Price the job right before you back out of the driveway.
A transferable lifetime warranty is what makes a homeowner pick you over the cheaper bid. That promise has to survive the crew that installed the piers, the rep who sold the job, and the software you happen to run today. Oblyss keeps every warranty on the job and the customer, holds the certificate until the work is actually verified, and lets the next owner look it up and transfer it when the house sells. No lost binders. No premature certificates. No digging when the phone rings in year seven.
Guess low and you eat it. Guess high and you lose the job.
Foundation repair runs on thin, specific costs. Fourteen piers, the brackets, the epoxy, the labor, the haul-off. When the estimate is a number a rep pencils in from memory or copies off last month’s job, the margin is a guess. On a five-figure ticket, a guess that is off by ten points is real money walking out the door, and you do not find out until the accountant runs the profit report weeks later.
The other trap is inconsistency. One rep prices a push pier at $580, another at $640, a third throws in a discount to close and never tells anyone. Now your pricing depends on who happened to show up, and your best closer is quietly your least profitable. Homeowners talk to their neighbors. The numbers need to match.
And the estimate that finally goes out often looks like it came from a different company than the truck in the driveway: a generic template, no logo, no license number, line items full of raw part codes nobody can read. It chips away at the exact trust a five-figure repair depends on.
What a real estimate tool does
Build from the catalog. The margin is already in the price.
A warranty gate is a required check that has to be marked passed before the certificate can be issued. You decide the checks. The system refuses to release the certificate until they are all green.
SKUs from the distributors you already buy from
- Live catalog search by name, description, or category as you build.
- Sell price auto-calculated from supplier cost plus your margin rules, set globally, by category, or per product.
- Warranty badges appear on warrantable products and carry into the job's warranty records.
See your cost on every line. Protect the margin as you go.
For the roles you allow, each line shows Your Cost, the company’s real number from the supplier catalog with an editable override, right next to the sell price. Nobody sells below cost by accident. The COGS gets snapshotted onto the line the moment you save the estimate, so the profit report later reflects what things actually cost that day, not what they cost six months from now.
Discounts are where margin usually disappears quietly. Here a rep can apply a per-line discount to close the deal, but anything past your threshold trips a manager approval before it can go out. Your closer still has room to negotiate. You still see it before it costs you.
- Your Cost / COGS per line for permitted roles, with a per-line margin override when you need it.
- Per-line discounts with a manager approval threshold on anything big.
- Required line items so the essentials never get left off a scope.
Repair-type templates do the scope for you.
You do the same handful of repairs over and over. The scope of work for a pier lift, a crawl space encapsulation, or a waterproofing job should not be rebuilt from a blank page every visit.
Start from a template, not a blank estimate
Estimate templates tagged by repair type carry your standard scope, your required line items, and your usual products, all managed in one place. The rep picks the repair, the bones are already there, and they adjust for the house in front of them. New reps price like your veterans on day one, because the template is your veterans’ pricing.
Then give the homeowner a choice instead of a single take-it-or-leave-it number. Good, Better, and Best repair tiers show up on the hosted estimate the homeowner opens, so the conversation shifts from yes-or-no to which-one. That framing alone closes jobs a single price would have lost.
$22,900
Stabilize the affected corner. Address the active settlement now.
$28,400
Full perimeter piers with the transferable product warranty. Most homeowners pick this.
$34,100
Piers plus drainage correction and crawl space work, so it does not come back.
Stop guessing whether they read it.
Every estimate gets a hosted web link the homeowner opens with no login. The system tracks how many times they opened it, how long they spent, and when they last looked. Your CSR sees a plain “Viewed 3×” on the worklist, so the follow-up call is not a shot in the dark. There is a real difference between a homeowner who has not opened it and one who has read it four times and is clearly deciding. Now you know which call you are making.
And the estimate is not a dead end. The moment the homeowner accepts, it becomes a job, and the same document carries straight into a proposal and a contract without anyone re-typing a line. What you priced is what they see, what they sign, and what you bill.
- Hosted view, no login, that the homeowner opens on any phone.
- Opens, time spent, and last viewed tracked, with a "Viewed N×" flag for your CSR.
- Accepted estimate becomes a job, then flows into the proposal and contract.