Quote & Estimate Builder

What this tool does

CM8-15 builds a priced quotation from the bottom up. You enter what the work costs you — hours, materials, subcontractors, equipment, anything else — and the tool adds overhead recovery, contingency and your selling margin, then produces a client-ready quotation you can print or save as a PDF, plus an internal page showing exactly where the money goes.

Everything happens inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so your cost rates, markups and client list never leave the computer you are using.

It is deliberately country-neutral: 44 currencies, metric or imperial units, four date formats, and a tax section that covers VAT, GST, HST, sales tax or nothing at all.

Getting started

1. Fill in Your business and Prepared for — these become the letterhead and the addressee on the printed quotation.
2. Give the quote a number, an issue date and a validity period.
3. Add line items in the five build-up sections. Each line needs a quantity, what it costs you, and how you sell it.
4. Set overhead, contingency and your margin on the Pricing & terms tab.
5. Check the price bar at the top: total cost, net price, total payable, gross margin and margin per cent update as you type.
6. Press Print quotation.

If you would rather see it working first, press Load example quote — a small refurbishment job that uses every section, the package switch and the optional extras. Edit any figure, or press Reset to clear it.

The five build-up sections

Costs are grouped so that the margin on each kind of work is visible separately — the labour on a job usually earns a very different margin from the materials, and averaging them hides it.

• Labour — hours at what that hour costs you, sold at a charge rate.
• Materials & goods — buy price per unit, sold with a markup.
• Subcontractors & outsourced — their price to you, plus your handling markup for managing, coordinating and warranting the work.
• Equipment & travel — plant hire, vehicle distance, access equipment, accommodation, courier.
• Other costs — permits, disposal, insurance, licences.

Each section shows its own cost, charge and margin under the line list, so you can see at a glance which part of the job is carrying the job.

Markup or charge rate

Every line sells one of two ways, chosen with the small selector in the row:

• @ — charge rate. You set the price per unit directly. Best for labour, where you already publish an hourly rate.
• +% — markup. The price is the cost plus a percentage. Best for materials and subcontract work, where the buy price moves and the uplift stays constant.

Markup and margin are not the same number, and confusing them is the most common pricing mistake there is. Markup is measured against your cost; margin is measured against the price you charge. A 50 % markup on a cost of 100 gives a price of 150, which is a margin of 33.3 %. The row calculation under each line shows both, so you never have to convert in your head.

Overhead and contingency

Overhead recovery is the share of running the business that this job should carry — rent, vehicles, insurance, software, the time spent quoting work you do not win. It is applied as a percentage of direct cost. If you have never worked out your rate, a rough starting point is your annual overhead divided by your annual direct cost; refine it once you have a year of real figures.

Contingency is your allowance for the things that go wrong on this particular job. It is applied on top of direct cost plus overhead. Straightforward, well-defined work might carry 2–5 %; work in an occupied building, on an old structure, or against an incomplete specification deserves considerably more.

Both are internal. Neither appears as a line on the client's quotation — they are absorbed into the prices the client sees.

Margin, markup and the floor

The margin floor is the lowest margin you are willing to accept. Set it once and the tool colours the margin figures against it: green at or above the floor, amber below it, red if you are selling at a loss. A warning appears on the Pricing tab telling you exactly how much more the net price needs to be.

The margin analysis also shows the break-even price, the price at your floor, and the largest discount you could still give and stay at the floor — the number worth knowing before a client asks for one.

The target-margin solver

Normally the price is whatever the line charges add up to. Tick price to a target margin and the tool works backwards instead: it calculates the net price that delivers the margin you asked for, and adjusts the subtotal to reach it.

With a discount also set, the solver grosses the price up first so the margin survives the discount. The explanation under the margin table shows the arithmetic in full, including the actual margin achieved after rounding — which is rarely exactly the target.

Discount and rounding

The discount is a percentage taken off the subtotal. Rounding is applied last, to the net price, using one of nine rules — nearest 1, 5, 10, 50 or 100, round up to 10 or 100, or up to the next figure ending in 99. The rounding adjustment is shown as its own line in the price build-up so you can see what it did.

Rounding up to a psychological price point costs you nothing and rounding down costs you margin, so check the margin figure after changing the rule.

Tax

Pick a treatment — none, VAT, GST, HST, sales tax, or a custom label — and set up to three rates. Each rate can apply to a share of the net price, which covers the common case of a job that is partly standard-rated and partly zero-rated, and jurisdictions that stack a federal and a provincial or state tax.

Choose whether your prices are tax-exclusive (tax is added on top — normal for business-to-business work) or tax-inclusive (the price you quote already contains the tax — normal for consumer work in much of the world). Internally every figure is held ex-tax, so the margin is always calculated on money you actually keep.

This tool does not know your registration status, your place of supply, or whether a reverse charge applies. It applies the rates you enter and nothing more.

Packages and optional extras

Turn on packages to present the same quote at up to three levels — name them whatever you like. Each line item carries a from tier setting: a line marked “from Standard” appears in the Standard and Premium packages but not in Essential. The comparison table prices all three, and the printed quotation shows the client a clean options table with no cost or margin in it.

Optional extras are priced separately and are never in the headline total. They are listed on the quotation under their own heading, so a client can add one without renegotiating the job.

Terms, deposits and milestones

The terms you enter are printed with the quotation, because a price without terms is not a quotation. You can set a deposit percentage, payment terms, a milestone schedule, lead time and duration, and two lists — what is included and what is not.

The exclusions list is the one that protects you. Most disputes are not about the price; they are about something the client assumed was in it. Write down what is not covered.

Milestone percentages are converted to amounts against the total payable, so the client sees both.

Printing the quotation

The printed document has two parts. The client quotation shows your letterhead, their details, the scope, the price, the tax breakdown, the terms and a signature block. The internal page that follows shows cost, markup, margin, the charts and the register.

Three levels of client-facing detail are available:

• Full line detail — every item with its quantity and unit price.
• Section subtotals only — one figure per element of the works.
• Single lump sum — one price for the scope described.

Line amounts shown to the client are scaled so that they always add up to the quoted price: overhead, contingency and margin are distributed across the visible lines rather than exposed as separate items. The report title and the closing note let you relabel the document — “Estimate”, “Budget price” — and add a sentence under the totals.

More detail invites line-by-line negotiation; less detail invites the question “what am I paying for?”. Choose according to how well you know the client.

The register and win rate

Save quote to register stores a snapshot: reference, client, dates, cost, price, margin and status. Saving again with the same reference updates that entry rather than duplicating it.

Status is entirely manual — draft, sent, accepted, declined, expired. From it the tool derives your win rate by count and by value, which are usually different numbers: winning many small jobs and losing the large ones looks healthy by count and is not.

Reload brings a register entry's header back into the editor. Line items are not stored in the register — only the totals — so re-enter them or keep a .json backup per quote.

Currency, units and dates

Currency, unit system and date format are set in the bar under the tabs and apply everywhere, including the printed quotation. Currency formatting follows your device's regional settings, so the same figure appears the way your reader expects.

Switching between metric and imperial offers to convert existing quantities and rates for the units that have a real equivalent — metres and feet, kilograms and pounds, litres and gallons, and so on. Line totals are preserved: the quantity and the rate move in opposite directions. Choose Cancel to change only the default for new lines.

The register stores each quote's currency with it, so entries saved in another currency stay labelled correctly.

Saving your work

Your details, the quote being edited and the whole register are written to this browser's local storage as you type; the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer. Another browser, a private window, a second machine, or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Reset asks twice, then erases the in-memory data and every storage key this tool uses, returning it to a clean first run. There is no undo, so export first.

Two CSV exports are available for spreadsheet work: the line items of the current quote, and the whole register with its pipeline summary.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool performs the arithmetic you ask of it on the figures you enter. It does not know your true overhead rate, your local tax obligations, your contractual position or what your market will pay. Cost rates that are out of date produce a confident-looking quotation that loses money.

It is a pricing aid, not tax, legal or financial advice. Check the tax treatment and the contract terms for your own country and circumstances before issuing a quotation, and verify any figure you are relying on.