbiage on that, formal proposal, you could do that right down here in the formal text.

‍

And there's these insert buttons that insert various information about the part, such as the quantity or unit type or you can paste that part description from the very top up here.

‍

Just below the description at the top, you're gonna see unit types, and this is just telling you how the part is priced. So it'll be highlighted here. This is a cost per square foot.

‍

If you wanted to adjust this to let's say a linear foot cost for the drywall, you could. It's not a conversion calculator though. So it's not gonna convert this to a linear foot cost if I click linear foot. You would have to come into your material costs and make adjustments.

‍

But that's your unit types if you wanted to customize anything about that. Piece is kind of your catch all for anything not priced out by square foot or linear foot or cubic yards. A lot of times you'll see this used for things like doors or windows or something you only need one of.

‍

Now each part is going to have three different calculators included with it. Material, labor and subcontractor. This one's optional. You would have to plug this in yourself.

‍

Out of the box it's all going to be in house costs.

‍

What you're basically what you could expect it to cost for your crew to do the work for labor and what you expect to pay out for materials.

‍

But that said, any of this is adjustable. So if I wanted to charge a dollar per square foot, I can click into this material box here and just adjust that cost per square foot if I wanted. And we can see that that's going to update in the part right away. So if I plug in a quantity, now I have three hundred dollars in material.

‍

If I wanted to remove the material, let's say we were doing a labor only estimate. All you gotta do is just plug in your quantity, uncheck material, could do the same thing for labor. You know, you can kind of pick and choose what's included, for any of these part costs.

‍

Now for labor, what we do, it's called hours per unit. Most of the parts are set up with a number of labor hours and this labor hours number gets multiplied by your part quantity and then again by a labor rate. You can almost imagine kind of an invisible triangle here, for the calculation. So it's taking your hours per unit while it's applying that by the square footage for this part and then again by a labor rate.

‍

Now if you wanted to adjust anything about this, you could do that as well. We can change that labor hours number just by clicking here. We can also choose different labor rates from the list. In a little bit I'll show you how you can customize the default rates that are kind of built into each of the parts.

‍

And also if you wanted to, you can just plug in a rate. You know, if you just wanted to say, you know, I want it seventy five dollars an hour. You're able to do that. It'll let you know it's not the typical, value.

‍

But you can really adjust this however you see fit. Plus you can actually add in a whole list of your own labor rates as well to use alongside hours if you'd like. So we're gonna cover that in a bit.

‍

So that's how you can adjust the labor cost. There is even more options depending on how you estimate labor. So let's say maybe we had a per square foot cost for labor. If we click where it says hours per unit in blue, we can change how the part calculates. So maybe we weren't using a labor hours number. Maybe we just charge two dollars per square foot to hang drywall for example. I could switch this over to dollars per unit and just plug that in here.

‍
And so this way it's just like material cost where it's just my dollar per unit cost multiplied by my quantity.

If I just wanted to plug in a number, lump sum, that's what this will do for you. It's just gonna ignore the quantity, ignore the rate, and just allows you to define what that number is. So I just want to charge five hundred in labor. I can plug that in and it's going to be five hundred just kind of a static five hundred, any number I put here.

‍

And then if I just wanted to charge a number of hours against a labor rate, I can click hours and just say, okay, I expect this to take three hours and then here's our labor rate and we can make any adjustments there.

‍

More commonly with the lump sum would be subcontractor cost. Let's say you're working with a sub, they've given you a price to do the, the project work. You can uncheck the labor cost, add in a subcontractor cost. Most commonly I would see customers click dollar per unit here, change that over to a lump sum, and plug in the cost their contractor gave them. So you can really customize these parts however you see fit.

‍

And again, this is just gonna be specific to this estimate only, and then we can go ahead and add the part in.

‍

Alright. So let's take a look at what we've done here so far. So we added these two different parts to our estimate, and here we can see them now listed in the project parts window. Our description, we have the quantity here.

‍

If we wanted to make adjustments to the part quantities, we can click into that column. Hours, labor, all these are all kind of clickable if you wanted to make quick adjustments. But then you can also just open these parts back up using the pencil over here on the right, and continue to make any edits or adjustments that you need for the part. If you wanna delete a part, you can do that with the trash can as well.

‍

Alright. Great. So now what I think we're gonna do now that we've covered browse parts, let me just double check if there is any questions specific to browsing the library.

‍

Not seeing too much come in. Oh, one thing I did wanna mention, this is another really cool time saver when you're browsing for parts. So let's say we browse part library and let's go back into let's say, we wanted to look at some ceiling drywall. Let's go into twenty nine ceiling coverings.

‍

Now the search bar really helps a lot when you're in browse mode because if we click, twenty nine ceiling coverings here, now the search bar is only gonna look in twenty nine ceiling coverings. So then if I wanna see drywall for a ceiling, type in drywall like this. It's only searching in ceiling coverings and then it's just a much smaller list of parts and options and it's all specific to drywall for a ceiling. So another handy tip I wanted to mention.

‍

Almost forgot to let you know about that. And also if you're in browse and you just want to go back to general search, you can reset. It'll take you back to search. And then if you want to browse again, just browse parts.

‍

So you can do that as well.

‍

Oh and while we're in here, I should just show you if you ever want to just kind of have a side by side view while you're building your estimate, you'll see this little tiny box with an arrow and this will kind of dock the part search over on the left side so that way you can kind of see, your project contents while you're building the estimate. I prefer to keep it in this pop out, but really up to you how you want that configured.

‍

Great. So now we're seeing some totals for items we've added in. This is the actual total cost.

‍

In blue here, we're gonna see the dollar amount of markup being applied. And then the number for our customer is here in orange. This is the base bid. So it never shows your markup to your client.

‍

It just kind of rolls that into the project costs for us. And again, that's all based on the percentage of markup we're adding in down here. It defaults to fifty percent. This isn't a suggestion.

‍

It's just kind of the system default, but you can customize this however you'd like.

‍

Great. So that covers adding parts one by one. Now I'd like to get into just a quick overview of how templates work and then we're gonna build just a quick job here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna delete the parts I've added so far. Keep in mind there's check boxes to the right of each of these parts if we wanna do any kind of bulk actions. You'll see it produces little action button and then we can do bulk actions like move parts to different sections, make copies of parts if we want some duplicates, or delete them in bulk.

‍

And I'm just gonna click this top checkbox to choose everything here and we're gonna go ahead and delete.

‍

And that's gonna start us over fresh.

‍

Really quick, let's talk about adding templates. So I'm gonna click add template here.

‍

And again, a template starting point for an estimate. It's designed to save you time. It's really just a list of parts that are commonly seen in different types of remodels.

‍

Now templates similar to the parts are also gonna be categorized. So if I click this drop down here, select a category, we'll see all the different template categories. So there's templates for additions, bathrooms, demolition, decking, kitchens, floor systems, plenty of different types of room remodels, even things like roofing and gutters, site work and landscaping, flooring and and so on. So there's about three hundred or so pre built templates.

‍

Major time saver here. So here's how this works. Let's say we wanted to take a look at some bathroom templates. I'm gonna go ahead and grab bathroom and then using this middle drop down, we can select a specific bathroom template.

‍

So you're gonna see a lot of replacement templates. These are shorter lists of parts here for things like door replacement, tub replacement, maybe just a quick task that involves a couple of parts. There's some replacement cost templates in here. But if we scroll down a little bit, we'll get into complete new build bathroom templates in different grades. Economy, average, premium. And this just, refers to the grade of materials used in the template. Obviously premium is gonna be much higher than economy.

‍

And then further down we're gonna see remodel templates for things like, economy average or premium grade bathroom remodel. So let's just say for example, we click bathroom remodel average grade. Now when I click that, we can see what the template is. It's gonna show us all the template parts, and we can see it's just a list of suggested parts that are commonly seen in this type of a bathroom remodel. And it's gonna try to cover as much ground as possible. Obviously we're looking at plenty of demolition costs, plenty of plumbing costs here.

‍

Further down we're gonna get into things like electrical and wall coverings for things like drywall, ceiling drywall, doors and so on.

‍

But it's still just a starting point because we're gonna wanna customize this for what our job needs as every job's a little different. What's cool though, about these templates is that every part in these templates that we build has a formula attached to it that ties back to this template quantity right up in the top right. So what this allows you to do as an estimator is let's say the footprint of this bathroom was ninety square feet. We can just plug in that footprint square footage right here.

‍

We can see it's priced by the square foot. And then we can click this calculate quantities button. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna use those formulas to come up with suggested quantities for each of these individual parts in the template. This way we don't have to plug in each quantity.

‍

However, again it's still just based on kind of a starting point, perspective here. You still wanna compare your park quantities to what you're seeing in your plans and make any adjustments to dial it in for what your job needs. And then if there's something that's not gonna be relevant to your estimate, you're able to uncheck any parts that won't be relevant and then just add the remainder of the template items. So it just gives you a way to stage a group of parts, make any adjustments to the quantities, uncheck anything you don't need.

‍

And then let's say we were looking through this list of parts and there maybe is a couple of items that we are gonna need to price out that aren't included. Then after we add the template, we can just go back into browse parts and add anything remaining. And that's exactly what we're gonna do here today with this sample job. Keep in mind once you've priced out your template, you've reviewed your quantities, unchecked anything you don't need, you can add the template to your project just by clicking add template.

‍

It's gonna show you the template total down here. And you also have different choices in terms of where to add the template. You can add it as a new alternate or a component or in an existing section if you have one.

‍

Great. So just a quick crash course on templates. We're actually gonna be using a template to build our job today. So, and I have another question here from Dennis.

‍

Once you choose your template, comma, if you don't put quantity in square footage, can you go back and do that? Yeah. So what would happen in that case, and I think what you're talking about is let's say we didn't input a quantity here and we just added the template as is, right? And add the template to the job.

‍

So what this will do, and I'll just side track here for a second. It's gonna add everything with no quantity and then what you would need to do as an estimator is just kind of go into this quantity column and begin plugging in your quantities. You know, let's say it was two hundred square feet of ceiling drywall or something like that. And you can kind of plug these into this quantity column here even if you've added the template with no quantities.

‍

So you could still do that. There's not gonna be a way you could do it in bulk though like you can in the template mode. So in that case I might suggest just delete all of the parts you've added if you forgot to add a quantity, and then go back in to add template, pull up one of those templates again, and then just make sure to add your quantity this time. So to answer your question, yes and no.

‍

There's no way to do it in bulk once you've added in the estimate, but you could adjust those quantities, delete the items, readd the template with a quantity if you wanted.

‍

Alright.

‍

So at this point, I'm gonna go ahead and jump into kind of a small sample estimate we're gonna build today. And this is what it is. This is a bedroom model takeoff. Now I always suggest have some kind of a list of all your measurements and quantities when you get started.

‍

It's just gonna make it so much easier to price out the work in your project. And so what I did is oops sorry we have a quick question coming in here from Joanna. When you use a template, does it update the rates according to location? Absolutely.

‍

Let me just back out of here just to answer Joanna's question really quickly.

‍

So when you're browsing the part library or you're browsing for templates, it's pulling all of that information, all of that part information from the parts tool which is where all the master settings for your parts live. And it's all gonna be priced out based on the location you have set up in your update tool. So when you're, setting up a location, for example, I'm here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have that selected and then I'm going to be using Ann Arbor costs for all of my parts in my part library. And then when we're adding parts and templates into the project, it's just referencing whatever costs are in the parts tool for those, different parts. So it's always going to be update whether you're using a template, whether you're just adding parts one by one and it is gonna be specific to the location you have set up in your update tool.

‍

Alright. So this is the job we're gonna build today. Like I said, I went through the homeowners bedroom. I just took all my measurements, figured out everything we're gonna need to price out.

‍

This is gonna be a two hundred square foot bedroom and model estimate. We're just gonna be doing some pre finished oak wood flooring and it's a pretty simple estimate here. Just a little bit of prep work. We got some demolition.

‍

We're gonna be taking out some baseboards, trim. We're gonna be taking out some drywall. We're gonna install some new drywall.

‍

We're gonna add a door for them. A little bit of trim work. We're gonna be installing some oak flooring, some painting and some clean up. So fairly simple estimate, but like I said, I just prepared this take off list. It's just a really good idea to have an idea of what your measurements are, when you're getting started and all the quantities for everything you're gonna need to price out. So I'm gonna use this to build my estimate today.

‍

And I'm just gonna go ahead and start here at the st at the very top of the list. So the first thing I need to do is some surface protection. It's just twenty five square feet of area. This is just gonna be the area in the hallway outside of the bedroom.

‍

I just wanna mask that carpet and keep that carpet nice and just put down a little bit of surface protection here. So let's go ahead and dive in. I'm gonna come back into my project here. We have a blank project.

‍

Just a blank starting point for us.

‍

And then I'm gonna go ahead and click browse part library.

‍

And I'm gonna go into project preparation. This is where all of that kind of prep work items are gonna be found.

‍

Using the middle drop down, I'm gonna go ahead and grab surface protection.

‍

And now we're just looking at a handful of items for surface protection.

‍

I'm gonna grab this one here cover and mask floor with plastic sheeting and then I'm just gonna put in that measurement twenty five square feet of area. That's gonna price that out pre mark up and pre tax and then we're gonna add that part into our project.

‍

So next I need to pass on the costs for a set of plans here to the homeowner. It's about a eight to ten thousand dollars project cost approximately.

‍

I'm still in project prep here, so I can just go ahead and grab my middle drop down here. I'm gonna switch my subcategory from surface protection over to building permit fees.

‍

Now I just have a list of building permit fees. Here's eight to ten. I'm gonna grab that. How many, s how many permit fees am I gonna need? Probably just the one. So I'm just gonna go ahead and add that in.

‍

And next, travel cost.

‍

So we have, travel costs here. About a hundred and fifty dollars in gas I'd like to pass on to the homeowner here. Now we do have items here in our library for that. So if I reset here and I just search something like travel, there is travel charge in fifteen minute increments.

‍

But this seems like a good opportunity to show you how you can just quickly add in your own cost very quickly. So if I close out of this, keep in mind if we just wanna quickly add a a part to our estimate and we just wanna create one very quickly, we can click create custom part. There's two ways we can do this. There's a simple mode and all this requires is a description, category, and cost info.

‍

So let's say I wanted to put this in project prep. Let's say we wanted to call this a travel travel charge. Something like this. And just plug that in as either material or labor.

‍

And then we can just save part that's gonna add that right into the project. Now if we wanna click standard, that's gonna give us that full suite of calculators like you see in any part and you can really build parts from scratch, to do anything you'd like here.

‍

So let's add that in.

‍

Great and there it is. Quick question from James. Do you have a sketch available? Unfortunately, nothing in clear estimates supports, sketches or drawings.

‍

We don't have any kind of built in CAD feature at the moment. Something we get a lot of requests for and we're hoping to offer in the future. At the moment, you'll just kinda wanna have that list of measurements all set to go, and then we're just gonna kinda plug those in to price out everything. But that is something we're looking into.

‍

We're exploring integrations with maybe a third party sketch or drawing, platform that maybe we can interface with clear estimates so just be on the lookout.

‍

Definitely in our feature request tool up at the top, you'd be able to find an entry for that and feel free to vote on that if you'd like.

‍

Okay, so that's all of our prep work done. How about demolition? So now let's get into the demolition.

Now of course I could go through line by line. Just go through browse part library. We could pull open these demolition categories. A lot of the interior demolition is gonna be under general demolition. So I could demolition is gonna be under general demolition.

So I could go line by line and price out all this demolition work. But what I'm gonna do instead is use one of the bedroom remodel templates to save time on this job. And we'll show you kind of what the process is gonna look like for that.

‍

So I'm gonna go ahead and click add template once again here.

‍

I'm gonna select a category.

‍

I'm gonna go ahead and filter for bedroom.

‍

We're gonna grab room remodels bedroom right here.

‍

Middle drop down is gonna show me all the bedroom templates available.

‍

And these are all kinda sorted by different type, different types of flooring, ceramic flooring in different grades, laminate flooring. And what I want is pre finished wood. Remember we're doing an oak, wood wood floor here. And so I'm gonna use one of these templates here. I'm gonna go ahead and grab bedroom remodel pre finished wood flooring average.

‍

Now you might notice right off the bat when I click this template, suddenly there's this description up here. Now this isn't a description for your customer or a description of what the template is. It's actually instructions for you on how to use the template. And what this is saying is that this template includes options for various items, and to be sure sure to uncheck anything that we don't need.

‍

And then if we scroll down, we're gonna see that those options include various choices of floorings to remove flooring types to remove and various electrical parts to choose from. So it's just letting you know there's a couple of different options built into the template and to uncheck anything you don't need. So we are gonna be doing that.

‍

But what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna plug in my quantity. Again this is a two hundred square foot bedroom. So I'm gonna go ahead and plug in my template quantity here. Two hundred square feet.

‍

And then we're gonna go ahead and calculate quantities right here.

‍

And so again that's gonna give you some suggested quantities for each of these parts and once again it's just a list of suggested items commonly seen in this type of a bedroom remodel. So at this point what we're going to do is we are gonna go through this take off and we're gonna compare everything in this take off to what this template is suggesting and we're gonna make any adjustments as needed to really just dial this template in. Because keep in mind we haven't add these parts to the estimate yet. We're just staging them, getting ready, making any adjustments and then we're gonna add everything in bulk all at once. So let's go ahead and do that.

‍

So for demolition, I have a little bit of trim that needs to come out. Baseboards and quarter round and I have fifty four linear feet of each. So if I come back into my template, let's see what we've got here. And right up here at the top, remove baseboard and remove quarter round.

‍

However, it's suggesting sixty linear feet and I actually need fifty four as we were saying. So we're just gonna make that adjustment right here. We're gonna click into that quantity column and we're gonna change that over to fifty four. This way it dials in our costs for fifty four linear feet of trim removal here.

‍

So next ceiling drywall. I need to make sure we're removing two hundred square feet of ceiling drywall And that's actually the third part down here and it is two hundred square feet. I think that makes sense.

‍

We're also going to be removing a door, just one door here And here is Remove Door quantity one. That's just what I need.

‍

Next up is Remove Carpet and Padding and we're also gonna be removing some strip flooring here. Two hundred square feet of each.

‍

So let's see what we've got here in the demolition costs for, for flooring. Here we go. So here is a couple of different items for flooring removal. Now remember, it was letting us know right off the bat, there's various choices of flooring types to remove. Now in this case, we are gonna be removing the carpet and we're gonna be removing, the strip flooring. However, we are not going to be doing anything with resilient sheet flooring. So we're gonna go ahead and uncheck this because it's just not relevant to our estimate.

‍

And we had some wall drywall, four seventy five square feet of wall area with drywall on it that needs to be removed. So let's see what we've got for that.

‍

Here's a part removed drywall from wall, but it's suggesting four eighty. So once again we're just gonna switch this over to the quantity we actually need.

‍

And then we're gonna get into drywall costs. So we're gonna be installing some new drywall for the walls as well as the ceiling. And four hundred and seventy five square feet of wall area, two hundred square feet of ceiling area.

‍

Now what's interesting about this estimate in this case, we're just gonna pretend our homeowner is also a contractor and is gonna be doing all the electrical himself. And we're not gonna need to price out any electrical. So I'm just gonna uncheck all these parts because I'm not gonna be doing any of the electrical.

‍

And so we're just gonna uncheck these because we're not gonna need any of these.

‍

And the next down we're gonna get into our coverings category for things like drywall and for ceilings and walls. So once again, here is my install. Half inch drywall taped and finished over three hundred square feet. This is for my walls, and I do need to switch this to four hundred and seventy five square feet of wall area. So I'm just making that adjustment here.

‍

Two hundred square feet of ceiling drywall looks good.

‍

Great.

‍

So then we've got a couple of things here. A lock set for a door and we're installing a new oak door. Now what I like to recommend is when you're using these templates, kind of focus on this category column. Because this is how you can quickly kind of just scroll through the list and quickly find a particular category. So I just come right down here to interior doors and then I can look and see what items are available. And interestingly enough, here is a lock set and that is something I need to get priced out. And then here is a pre hung door.

‍

However, this template has a pine door included. And as you can see on my take off, I need an oak, pre hung panel door here.

‍

So this part's not gonna work for this project. I'm gonna go and uncheck this. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go back into the library later. We're gonna find a note door and then we're gonna add it in with our estimate. So what I'm gonna do on my take off here is just mark off that I still need to come back and do something with this item.

‍

Just so I know that I still need to price that out here.

‍

So let's talk about trim. I am going to be installing some new base molding and some new baseboard fifty four linear feet of each. It's going to be Oak.

‍

And once again, I'm going to use that category column and find interior trim and here's couple of items for trim work.

‍

I've got a base shoe mold in oak so this works for me except it's suggesting sixty linear feet. We're gonna change this to fifty four.

‍

And then I have some pine base. Now again, we're gonna be using oak baseboards by the customer's request. So this isn't gonna work. We're gonna go ahead and uncheck that pine base. It's not what we needed for this estimate. So once again I'm gonna mark this off on my take off that I still need to come back and add in that baseboard.

‍

Next up is flooring. We're gonna be providing in providing in installing some oak flooring for them.

‍

Once again, I'm gonna find my floor coverings categories. See what items it's suggesting.

‍

And you might see this sometimes. So we actually have two separate parts for the flooring. We have the labor to install and we see this as labor only. And then we actually have the material cost for installing the oak floor. So sometimes you might see this where there's separate items for the labor to install costs. Especially with flooring, a lot of times the material will be separate. But in that case you could just include two different items fairly easily here and it's actually suggesting the quantity I need.

‍

Great. So moving right along here. Now we're getting into all of the painting work. So we are gonna be painting two coats of latex paint on these walls, as well as the ceiling with two coats. It's gonna be two hundred square feet of ceiling, four seventy five for the walls.

‍

I'm gonna find my painting category right down here at the bottom and then let's see what we've got for walls.

‍

Paint wall over smooth finish latex roll two coats. And keep in mind if this was any other type of application, maybe we weren't using a roller, maybe we were spraying it or something like this. We're gonna have other options in the library. You could always uncheck and add something different. In this case, this works other than I need to adjust my quantity here.

‍

And then here is my ceiling painting.

‍

We also need to paint the baseboards. Fifty four linear feet of baseboard here.

‍

That's typically gonna be in window and trim. Down here at the bottom. Paint baseboard.

‍

And again, we're actually gonna need fifty four linear feet of that. So we're gonna make that adjustment right here. Fifty four.

‍

We're also gonna be painting the door. Let's see what we've got for paint door here.

‍

Paint interior pan interior panel door.

‍

Brush one coat. This is actually what I need. I'm noticing it's quantity two. Now why that might be?

‍

If we look at these part descriptions, I always recommend really take a good look at these part descriptions cause it'll sometimes give you a little hint about how it's priced. So here we're seeing per side. So it's letting us know that the quantity of this part is per side. So that's why it's suggesting two.

‍

It's assuming you're gonna need to paint both sides of the door. Just be on the lookout for that. Sometimes it'll specify, part information like that in the description.

‍

But that one's correct.

‍

And then we just need to paint the window and trim and we've got the window and trim. We've got an item for that.

‍

So then all we're gonna need to do beyond that other than these handful of items, we're still gonna need to come back and add in is the cleanup work. So dumping debris, and just cleaning up the work area. Now I don't have anything in this template for that. But that's okay.

‍

So what we did was just to recap, we kinda went through all these parts in the template. We figured out what was gonna be relevant to our estimate. We adjusted any quantities as we needed and then as you can see we unchecked parts we're not gonna need. We still haven't added this to the project yet, but we're gonna do so right now.

‍

So now everything looks good. We're gonna go ahead and add this template in bulk into our project just by clicking add template here.

‍

And that's gonna copy and paste that whole template into my job.

‍

And now once again we can kinda go through these items if we needed to open up any of these parts. We can do that with the pencil, adjust any quantities.

‍

A lot of those things that you can't adjust in the template mode, you can adjust once it's added to the project such as the cost of individual items.

‍

Alright great. But we're still not done here. There's still a little bit of work to be done. So we had a couple of items that we still need to price out. Of course the finalization and clean up, as well as this door and the base board. So let's go ahead and find an oak door to add.

‍

So I'm gonna come into browse part library.

‍

Let's pop into interior doors here.

‍

And then what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna search for pre hung oak panel door.

‍

Great. And then we have a handful of oak panel doors, and I just need to make sure my dimensions are correct.

‍

Okay. And that's perfect.

‍

And then we're just gonna add one of these doors in.

‍

Great. So we took care of that.

‍

And then some new baseboard, oak baseboard that we needed. In this case, I'm just gonna reset and just search oak base.

‍

Some pine base parts. Here's some oak base in plain and decorative.

‍

Let's see what my dimensions say for that.

‍

It's pine.

‍

There we go. Okay, great. Here's Oak base and I'm gonna plug in fifty four linear feet and we'll add that part in.

‍

I'm gonna mark off on my takeoff that that one's done.

‍

And then the only thing as far as my takeoff items here are gonna be dumping debris and cleanups. So let's go back here. I'm gonna click browse parts. That's gonna take me back to the browser. I'm gonna select a category. Now a lot of cleanup dumpsters and such are gonna be in finalization. That's number thirty seven.

‍

Using my middle drop down, we're gonna see, specific subcategories for dumping debris and general cleaning here. So let me go ahead and grab dump debris.

‍

And what we're gonna need here is four cubic yards of debris approximately priced out here.

‍

Now what's interesting about these parts is you might notice that it actually tells you the quantity right in these parts. So we're seeing parts for two point two five, four point five cubic yards, six point seven. Whenever you see that, usually these parts are priced by the piece and what that means is that one quantity of this part, quantity one accounts for four point five cubic yards. So sometimes you'll see that and you'll see that certain parts will say up to or over and that'll change how their, how their unit type works.

‍

So if something's up to typically that's just gonna be one quantity one piece. If something's over then usually that would allow you to plug in a square footage or linear footage. In this case, it's just letting us know that one quantity one of this part accounts for four point five cubic yards of debris removal. And then we can go ahead and add that in.

‍

And then we also needed to do some general cleaning.

‍

I'm gonna click general cleaning first floor. I'm gonna look for above first floor here.

‍

It's about two hundred square feet. I'm gonna go ahead and grab this one Similar idea here where it's priced by the piece and we've got that range of quantity right here. Two hundred to square two hundred to three hundred square feet.

‍

And that just means that quantity one of this part accounts for this much cleanup. So we're just gonna go ahead and add that in.

‍

Great. And so that's everything as far as the takeoff is concerned. We already kind of put everything in this project you know even though we were kind of describing each step of the way you can see how quickly we were able to kind of go through the library, use our template to save a little bit of time and plug these items in.

‍

But we are still not done here today and there's still plenty more to cover. So let's kind of start walking through what our next steps are now that we built the estimate right?

‍

So first of all, we wanna double check our markup. Like I said before, you wanna just make sure your markup is accounted for and we're gonna see the dollar amount of our markup here.

‍

Another thing I haven't done is add sales tax. So I'm gonna come down to the very bottom here, miscellaneous items. And we're gonna go ahead and click this plus to add in a line for sales tax. So just make sure we account for sales tax. This is really easy to do. It just needs a description and it needs to know how to calculate. So I'm just gonna go ahead and plug in sales tax.

‍

And you can really set these up for anything. You know I've seen some clients use these for things like discounts. You can actually put in a negative percentage. You know you have a choice between a dollar amount or a percentage if you wanted to do a discount.

‍

You could make it a negative value. I've also seen some clients use these for cost plus estimating if you do need to break out your, markup percentage on your proposal. I've seen some clients set it up this way. So you do have a you can whole bunch of different applications you can use, these miscellaneous items for.

‍

But in this case, we're just gonna set up a line for sales tax. Set it up based on a percentage. We're gonna call that a six percent sales tax and then we'll have a drop down to choose where to calculate.

‍

Based on the actual total before markup, the base bid would be our after markup cost. And you have a variety of choices, material labor, sub with or without markup here. So we're just gonna do actual total cost of the project.

‍

And we'll save it.

‍

Close out and then it'll even show us the running total after our tax item here. So this is gonna itemize this at the bottom of the proposal.

‍

Alright. So let's get into the fruits of our labor here. I'm gonna scroll back up and let's go ahead and take a look at the proposal and we're just gonna make sure everything looks good there before we send it out. So we're gonna go find this eyeball up here, view report and print to PDF. And this is gonna pull up that formal proposal that we're gonna be sharing with our client here.

‍

Great. So this is the formal proposal. I plugged in my company logo when I signed up. You may have been prompted to do the same, but if you haven't in a bit, I'm gonna show you where you can adjust that.

‍

And then I have my submitted to and submitted by section. And this is my company details right here. Oops. This is my company details right here, and my customers information. I'm gonna add in my customers address, and contact info here just so it looks a little more professional. So I'll show you how to do that here in a sec.

‍

Below that there is a paragraph of contractual language I've added. This is just an example, but I've just plugged this in. I'm gonna show you where you can plug in your own contract as well.

‍

And then we're gonna get into the contents of the estimate. So we can see we didn't type any of this out. We didn't search for these costs. Clear estimates just automatically prints out a professional sentence of text organized by scope of work in language that the homeowner can understand. And then we have a subtotal for the job.

‍

And then we can see our sales tax is itemized down here and we have a total project cost.

‍

Then down at the bottom, there's gonna be a convenient place my client can sign the agreement.

‍

So a couple of things I wanna do here, I do wanna go ahead and add in my clients details and then, his contact info rather. And then I also just kinda wanna walk through where to adjust that logo, where to adjust this contract verbiage. So let's go ahead and just jump out of here. Now first of all if I want my client's contact info at the top of the agreement, I'm gonna head back into customers. Now when we click customers, it knows I'm working with John homeowner here so it's gonna take me right to his profile. And then I'm gonna go ahead and click edit.

‍

And then I can start plugging in his contact info. So if I just wanted to give him a street, And I can just plug in his phone number.

‍

And keep in mind, you know, if you have a client that maybe resides at a different address than where the, the job is gonna take place, you can add in multiple addresses here.

‍

Multiple phone, multiple email, even you know let's say if you're a homeowners are a couple or a partner, you could add in a couple of different contacts here and save it and then this is gonna update on that proposal for you.

‍

Now as far as that contract verbiage we were looking at, that's gonna be all found here in the reports tool. Now we haven't been here yet. Reports is where you can export different styles of proposals and also set up contract language. Now really quick, as far as these different styles of proposals, if you wanted to export a preliminary proposal or a subcontractor proposal, you can do that here in the reports tool. You'll just click those tabs and you can print preview like we were showing you earlier with the report text.

‍

Like we were showing you earlier with the report text, it's going to be able to export these different proposal styles, automatically because that part text is already loaded in. Now here's how you can preview it as well as send it to a client. The difference with a preliminary proposal versus a formal proposal, it's kind of meant as an initial walk through. It's not as detailed. It doesn't include unit types or specific quantities. It's just meant as a rough estimate.

‍

Subcontractor proposal is exactly like the formal proposal, only it doesn't include a cost. This way you can give a scope of work to a sub so they can give you a price to do it. And that's what the subcontractor proposal will do. The formal proposal, there is a tab here, but you'll see that on the projects page we can preview it there. We can also send it to the customer from there as well.

‍

That said, for any of these different documents, we can set up the contract verbiage here in boiler plate.

‍

Quick question just came in here from Mark. Can you add a signature without printing and signing? At the moment, we do not have a built in e signature flow. That is our most requested feature, and we're currently, making some updates to the back end infrastructure to enable that.

‍

So, you may even notice this notification panel up here. This is brand new and it's actually eventually going to tie into an electronic acceptance flow. And it was really just the first step toward electronic acceptance is this way you can get notifications if a customer has signed or if they've opened, one of your proposals for example. So this is really the first step was redesigning our infrastructure to enable that update.

‍

And that is coming. I can't tell you when that's gonna be available. It's a pretty sizable update, but that is our most requested feature right now is electronic acceptance, and we are in the process of working on that as we speak.

‍

Alright. So as we were saying that contract verbiage, that exists at either the top or the bottom of your different proposals, that's all gonna be set up here in reports boiler plate.

And in reports boiler plate, you can scroll down to the bottom left. Boilerplate information right down here.

‍

And this is where you're gonna find all of your different contracts. Now when you first sign up, it's just gonna be examples just to show you you can have a couple of different contracts loaded here. And as we click these titles, we can see the text within populate right over here on the right side.

‍

And this is where we can make adjustments to the text.

‍

And then if we wanted to add in our own contract, we can just go ahead and click add heading down here at the bottom. This is gonna create a new blank boiler plate. And then we can just click it. We can give it a title if we wanted to call this contract or general agreement or general conditions. Whatever you want to title that.

‍

And then we can either type or paste our contract language into this box here.

‍

And then from there, all we're gonna need to do is choose which proposal to show our contract language on. And there's three different options. Preliminary, formal, and subcontractor. And how you would apply it to one of those reports is using these check boxes. So you can pick and choose which proposals these boilerplates are gonna appear on, and we can see that when we were looking at my formal proposal, we were seeing this language here, this general conditions, and I know that because f is checked here, for the formal proposal.

‍

Now you'll see that there's also two tabs here intro and outro. Intro is gonna be anything above the line items in your project. Anything at the top of the contract is gonna be intro boilerplate.

‍

Something at the bottom is gonna always be outro. So this is gonna be things like your signature lines. If you wanted to make any adjustments there, you can do that in outro.

‍

So you do have different options in terms of how to set up that language, and where it's gonna appear on your reports.

‍

Quick question from James. What about sketch? Great question. Yeah. We had just, we had gotten that question just a bit ago.

‍

At the moment, there really is no built in sketching or drawing feature. Though another, feature we get a lot of requests for. And we're hoping to eventually interface with some kind of a third party sketch or CAD, system that could maybe inter integrate, directly with clear estimates. At the moment, it's not available.

‍

You'd need to handle any sketching or drawing outside of clear estimates. But another thing we're hoping to get added in here fairly soon. Great. So that covers how to adjust that contract verbiage.

‍

And then as far as this estimate is concerned, what I would do is come back here into the project. I would preview it again just to make sure everything looks good and the way I'd like.

‍

And then here is the proposal. I've added in my client's contact info.

‍

My legal language looks good. All of my line items are accounted for. I have my total cost down here at the bottom. We've got a place where they can sign the agreement.

‍

So everything looks good. Now if I wanted to send this out to my customer, I could do that right here from the projects page. Send to customer. Send report to customer.

‍

And this is gonna prepare an email and it's going to have that pdf attached to it.

‍

So you'll see it's got a body for your email subject line and then it's gonna populate your customers email address right here.

‍

Now you might be tempted when you're looking at this, you're gonna see these brackets, customer name, brackets company name. You might say, oh I guess I need to erase this and put my customers name and erase this company and put my company signature. You actually don't. These are what are called variables. These will pull automatically from your customer details and your company details So that way when you send this over, it should just say their name automatically and have your company name signed. Now if you wanna preview that just to make sure, just feel free to add in your own email right up here at the top and send yourself a copy. You can see exactly what it's gonna look like for your client.

‍

Great. So that kind of walks us through the estimating process. A couple more things I wanted to touch on while we have time.

‍

We didn't really talk too much about components and alternates yet. So that is one thing I do wanna cover here quickly.

‍

Like we were saying in the very beginning, components are just a subsection of your estimate. They're designed to kind of organize your proposal by room or by phase and sort of have a subtotal for each section.

‍

So super handy if you're doing a larger estimate, multiple rooms, multiple phases. You can organize it using components. Let's talk about how this works.

‍

Like we were showing you at the beginning, you can set these up ahead of time and it would create them for you and name them. But we're just gonna create them from scratch right here in our components list. The way we're gonna do this is click the blue plus and that's gonna take us into a new component. So we can see we're in a new component here.

‍

And you can always double check if you're in a component. You'll see it's blue component right here. Let's you know that you're in a component. You'll also see back to main project.

‍

So we are now in the same project but in a separate section of this this estimate here. So the first thing I could do is give this a title. Let's say I wanted to price out you know maybe a second bedroom. We could call this bedroom two.

‍

Add in any description we wanted and then what you're gonna see is that other than that, it's just like the main projects page. You have the same options for searching for parts and templates and anything we add is gonna go right into bedroom two. So just to save time, I'm gonna use a template just to fill this up with items. This way you can see what this actually looks like.

‍

Oops. I'm gonna go and grab a bedroom template and we'll just say it's ceramic flooring. In this case, we'd plug in a template quantity.

‍

Of course we would make any adjustments to those quantities, uncheck anything we don't need, add in anything remaining that we needed. But I just went ahead and added that template just to save a little bit of time here.

‍

And what you might notice right off the bat about each of these parts we just added into the component is that they all have this code to the left of them. C zero zero. And this is what's called a component code. And it lets you know that parts are in a specific section of your estimate.

‍

So why is that important? The reason is because when we're in the component right now, we're only seeing bedroom two items. So when we're browsing this list, this is only specific to bedroom two. However, if we go back to main project, here on the main project parts list, it's gonna show us everything in the entire estimate whether it's in a component or not.

‍

So you can see some of these parts like this remove baseboard doesn't have that code. It was just added to the general estimate, But this one is part of that bedroom two we just created. So just be mindful of that. It's gonna show you all of the parts in the whole estimate here at the top.

‍

So if you're working with a multiple room or multiple phase estimate, I recommend just come down to the components list here. Open up each component individually and then just work within the component itself. So you finish up bedroom two then move on to bedroom three. This way it just kinda keeps you a little more organized.

‍

It's a little less likely that you could get tripped up with that.

‍

But just wanted to give you an overview of how that works. So let's go ahead and see what this does on the proposal. I'm gonna go back to main project.

‍

Let's hit view report and print a PDF.

‍

And then after this we're gonna get into some of those library management like creating categories.

‍

Great.

‍

So here's my proposal and I just wanted to show you what the benefit of the, component feature is. So here is bedroom two, and we see that my component codes here. There's an option in your settings if you don't want that displayed.

‍

But we're seeing bedroom two. We're seeing all the line items specific to bedroom two. And then we're seeing a subtotal for bedroom two here.

‍

This is also cool too because and like I said, I'm not gonna get too deep into, invoicing today. I do have another whole webinar on invoicing I can share out for you.

‍

But what you can do this is a really neat feature we just added in. Now if you did set it up with components and you wanted to just invoice on your different rooms, you'd have that option to invoice from components as well. Like I said, I'm not gonna get too deep into invoicing today, but I'll share a link in the chat here to a webinar we recently did on invoicing.

‍

Okay great. So we talked about components and and you can imagine you could build your whole estimate with components, have a whole list of different sections here.

‍

Alternates work very similar to components. The difference with alternates is that they're not included in the project cost. And this is used for creating change orders. They have their own change order document within. And it's also for showing options on the proposal.

‍

But they work almost exactly the same. So if we click alternates here, we can create a new alternate. You know you could call this anything you'd like. Maybe it was something like a countertop replacement that they had wanted to add on after the fact. We could build it here as an alternate. This way we can create a change order.

‍

Same idea. It's very similar. We're saying we're in an alternate here.

‍

Let's just say we added in a template for maybe some cabinets.

‍

Fifteen linear feet of cabinet replacement.

‍

And then now what we could do is now that we've set this up as an alternate, we can go view report and print a PDF and this will actually give us a standalone change order document that we could send out to the client to get a signature on. So here's our alternate work order.

‍

You can email this to right from the alternate tool. You can email it to your customer.

‍

And there's also a status drop down. Just so you can keep track of if the change is accepted, declined, undecided.

‍

Now if they wanted to go ahead with the work, you can convert alternates and components back and forth. So like I said, this cost right now isn't included in the project cost. But if I click component and back to main project, that's going to create or it's really just gonna convert it into a component. So now this is totaled into our project cost.

‍

And then like I said, the other thing in alternate will do is just show options separate from your project cost down at the bottom with their own costs. So this way you could show a couple of different options for maybe had a couple of different styles of decks to build or something like this. You could show them a list of options so you could set that up with alternates. Also seen some clients use alternates to track budgets.

‍

Also a very common use case for the alternate.

‍

Alright so that about covers projects, how to build a project, how to adjust things in a project, how to create sections of estimates, how to create change orders.

‍

One thing that we got a we did get a question from Dennis a bit ago. Can you add in your own category? Absolutely.

‍

That's all gonna take place in, remember in the beginning we were talking about how all of your account settings are up here in the top right. Parts, templates, options, update.

‍

Customizing categories is gonna take place in your parts tool. So if we click into parts, this is gonna pull up our part library manager. And this is where you can edit or adjust any of the default settings for your parts on a permanent basis. So do be careful when you're in this tool because everything we're doing here is permanent. You can just kind of select your categories and make adjustments to the items within. There's a filter if you wanna quickly find a specific part that you wanna customize on a permanent basis, you could do that.

‍

Now as far as categories, you're gonna be right here in parts and you'll see this more drop down right here. And if we click more, you're gonna see second option down is edit part categories. And this is where you can both create and edit part categories. It's gonna show you all of the categories in your library here on the left. And if we click any of these categories, you're gonna see it's gonna give us an option to customize the category title. And it always has sort of a separate set of verbiage for what shows up on the proposals versus what you see in the software.

‍

So you could have different text for that category on the proposal than you do in the system.

‍

But you can adjust those here.

‍

Now if you're a pro user, there is an option to add your own subcategories and part groups and then you'd be able to create these subcategories and groups. This is available on the pro plan. For standard plans, it only supports the main category customization.

‍

However, you can add your own category right here. So if we go ahead and click add category, we can go ahead and create a category. So maybe you know we wanted to have some pool supplies or something like this. Something that's not offered by clear estimates. We can just go ahead and create it here, and I'm adding in something for in clear estimates and what's gonna appear on my proposal.

‍

And then we can either add it at the bottom of the category list or ahead of the selected category. So we're seeing we're in here in project prep.

‍

So let's say I came down here and I just wanted to put it somewhere toward the bottom of the list maybe just below finalization.

‍

I probably should have clicked that first and then clicked add category but then I could go ahead and plug that, info in.

‍

And we'll do it ahead of the selected category and save. That's gonna add that right in. And then like I said, if you're a pro user, you'd then be able to come in and start building subcategories as well.

‍

You just wanna make sure you click save after any adjustments or anything you create in here. Make sure you click save and then after you do so, it would be available for you to select both in the parts tool. If you wanted to begin adding parts into it, you could do that right here. So you'd just select your new category from the list. You begin adding parts using add part.

‍

And then when you're building your estimate, you'd be able to find those parts in your library. Keep in mind when you're adding categories and parts from the parts tool, there's probably about a minute or two delay before it becomes searchable. There's a sync process that runs every minute or so. So if you've just added a part in the parts tool, you can't find it in the library, I would just wait one minute and then check again.

‍

Another thing we didn't go over is adjusting the default labor rates. So I'd like to get into that next. And we really haven't explored the options tool too much here. So let's go into options.

‍

Now options is where we can adjust things like company information. So if we wanted to adjust my company name on my proposal, if we click options it'll take us right to this first menu item, my company info. And This is where we can change our company name, add in an address, a license number, adjust any of our contact info. A lot of this should have been populated for you when you signed up but if it isn't you can always plug it in here.

‍

Now if you need to set a logo, what you're gonna do is you're just gonna click set company logo and then you would choose a file from your drive. Once you select it, it would stage it and then the last step would be to scroll down to the very bottom and click save. That would complete the import and it would populate your logo up here at the top. Keep in mind you have options for position, how you want that logo oriented as well as what size it's gonna use.

‍

You have those different settings here. Any adjustments you make here, just make sure to click save bottom right.

‍

Now the next option down is the labor rate editor. Like I said we didn't get too much into adjusting default labor rates. Now when I click into the labor rate editor, it's gonna show me suggested labor rates for my market. The market I choose, the the location I set when I sign up, or whatever I've most recently refreshed to in the update tool. So right now we're looking at suggested rates for Ann Arbor, Michigan and every year we're gonna release new suggested labor rates. And they're just gonna populate up here at the top.

‍

And then down below we're gonna see the rates our account is using. And we're gonna see the title so this relates to what types of parts, what types of rates we're looking at. Carpenters for things like wall framing, you know concrete if you were gonna be doing any concrete work. Those are gonna include your concrete rate.

‍

And you can make adjustments to these rates however you see fit. What I do recommend is don't delete any rates. Cause these are all tied back to parts in your parts tool.

‍

So that's why when you're building an estimate, it already has those labor rates attached. So if you wanna change labor rates, don't delete anything. Just click into this rate column and make adjustments. And that's also what you need to do when we release new labor rates. Because you're gonna have these suggestions which should be preloaded when you start out.

‍

But the following year when we update labor rates, let's say you would come in and you have proprietary set of labor rates you always use and you've used those rates instead. We don't wanna come back in and change those. So when we release new suggested rates, we'll send you an email, let you know that there's a new set of labor rate suggestions up at the top of the labor rate editor. And then if you wanted to, let's say if I wanted to use the trucker rate for Ann Arbor, I can just click into that rate column, put go ahead and paste that in here and save changes. And that would update that rate, to match the suggestion.

‍

There's a little infographic here if you're curious about what the labor rates include. It's just an explainer that it's the cost of performing tasks without the overhead and profit. It tells you what is included basic wage paid unemployment insurance workers comp, social security, nine point seven five for benefits.

‍

And then certain rates are assumed to be sourced from a sub specifically the electron electrician and plumber rates. So that just gives you a little overview of what's included in the labor rates here and like I said you can make those adjustments here and save. And these are global so these will just automatically if you were to update your carpenter rate then any wall framing part or framing part in general that uses a carpenter rate is gonna use your new rate you plug in here. Just make sure you click save changes.

‍

Great. Further down in the list, we'll get into things like report settings. So maybe I wanted to adjust the font or the size or the color of the text on my proposals. We can do that from report settings general. This is where we can make those adjustments.

‍

And then it'll even give you kind of a little preview of what it's gonna look like. Make sure to click save if you do make any adjustments there. And then there's individual settings pages for your different proposals.

‍

So we went into formal proposal. This is where we can do customizations like maybe I don't want my company logo included, we can uncheck that. Maybe we don't want that submitted to or by section, what else here? So there's gonna be some settings related to components.

‍

You can have the option to not subdivide the components if you do just want one long list and you just want the component organization to be for your own reference, there is an option for that. You can also hide the component subtotals if you wanted.

‍

You can hide those component IDs.

‍

You can hide line items and components overall. So like let's say we just wanted a section that said bedroom and then had the total of all the line items, you do have that option as well.

‍

You can also itemize the cost of each line on the proposal by default. So this will give you that option to just itemize the total cost after markup up of each line on your proposal.

‍

And then down at the bottom, there's settings for the the report title. So if you wanted to customize this, you could do that here. And then once again, click save.

‍

A little bit further down in the list, you're gonna see the preferences options. Now in miscellaneous here, you're gonna have, things like your default markup settings. So if you wanted to always use a different markup than this fifty percent default, just change it here. Maybe you always want tax items included, with every new project you create.

‍

You can create default items here. Keep in mind this is all gonna be moving forward. So if you've already created an estimate and it's got, doesn't have a miscellaneous item or it doesn't have, the markup percentage you want, readjusting the defaults here won't go back in time and make that change, but any new project we create would then use our new default markup. Any default items we add in.

‍

Once again, I know I'm a broken record. Just make sure to click blue save down here so so you don't lose any of that.

‍

Lastly in the integrations tool, this is where you can log into Quickbooks online. Our Quickbooks integration is great for invoicing. It just sends the product totals over to Quickbooks if you prefer to invoice from Quickbooks instead of clear estimates. But you do have that option.

‍

This is also we do we do partner with a payment processor for payable invoicing. So that way when you send an invoice to your client it has a payment terminal. That's a separate company we partner with but we do have an API integration with them if you do get set up. And this is where you'd manage all of that.

‍

Alright. Great. And so at this point I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to the audience. See if there's any other questions.

‍

I think we've about covered the process. Giving you a pretty detailed overview. Oh you know what I didn't mention? If you ever wanna filter parts in your estimate, for standard users, you can just kind of type in a text.

‍

You know so if I wanna just quickly find my travel charge, I can just click that hourglass and sort through items and find things quickly. And then pro users have even more filters they can apply. Let's say I just wanted something demolition costs here in the estimate.

‍

Pro users are able to also filter this way and then if you export project, you can create a report of your filtered items. So that's another thing I always like to point out. And just something I didn't mention.

‍

But beyond that, I think we've about covered the entire estimating process.

‍

Let's just take a quick look here. See what kind of questions we have coming in.

‍

See if there's anything we haven't covered.

‍

Alright. Not seeing too much come in here. So the last thing I wanted to do is share out a couple of resources for you.

‍

First of all, if you'd like to schedule a one on one training with us, this is available for you. So feel free to do so. This is a QR code. You should be able to scan this with your phone. It'll take you right to the calendar. I'm also gonna just share a link to my calendar here in the chat message. So that way if you just wanna avoid that whole QR code you can do it that way.

‍

And so there is that link. Or you could just go to clear estimates dot com slash call schedule and book some time with us. Like I said, this is included in your trial. This is included in your subscription.

‍

And there's really no limit to these so feel free to book some time with us. Now if you're watching today, you haven't signed up, you were just curious how the system works and you'd be curious about starting a thirty day free trial. Only customers do start off with a thirty day free trial. You can use this QR code to go right to our checkout page.

‍

Or if you prefer just go to our website and go to the pricing link and you'd be able to start a free trial. And then lastly, if you do have any questions about the presentation that come up later or something that's top of mind or if you just wanna connect and chat, feel free to reach us at supportclearestimates dot com. We do have live support here nine to five eastern Monday through Friday. And even when you're working in clear estimates, there's actually gonna be a little blue chat button that you can click to send us a question.

‍

So we do have that support available for you while you're working in the tool. Feel free to reach out to us. And then beyond that, I just wanna thank everybody so much for joining in with us today. Hopefully this was helpful for you. Like I said, feel free to book some time with us if you'd like, and we'll look forward to catching up with you in the next one.

‍