Quotes and pricing calculators

A quote is where a job is won or lost, and at the same time the place where mistakes happen most often. Whoever sends a price first has the advantage. Whoever gets the number of items wrong pays for it out of their own pocket.

A calculator solves both at once. It cuts the time from an hour to minutes and takes the manual keying out of the calculation.

How it works in Paving Planner

The paver draws the area directly in the browser. Polygons, arcs, cutouts around trees and manholes, with length and angle locks so the dimensions hold. From that the app works out the materials including the laying pattern and cutting waste, the kerbs and rounding up to whole pallets.

They switch to 3D and see how it will look, including the layers under the paving. Then they press a button and a finished quote goes to the customer with a payment QR code.

The whole thing takes about five minutes instead of an evening with a notebook.

Why it pays to check the old calculation

With a scaffolding client, before building, I compared the new calculation with the original Excel. The tests compare the results directly against it, so the client could see the app calculates the same thing he already trusts. Except at those ten places where the Excel calculated wrong.

This is worth doing whenever a calculation is moved into a system. A mistake in a spreadsheet only shows up when someone sends a price to a customer off the back of it.