Who this is for: Managers
📋 The PriceRight Pro Business Cycle — 7-Part Guide
- Part 1: The PriceRight Pro Business Cycle — Start Here
- Part 2: Find and Track Your Prospects
- Part 3: Build an Estimate That Wins Jobs — You are here
- Part 4: Present, Sign, and Collect a Deposit
- Part 5: Invoice, Get Paid, and Manage the Job
- Part 6: Close the Job and Ask for a Review
- Part 7: How PriceRight Pro Sets You Up for Tax Season
💼 Why this matters
Most contractors price jobs one of two ways: gut feeling, or copying last time. Both leave money on the table — sometimes a lot of it. Stage 4 is where PriceRight Pro does something most estimating tools don’t: it builds your actual costs, overhead, and labor burden into every line item automatically, so the price you send a client is one you can actually make money at.
Stage 4 is the Job Builder — the screen where a prospect becomes a real estimate with a real price attached to it. Everything you set up in the Allocation Module in Stage 1 flows into every estimate you build here. You’re not guessing at markup. You’re working from your numbers.
The Job Builder is designed for the way contractors actually work — in the field, on a phone, often between other things. A complete estimate with materials, labor, overhead, and a professional PDF takes about five minutes once your catalog is set up.
Select your trade vertical #
Every estimate starts with a vertical — your trade. PriceRight Pro includes 11 trade verticals: Video Production, Pressure Washing, Painting, Landscaping, General Contractor, Cleaning Service, Marketing / Agency, Freelance / Creative, Graphic Design, Coaching, and Retail. When you select a vertical, the Job Builder shows the sections and fields that matter for that trade and hides the ones that don’t. A painter doesn’t need the same scope fields as a general contractor. The app adjusts automatically.
Build your scope and line items #
Once your vertical is set, you build the scope of work — what you’re doing, what it costs, and what you’re charging. Line items can come from three places: your saved Service Catalog (services you’ve priced before), your Product Catalog (materials and products with set costs), or entered manually on the fly. Pulling from your catalog is faster and more consistent — the pricing math is already attached.
SmartScope calculators are available directly inside the Job Builder. These are trade-specific tools — a square footage calculator for a deck, a room measurement tool for a painter, a satellite map measurement for a roofer — that calculate quantities and add the resulting line items to your estimate automatically. You measure once, the numbers flow in.
Costs, overhead, and markup #
After your line items are in, the Job Builder applies your allocation settings: material costs, overhead per job, and your markup or margin target. These pull from the numbers you set in the Allocation Module. You can adjust them per job if needed — a bigger job might warrant a different margin, or a repeat client might get a discount — but the defaults are already calibrated to your business.
If you’re not sure whether your price is right, the Smart Pricing Advisor is built into the estimate flow. [Premium] It reads your costs, your margin target, and your history, and gives you a plain-English read on whether your price is likely to win the job, leave money behind, or put you underwater.
Preview and send #
Before the estimate goes to a client, you can preview exactly what they’ll see. PriceRight Pro generates two versions of the PDF: a detailed contractor version with your full cost breakdown, and a clean client-facing version with your branding, line items, and total. The client never sees your markup math — just a professional document with your logo on it.
From the preview, you can email the estimate, open it in Client Mode for an in-person presentation, or send a remote approval link the client can sign from any browser. That’s Stage 5 — covered in the next part of this guide.
📱 In Your Day: You finish a site walkthrough, sit in your truck, open a new estimate, pull your standard services from the catalog, run the square footage calculator, and send a branded PDF to the client before you leave the driveway — all in under ten minutes. Full scenario →
🚀 Smart Business Tip
The faster you send an estimate after a walkthrough, the higher your close rate. Studies consistently show the first contractor to send a professional estimate wins the job more often than the cheapest one. Speed signals professionalism. Building your catalog and running estimates from it is what makes same-day turnaround realistic.
How to get started
- Build a Reusable Catalog: Services, Products, and Packages →
- SmartScope Calculators: How They Work →
- Start a New Estimate: Vertical, Scope, and Line Items →
- Add Costs, Allocation, and Markup to Your Estimate →
- Preview, Finalize, and Send Your Estimate →
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