Included in All Memberships

LiteningFast Estimating

LiteningFast Estimating

You will discover how easy it is to craft job winning estimates. Your estimates will impress your clients because they make you look like the professional you are.

QuickBooks Silver Developer

Interface to QuickBooks

Simplified budgets make it easy for you to:

  1. Track your costs as you pay your bills
  2. And, as you pay your people
  3. Monitor your costs
  4. Discover problems before they become big budget busters
Estimate by Sections

Estimate by Sections

Sections are like Foundations, Framing, Roofing, etc. They are important important because:

  1. You work on 1 section at a time
  2. You can easily find duplicate items
  3. You can quickly find missing items
  4. You can review each section independently rather than a huge mixed list of items
Detailed Estimate Report

Detail Estimate Report

A detailed estimate is important because:

  1. Your clients will appreciate knowing exactly what they are paying for
  2. It details exactly what you are going to deliver in the project
  3. You wind up with change orders
  4. You do NOT have hassles with unhappy clients over misunderstandings
Budget Report

Budget Report

The Budget Report:

  1. Allows you to review your project by section to:
    • Find any duplicated items
    • Find missing items
    • Review your costs by section looking for unexpected totals
Labor Price Updates

Labor Price Updates

As your labor costs change you can easily update them in your database:

  1. Enter the new rate
  2. Click a button
  3. In a minute or Two, all your pricing is updated
Material Price Updates

Material Price Updates

As your material prices change you can:

  1. Select a "material group" like lumber
  2. Enter the percentage change
  3. Click a button
  4. In a minute or two, all the pricing in your database will be updated

Included in Expert Membership and Higher

The Contractor's Profit System with LiteningFast Estimating Expert Membership is for companies that are growing and want to automate their business processes and create a closer connection with their customers

Customer Accounts

Bid Items

Bid Items are a way you can break up your projects into sub-projects. For Example, Let's say you are doing a bath remodel and a kitchen remodel for one of your clients. You can break the project into 2 bid items. That way, you clearly differentiate what the costs for each of the parts of the job. And, in case the customer can't afford one of the items you do not lose the entire project.

Copy Estimate

Copy Estimate

The ability to copy estimates gives you a way of presenting several different options to your clients. For example, you may have options for different floring or different countertops, or other materials. Each of the estimates may have different pricing as well as the different materials.

When you offer different options, you give your client the opportunity to fit the project in their budget and the level of quality they want.

This means that you demonstrate your professionalism and respect for your clients needs. And, that means you get more jobs.

Save order

Templates

Templates are one of the most powerful tools in the system. If you do similar projects, like kitchen remodels or bath remodels you can create a template for each of those type of projects. So, when you have a new bid for, let's say, a kitchen remodel, you can use the template to build the estimate. You remove the items are not appropriate for the new estmate, make a few adjustments for quantities and BAM! your estmate is done.

One of our clients, Brian Kaufmann, noted the he commpleted a $150,000 estimate for an addition, from a template in an hour and won the job!

GetResponse Interface

Assemblies

Another powerful tool in the Contractor's Profit toolkit is asssemblies. Assemnblies allow you to combine material and labor items that are used together so you can save time when you are creating an estimte. Instead have taking off several items, you only have to take of 1 item that has all of the detail items included. That means that you save time when creating estimates. AND, you immprove the accuracy of your estimates because you only have to enter a quanity once rather than multiple times. That reduces the possiblity of an entry error.

Labor Report

Labor Report

The labor report gives you a preview and on-going review of the labor that is required to complete the project. It also includes a breakdown by labor type so you can keep track of your labor mix.

QuickBooks Interface

Material Report

When you are preparing the bid for a job, you can run a material report. You can send the material report to your vendors to get price quotes so you are using accurate numbers for the materials on the job. This means that bid is going to be as accurate as possible.

And, that means your are more likely to make a reasonable profit you the job.

Chat Code

Project Schedule

When you complete your estimate you can automatically see a project schedule. This will give you and your clients an estimte of how long the project is going to take and when different operations during the project are going to occur.

Included in Master Membership

Complex Assembly Calculations

Extended Assemblies

Extended assemblies allow you to create complex assemblies that need spreadsheet like functions to properly calculate the takeoff quantities. For example, taking off a roof you may have rise, run, overhang, and width. Any formula you can create in a spreadsheet you can create in LiteningFast Estimating Extended Assemblies.

Update vendor pricing

Import Vendor Pricing

If you have vendors that provide electronic prices lists for materials you can import the prices into your data. So, every time the prices change you can update the prices at the click of a button.

Tracking Pixels (Advanced Topic)

QuickBooks Purchase Orders

When you win the project you can update QuickBooks to print purchase orders for the subcontractors you have identified for the project. In addition, you can update to print purchase orders for materials for the project. What this means is you have established the tracking mechanism for paying your subs and material suppliers.

Source Tracking (advanced topic)

Interface to Microsoft Project

The interface to Microsoft Project allows you to use team based project scheduling. The schedule you have developed in The Contactor's Profit System will be transfered to MS Project so you get a jump start on your project management.