In this fun and informative walkthrough, we discuss setting up & emailing proposals from Clear Estimates. We also walk through exporting project details & breakdowns, custom project reports, and general settings.
Plus, we share some tips for getting started with Clear Estimates, so you can get the most out of the software!
Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining in today!
Waiting just a couple of more minutes here to get started. So we're going to see if a couple of more folks join in, and then we're going to go ahead and start the presentation here in just a moment. Thanks so much for joining.
Okay. About a minute after here, I think we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us for Clear Estimates in Practice. My name is Michael. I'm with the customer success team here at Clear Estimates. And today we're going to talk all about proposals in documents. So big part of the clear estimate software here is the proposals.
Proposals are really the end result of the work that you do in the system. So they're the primary output of Clear Estimates, and ultimately proposals are the main function of Clear Estimates. So being able to present your customer with an accurate professional bid. So today we're going to focus on proposals. We'll talk about the proposal styles that are available, how to print them, how to format them, how to email them, save them for your records, and so on.
So we're not going to be getting too much into the actual estimating today. As you may know, we've done a number of these webinars on how to estimate in the system, and those are all available on our help center for you. But in this guide, we're really just going to be discussing the output of Clear Estimates, the the proposals themselves.
We're also going to be talking about other types of project exports and reports that are available in the system.
Before we get into, any of that, I just want to go over some quick housekeeping first. We're going to be covering a lot in a short time today, but we will have some time for q and a. So as we go along, go ahead and add in your questions using the chat feature over on the right side of your screen, and we're going to get to as many of those as we can most likely toward the end of the presentation.
Also this is being recorded, so if you miss anything or if you have to duck out, everybody who registered is going to receive an email with a recording link. This is going to be on YouTube as well. If you're having any issues with the presentation quality, there should be a gear icon in the bottom right corner of your screen that you can use to adjust the quality. And if you have any problems with the sound or anything like that, just try to refresh your browser. Usually that clears up any issues. Lastly, we will be doing more of these presentations. So if you have suggestions on topics you'd like to see, covered in the future, please just add those in the chat as well.
So we're going to start today with a very brief introduction to Clear Estimates.
From there, we're going to start talking about proposals.
We'll talk about the pro the, the different proposal types that are available and when to use them. From there, we're going to discuss formatting, adding your company header, settings, and more. And then from there, we're going to move into export documents, and we're going to explain the difference between a proposal and an export document here in just a moment.
And then we're going to wrap it up just discussing some additional options that are available on pro accounts for reports, and then we'll finish up today with some Q and A.
So the first thing I want to talk about today is what a proposal is. So what is a proposal? So a proposal in Clear Estimates is a combination estimate and contract. It's an agreement that you could send to your client with all of your project details and cost along with any legal language or agreement that you'd like to include. And as you create your estimate in Clear Estimates, it automatically generates the proposal based on the items that you're adding into your estimate. So rather than go through the process of researching costs and typing everything out by hand, all of that's handled for you automatically in the system.
So your proposals are going to include things like a company header, legal language, a detailed description of the work to be performed, the cost of the project, and it can also include things like signature boxes, payment schedules, financing options, itemized tax lines, and so on. So all we really do is find the parts that we need to include in our project, add them into an estimate, and the proposal is generated automatically with no typing. And then from there, we can just quickly email the proposal to our client from the software.
So we're going to look at all of this here in a minute. Before we jump in, and look at proposals, it's important to understand the difference between a proposal and an export document.
So what's an export document? So an export document is a more detailed breakdown of your estimate. While the proposals are designed to be more client facing, export documents are designed more for internal use and records keeping. These are also commonly shared with insurance companies who tend to ask for a little more of a comprehensive breakdown of the project cost.
Export documents include a breakdown of hours, material, labor costs per line in your estimate, and really any project information you'd like. So there's a lot of customization you could do with those. And these are just handy records that you can export from your project, and you can include markup in these breakdowns if you do choose to share those details with a client or a homeowner.
So we'll look at those different report options here in just a bit.
Really quick, I do just want to give a quick explanation of some of the newer options that are available for Clear Estimates pro accounts.
So on pro accounts, the export documents can be used to create custom reports of various project information, using new project filters that are now available on Clear Estimates pro plans.
So for pro users, this allows you to export a list of specific part types, cost ranges, a breakdown of specific categories in your estimate. So let's say we needed a report of just the just the, plumbing costs by themselves for example, to share with maybe an investor or a partner. So you can certainly do that. So we're going to we're going to walk you through exactly what we mean by that here in a little while, but just keep in mind you have these different report options available to you in the system, and there's a lot you can do with these reports. So let's go ahead and jump in here today.
So I'm going to pop over here into Clear Estimates, and when you first log in to Clear Estimates, it takes you to this home page. This is kind of our dashboard for recent estimates we've worked on. This is also where we can start a new estimate. Now just a heads up, if you've never logged in and you haven't used the system at all just yet, I do recommend take a look at this tutorial here on the home page. This tells you how to start a project, how to create an estimate, set up markup, all of the essentials. So definitely recommend taking a look at one of these, guides here on the home page, or one of our other getting started guides just because we won't be getting into too much of that today. Today we're solely focused on the proposals.
But to that end, I've already kind of set up an estimate for us to work in today. So I'm going to go ahead and click this open.
And I'm actually going to go ahead and stop my camera. That way you can see exactly what's going on here.
Perfect. And so I went ahead and when I clicked that project title, it opens up the project. It takes us here to this projects page. This is where all of the estimating takes place in Clear Estimates is right here on the projects page. And I've already assembled this estimate. What it is, it's two second floor guest bedrooms, both to be remodeled for my client.
And I've already added all the line items I need for this estimate into my project here. And I actually sectioned this particular estimate using a tool called components. And this allows us to create different sections or different rooms and sort of keeps different scopes of work organized on the proposal.
So the way I do that is just by clicking the plus to create a component for each of my my bedrooms, and then within the component itself, I've added all the line items specific to each bedroom.
And so that's really how these estimates are created. Like I said, we're not going to get too deep into this today. I'm going to show you very quickly how to add one line item to a project, but that's how these projects are assembled is by going through the library of costs and adding my parts into my project or to a specific section of my project.
Now in this case, you have a couple of different options for adding parts into an estimate, and up here at the top, you'll see there's a search bar where we can search by a term.
There's also this add template tool. This adds a list of parts. So templates are just pre built kind of starter estimates. You can add a list of parts to a project all at once. If I want to create my own part, I can do that using create custom part, and what I'm going to do here is click this button, browse part library, and this sort of just opens up the full catalog of costs that are available to me, in Clear Estimates.
And everything in Clear Estimates is categorized, so I can select this category drop down, and see all of these different types of costs that are available. And roughly chronological to how you'd be doing the work in your project. We're starting off with prep work, then getting into things like demolition.
Further down, we get into the building portion. So the framing and the concrete and the masonry, windows, doors, and so on. So just a quick example here. Let's just say we wanted to price out some wall framing. I'm going to grab ten wall framing here, and we can actually get more specific using this subcategory drop down and part group drop down if we want, and really sort by specific types of costs.
And then what we can see here is that Clear Estimates is providing us all of these line items we can add to an estimate. So we already have this description here. We already have the cost information plugged in. So all I need to do as an estimator is just click the line item I want to add to my project and tell Clear Estimates how much of it I need.
So this is a wood wood frame wall part. Let's say, this was an eight by ten wall just for example. All I as the estimator need to do is just plug in my measurement here and then that's going to price out the part for that specific square footage. So this is great because we already have this cost information built in for us. Now we can adjust this here if we want, but it's already going to be provided to us for our specific location.
And also down at the very bottom here, we can see that we have this report text section for each of these parts in our library, and what this is is the verbiage that appears on the different styles of proposals you can print from Clear Estimates. And there are three different styles of proposals you can print in the system. Preliminary, formal, and subcontractor.
And so these all, all of these parts that we have in our library, they all have this language already built into them, and this is great because this means all we're doing is adding a part to an estimate once, and then we're able to export these different styles of proposals without any additional input.
So it just makes that process a lot easier.
Now the preliminary proposal is typically a little more brief. This is sort of considered kind of a rough estimate, sort of an initial walk through with the client, not, as detailed as your formal proposal, which includes a little more detail about the line item. There's also a subcontractor proposal, and this works as a scope of work for a subcontractor. It's almost the same report as the formal proposal, but with, no project cost included. So this way your sub can actually give you a price for doing the work.
By far the most commonly used proposal in the system is the formal proposal, and this is kind of your default output. This is that combination estimate contract we talked about in the very beginning.
So most of the time when you're working in the system, it's the formal proposal you're looking at. So this is where we're going to start today, and then in a little bit, we're going to talk about how to export preliminary and subcontractor reports.
So once again, we see we already have this text preloaded for my formal proposal. I can, of course, come into this text box here and make adjustments to the text. We can add as much additional verbiage as we'd like. If we want more detail, we can remove verbiage if we want less detail. This even supports things like line breaks so I could do something like add a note for my customer here.
So there's a lot of flexibility there. But like I was saying, these are already just built in for you. So that way when I add the part to my estimate, we're already set to go and export a proposal. So let's go ahead and take a look at the formal proposal. Like I said, this is the most commonly used proposal in the system.
And the way we're going to look at this, there's actually these shortcut buttons to preview it right here on the projects page. So the formal proposal is what we're going to preview from this eyeball button view report, and the formal proposal is also what gets sent from this send to customer option right here. So let's go ahead and take a look at what this looks like. I'm going to click view report and I'm going to go ahead and click this option to print to PDF right here.
Let's give this a second to populate it.
And here it is. Here is my formal proposal. And as we can see, this is personalized. I have my own company logo here at the top. I have some contact information from my company, as well as my client.
Just below that I have some legal verbiage I've added in that appears just at the top of the document, and then beyond that we start to get into the project scope. So you can see here we're starting with my first guest bedroom, and then what we can see is that Clear Estimates is printed out automatically a professional sentence of text that clearly explains all of the work to be done to my client in verbiage that they can understand. We can see this is very organized, very readable, and even sort of organized by scope of work. So we're looking at prep work items, demolition items, electrical and so on.
So we didn't type any of this in. Clear Estimates just automatically populates these these descriptions from our project based on the items we added in. So here we see we have a subtotal for bedroom one and then it gets into guest bedroom two. So here's my second guest bedroom and once again all of the line items specific to guest bedroom one below and here is a subtotal.
Below that I have what is called general project contents, and these are items that are not associated with a particular bedroom.
These are items that, I've just added to the general project and aren't specific to guest bedroom one or two. So it's just some project prep work as well as some finalization. So dumpster rental, clean up, hauling debris and so on. We have a subtotal for my general project contents as well. Below that, we have a total project cost, and I've itemized out a discount as well as a sales tax line, and then we have a total cost after my, sales tax and discount.
Below that, I've included some financing options through acorn finance. This is optional. I'm going to show you how to turn this off in a minute. I like to leave this on just because we find this leads to a better turnaround rate with jobs.
It's just a a better frequency of winning bids when your client can kind of feasibly imagine how they're going to be able to, pay for the project. We just find that leads to more wins. So I like to leave this on, but it is optional. I'll show you how to turn this off.
It is very hands off for the contractor. Your client can click a link. They connect with Acorn on their end who provides them financing. They pay you as normal.
But like I said, we'll talk about where that setting lives here in a minute. And then down at the bottom we have a signature box where my client can sign. So it's a really nice proposal that we can print from the software. Keep in mind we can email this from the send to customer option, and then also if you want to download this to your drive, you're able to do that using this download option up here in the top right.
At least in Chrome, that's where that's located. If you're in Safari, you might need to right click and then open it in preview. And you can also send this to your printer. The same is true of any of the reports we're going to look at today.
So what I'd like to do at this point is just kind of go through each section of this proposal and show you where to customize, these different sections that we're seeing here. So let's start off right here at the top. So we have my company logo and my company information. So where this comes from, it's actually an account setting.
Clear Estimates allows you to upload a logo and just sort of have that in your account, and then it's going to print on all of your different styles of reports and proposals.
So to change this logo, we would need to come back into Clear Estimates, and then we're going to find this options tool right in the top right. And this is where all of your account settings live.
So if I click that, that's going to take me to this company data page. And this is where you can configure any of that contact information for your company. This is also where we can set up a logo to appear on that report.
A lot of this should have been filled in when you first signed up just because it's part of the onboarding, but if you haven't done that, you can always fill out this information here. Here's your street address, city, license number, contact information down here at the bottom. After any adjustments you make, you want to make sure you click this blue save button.
And to set a logo, you basically click this button, you select a file from your drive and then you just need to make sure you click this blue save and that will, import your logo into your account so that way it can show up on your proposal.
You do have some options for size and position as, appear at the top as well.
Now on the proposal as well at the top left, we see my client's contact info. So I've added in his street address. The way you do that is by going into your customers tool, and when I click customers, it's going to show me all the customers in my account. We're currently working with Bob Homeowner and right from his profile here I can click edit and this is where I can configure any of his contact info that appears at the top of that document.
Once again just make sure to click save.
So next we're going to talk about where to configure this contract language. So this is what's called boiler plate, and it's intended for any all encompassing contract you add to every, every job you work on. So it's kind of set it and forget it, but you can adjust this if you need. So the way we do this is come back into Clear Estimates, and we want to find this reports tool up in the very top left.
Kind of looks like a clipboard. And by the way, this is also later where we're going to be able to export preliminary and subcontractor proposals. But right now, I just want to focus on boilerplate. So boilerplate is another term for contract language or legalese or any kind of agreement that you want included on the proposal for your client.
And everything in this tool kinda takes place all the way down at the bottom of this page using these two boxes right here.
And then here on the left you'll see this box, boiler plate information. And this is the first place you want to look. So here in the boiler plate information box, we're seeing all of these different titles. And you may notice that as I click each of these titles, we're seeing different text pop into this text box over on the right. So you can have a couple of different contracts set up here and apply them to different proposals.
Now when I'm looking at my formal proposal, I see this general conditions language, and I know that that's going to be the same general conditions right here, and the reason I know that is because this f check box is checked just to the left. So you'll see there's three check boxes, preliminary, formal and subcontractor or p and f and these are our three different styles of proposals. So these are on and off switches for your different proposal styles, preliminary, formal and subcontractor.
So because f is checked here for my formal proposal, this text I've added into this text box is going to print at the top of my proposal here.
And this is great because it means that we can have a couple of different contracts set up on a couple of different proposals. So I could have one for my preliminary. I do have my subcontractor proposal set up with a sample agreement here. Now when you first sign up, these are all just examples. These aren't real contracts. They're just sort of samples so you can see what this looks like.
Typically your contract language is going to be pretty specific to your own business. So if you want to add in your own contract, you're going to click add heading down here. This is going to add a new heading into the box, and then over on the right we can give this a title. We could just say, you know, contract, and then in this text box we can either type or paste the contract agreement that we want to include on our proposal.
So that's how we would do that. And And then if we wanted this to appear on our formal proposal, we would just make sure we click this f checkbox here.
Now while we're on the topic of this intro paragraph here, I'd also like to call your attention back to the signature box at the very bottom of the proposal because this is also boilerplate language. So if we come back into my boilerplate information, we see that we have two tabs here, intro and outro. Intro is going to be anything that appears before the project contents. So we can see that my intro paragraph is here followed by all of the details of the estimate itself.
Outro is reserved for anything after the project content. So in this case, that's going to be my signature lines. So if I need to do adjust my signature lines for any reason, I can do that here in outro, and again we're in reports under boiler plate all the way down here in the outro. And so if you're looking at this agreement and you want to adjust anything about this box, that's where you're going to do that.
So heading back into my proposal really quick, while we're talking about the outro here, I'm going to show you where we can adjust this acorn finance option. Also, you might be wondering, you know, I see all of these different subtotals listed. What if I didn't want those included? Or maybe you're wondering, you know, what if I want to see the cost of each of these parts listed over here on the right side, the total cost of each of these lines? So I'm going to show you where to do all of that.
So the way we're going to do that is by heading back into our options tool, top right corner. So we're going to head into options, and this is where we were before when we were configuring our company data. You're going to notice this menu on the left side, and there's a whole section specifically for right here.
In report settings is general, and what this does is allow you to adjust the font, size, and text color of any of your reports right here. It's a global setting that's going to apply to all your reports. So you can adjust the font and the size and the and you just want to make sure you click this blue save updates on your reports.
But then we have specific settings pages for each of my different proposal styles, preliminary, formal, and subcontractor.
So So if I click into formal proposal settings, we're going to see all of these different settings so we can do a lot of customization with this report. Now in my case, my company logo is included on my proposal, so that's why we're seeing this up here at the very top. But you have that option if you want to omit that. Same thing with the contact information, the submitted to and by. That's this, contact details that live up at the top. If we wanted to turn that off for any reason, we can do that here.
You can also remove the project cost. Always recommend include your project cost, but, you can, you know, omit that if you'd like. Keep in mind the subcontractor proposal by default does not have a cost included.
And then below that we're going to see their settings specific for the subtotals. So both general project content subtotals and component subtotals.
So if we wanted to and when we're saying component subtotals that refers to these different rooms I set up. So I set up guest bedroom one and then down here I have a subtotal for guest bedroom one. This would turn that off. So it just lists the items.
There's a couple of settings here for the components as well. So if I wanted to hide the component ID, what that refers to is here where we're seeing, you know, guest bedroom two. We have c zero two c zero one, excuse me, right here at the top. And that's what's called a component code. So if you don't want that printing on your proposal, you have that option to hide that.
Also speaking of components, you know, if we wanted it, you know, a little less detailed without all of this, line item verbiage, what you can do with components is actually just have it display the, the guest bedroom two title and the description of the component followed by the subtotal without breaking out the line items. So you can actually do that with components, and you can do that using this option here, hide line items in component.
And then we were talking about itemizing. So you know, obviously this is just the descriptions and a total cost down here. But if I wanted the proposal itemized where it's showing me a total cost for each line, there is a setting for that right here, and this is called include line item costs on report by default. We would just check that on. And then lastly, we have this financing option. So again, I included this. It's not available in every single state, so I would review this, this message here just to make sure it's available for you if you do want to include that, but you can turn that off using that option.
Lastly, down at the bottom we can configure things like the report title. So if I didn't want this to say formal proposal, if I wanted it to say something different, I can adjust that here in the report settings.
Same thing with my project section title. So we can adjust that here. Once again, after any changes we make in this tool, we do want to make sure we click this blue save down at the bottom. That way we can reprint the proposal, you know, it'll, re export with our updated settings here.
So then lastly, you might be wondering how do I adjust the verbiage of the line items themselves. And so let's talk about where to do that. So that actually takes place right back in our project. I'm going to click project.
That's going to take me right back to the estimate I'm working on, and where that text comes from is the line items themselves in my project. And there's a couple of different ways we can adjust that text. Now when you're first adding a part to your estimate, so let's just say for example I grab one of these parts, we can, do this when we're first adding the part to our estimate by scrolling down to what's called report text and adjusting the verbiage for the specific proposal I want to look at. So again, that's preliminary, formal and subcontractor.
So we can adjust this here.
There's also a shortcut button if you, kinda just click your description, your part description on the projects page. You can actually make quick adjustments to your report text right here and then just make sure to click this check to save it. So if you don't feel like opening up the whole line item with the pencil, you don't necessarily have to. But I like to do this just because it makes it a little easier for me to do, a couple of different things. So, number one, there's these insert buttons that insert various project information.
Provide install, the part quantity, the unit type or the description from the very top. This is kind of your internal Clear Estimates description and again what displays on these proposals is down here. So you can always adjust this text here and then just make sure to click save. And then keep in mind once again, you know, we have these three different styles of proposals.
And just to recap on that, the preliminary is usually used as kind of a rough estimate, not the formal contract, sort of set up that you get with the formal proposal. And then the subcontractor proposal is the same as the formal, but with any subcontractor specific boiler plate, that I've added in as well as no project cost. So my sub can give me a price for doing the work. So let's go ahead and take a look at these two different styles of proposals, preliminary and subcontractor.
So, I'm going to scroll back up to the top of Clear Estimates. If I want to look at a preliminary proposal, the way I'm going to do that is clicking this reports tool. Remember, this is where we were setting up our legal language before, and then you'll notice that there's different tabs for all three styles of proposals. Now the formal proposal because it's most it's the most commonly used, proposal document.
All of the same options in this tab are available on the projects page, and this is just view report and send to customer.
But you'll see that there's different settings pages for your preliminary and subcontractor where we can print and send those styles reports. Now remember, because all of the parts in my estimate already have preliminary text included, I don't have to do anything extra to export a preliminary proposal. I just need to come into reports, preliminary, and print preview. And I'll show you what this looks like.
Give that one second to pull up. There it is. Perfect.
And so once again, what we can see, I do have my logo at the top that's already, kind of added in in my settings. And then we see that I didn't include any contract language for the preliminary proposal, but I did itemize this estimate. So I have the total cost of each of my line items over here on the right, but we can see that the part text just doesn't include as much detail specific measurements. It's just kind of a rough estimate of what's going to take place here.
And then down at the bottom I have a cost. So once again like these other documents, this has its own specific settings page. You can also save this to your drive from the preview or send it to a printer. This is always yours to keep. And if we want to email this preliminary proposal, we can do that once again in reports from preliminary, by clicking send to customer right here. It would just include that as a PDF attachment in the email.
So same exact idea with the subcontractor proposal. Again, this is just a scope of work for a sub. It's the exact same proposal as the formal, but with no project cost in any language specific to my subcontractor agreement.
I can also email this right from the same page. Let's go ahead and print preview and I can show you what this looks like as well.
Great. So here is the subcontractor proposal. I do have a sample subcontractor agreement, boiler plate included up here at the top. It just has a submitted by.
And then like I was saying, very similar to the formal proposal, the main difference being that there is no project cost included. Now, in fact, you could turn that on in your settings if you did want cost information here, but by default it's off. That way we could shoot this over to a sub. They could give us our price for doing the work and then we'd be able to plug that into our estimate.
Once again, like I said, you can save this to your drive, print it, or email it right here.
So with that all being said, that kind of ramps up the section of this presentation on proposals Before we move into export documents, just going to check-in with the audience really quick and see if we do have any questions.
Not seeing many questions come through. Okay. So, you know, if you do have questions, just feel free to add them in the chat. By the way, you know, if you don't see that chat box, you might need to add in your name there, and then it would let you see that chat.
But I'm not seeing any questions just yet. So let's go ahead and move forward in the export documents. And I'm going to go ahead and stop my camera again so that way you can see what's going on here.
So when we're looking at export documents, what these are, like we were saying in the beginning, these are a little more detailed. Now when we were looking at the proposal here, we didn't see all of these different cost columns like we're seeing on the project parts overview.
So we're seeing all of these different columns with the material versus the labor, subcontractor cost in total, all kind of broken out for us here. Now we don't include this on the proposals, and the reason for that is because we find that including this level of detail on the proposal gives the homeowner a chance to kind of shop your estimate around to other contractors and try to get a lower price for the work. So by default, the proposal just includes the descriptions of items, and the total costs. Now of course like I said, we could itemize them, but it still isn't going to include sort of a breakout of material versus labor.
However, an export document is designed to do just that. It's designed to be a printout of pretty much the same information we're seeing here on the projects page, that we can save for our own records. So the way we print this is by clicking this export project button just to the left of view report. So instead of the view view report proposal, we're going to be clicking export and then we can see that we can save these details to pdf, m s word or excel.
So let's go ahead and take a look at what this looks like. I'm going to click export project and print to PDF, and that's going to pull up this box where it's going to have settings for my export document. The first thing I'd like you to pay attention to is this include markup option up at the top. So very important especially if you do want to share these details with a client, include your markup because you can export this without the markup or with the markup because it's designed for your own records and job costing and so on.
So just keep in mind that that toggle is up there. And And then down below we can choose which columns to include in this export. So description, we can kind of click on and off any of the columns we want to see. You know, units, quantity, category, material labor and total.
So I'm just going to leave it like is, like it is, and I'm just going to go ahead and click export right here, and I'll show you what this looks like. And so here this is. So what we can see is very different from the proposal. This is a way more detailed breakdown of what's going on in the project, with a breakdown of hours and material costs and labor costs and totals.
So a couple of things to keep in mind. Now when we're looking at this, I do have this organized by bedroom. So I since I set up the project with components, it is organized by bedroom. So I'm seeing these totals for each bedroom, but there's a setting I'm going to show you in a minute if you just want one long project list.
Also important with these documents because these aren't designed to be as homeowner facing, there's no way to email this document from Clear Estimates. So there is some limitations with this document, but you can go ahead and save it from the preview. Once again in Chrome, there's sort of a download arrow, and in Safari and certain other browsers you might need to just right click the preview and open it in a different app to save it.
But we can save this to our drive. We can, print it out if we'd like to mail it perhaps, but you can go ahead and download this document and attach it to an external email and send this off to, you know, either your client if you prefer or an investor or a lot of times an insurance company asks for this kind of this kind of detail, to be included. So we see this used a lot for insurers and investors and so on.
So once again, this is always yours to keep.
And then we can export a full project list up here at the top by clicking export project and print a PDF. And just once again, you can also do this for MS Word or Excel.
There's more we can do with these though. So maybe I just want to report like that specific to one of my bedrooms. So scroll back down to my components tool where I've set up these different sections for guest bedroom one and two. Maybe I just want those specific line items broken down. So if I actually open guest bedroom one component, I can then go ahead and click export project and print to pdf and same idea here. We can select which columns we want included and export this and then what's going to be the same exact style of report only specific to guest bedroom one by itself.
So there's a lot of different, ways you can export these details from the project.
Back to main project here. You may be wondering while I'm working in the software. Well, what is this summary button do? So if I click summary, we can see that this is going to summarize our estimate at the category level where it's giving us totals for each of the categories of parts rather than showing us all of the line items. So we can see it's the same kind of columns here except without all of the details.
So this is great if you don't want all of that detail. Maybe you just want kind of a summary at the category level, we can print this the same way. We can go ahead and click export project and print to PDF. And regardless of where you're exporting, you can actually click the summary toggle on to change to summary mode.
So, you know, without summary toggle on, we're seeing all of the line item details. With the summary on, it's just going to be at the category level. So let's go ahead and export this, and I'll show you what a summary report looks like. So here it is.
So same idea. It's just the same report at the category level, and in this case, I do have this kind of divvied up here by bedroom.
And again, I'm going to show you where there's a setting where if I just wanted one list for the full project regardless of how many sections I have, I can do that. In this case, it is kind of organized by bedroom here, but we can see all of my category totals. And then remember when we're exporting this, we can omit certain columns. So if we didn't want the material of the labor, we just wanted a total. You can configure this however you want, and then print out this report.
So very handy. And then like I said, there's settings if you don't want this organized by room as well.
While we're on that note of settings, I typically would have my logo included on these documents. I actually have that setting off for my export documents, but I'll show you that here in a minute.
So let's go ahead and close out of that. And just to recap on that, all of that takes place in export project, print to PDF.
So if I head up into my options tool, like I was saying, there's settings for those specific reports, both the summary and the standard line item breakdown.
So what they are what they are is under report settings in view table documents, which is kind of an antiquated term for export documents. So if you go into report settings, view table documents, once again, like I said, I I removed my logo, but if we didn't want these subdivided by room, we can uncheck this option here, subdivide by components. And then we just need to click save and that would update.
So once again just to recap, you know basically all we did is just add all of these line items into my estimate, and then you can see all of these different styles of proposals and reports that I'm able to print automatically from the estimate.
One last thing I wanted to kinda go over, and really quick here, I do want to just turn it over. I see a couple of questions coming in.
First question here is from Veric. What is the character limit in line item descriptions? Excellent question.
So I'm going to tell you what that is. So if we open up one of these parts, keep in mind you have a couple of different areas where text lives. Up here at the top is your part description that kind of, it's sort of your internal part description in the software. So this is kind of, doesn't include as much detail because it's built to kind of fit into your part search module.
And this isn't what appears on the proposals. This description though does appear on export documents, and it has a character limit of two hundred and fifty five characters up here. As opposed to the report text for the proposals, the proposal text down here at the bottom has no character limit. So you can add as much verbiage into the reports, text for the proposals as you want. So the proposal view we were looking at, in view report that has no limit as far as characters.
But the project export document does use this description at the top and it is two hundred and fifty five.
You also asked is there a place for cost or item codes? So our library does have what's called, here I'll show you what I'm talking about here. I'm going to go into my part library and you'll see that in our part library, the default settings for parts, there is part codes and we actually use these for part up for for excuse me, part price updates. So, every quarter you get, refreshed material costs, updated material costs for each area.
And these codes are what we use to update the costs in the parts. So I usually recommend don't customize these, but they are included. And if you're setting up your own parts, you're going to have that field where you could add in a part code if you wanted and a supplier code. It could be any code you want.
And then when we export, there's no way to print this on a proposal I should mention, but when we export and we create an export document, there is an option to print the part and supplier code. So you could in your parts tool, add in a, an item code and then be able to print that in a report from the projects page.
And then let's see what else.
Can you filter a sub or export report? David asks. And I'm so glad you asked that because you, because that's a in fact what we were just going to get into here. So perfect. Let's go ahead and move along. I'm going to go ahead and stop the camera so you can see what we're looking at here.
Give me one second. Perfect.
And that's a great question. Can you filter a sub or export report?
You can on Clear Estimates pro. So with Clear Estimates pro, there is an additional filter option that you'll see right up here at the top of my project contents.
And so this filter, it's available for any pro account and you're able to sort of surface specific types of information in the project, and then yes, you'll be able to create a report of those filtered items. So I'm going to show you how this works. So again, I I clicked filter and then I have options to filter by description, by category, whether a part has an image, quantity, unit type, or a cost or a range of costs.
So let's say for example, I wanted a report of all of the drywall costs for both removal and installation of drywall for this estimate. I can go ahead and click description here and then I can go ahead and just type in drywall and apply it. And what you can see here is now it's applied this filter to my, project to filter my part descriptions to only show me drywall parts. So we already have a handful of removal and installation of new drywall.
We can see down here, we're now showing eight of sixty six project parts. Once the filter's applied, I can then come up here to export project and print a pdf and then you're going to see this magic filtered parts only option. And this is going to work whether it's a standard line item breakdown or a summary. You could still do it based only on the filtered parts.
So I'll show you what this looks like.
So again, just to recap, I applied a filter and I export project and print to PDF. And so here it is. So once again, kind of divvied up by room is all of my drywall removal and installation costs. So that's one way of doing this.
Another way we can do this is by filtering by category. So I'm going to go ahead and apply a second filter here and this time I'll go ahead and select category.
Now I'm not sure I have too many plumbing costs in this specific estimate, but let's say I wanted to only look at demolition items. I can go ahead and click my various demolition categories and apply it. And then now we're only looking at parts in my demolition categories. Once again it's filtering to show us seventeen of sixty six parts.
And then from here, I can go ahead and export, print to PDF, filtered parts only. Keep in mind, I could do this summary if I only wanted it at the category level. It would work the same way and then we can go ahead and export. And then it's going to not only just print the line items that are sorted under my demolition category, but it's also going to give us totals only for those costs.
So here we see the cost is actually only for the filtered items. So this is great for a subcontractor or maybe if you're working with an investor or certain types of job costing you might do, you can create these reports on Clear Estimates pro just by applying that filter. So that's a brand new option we just added in, I want to say about a month ago.
And in fact, that was the last thing I was going to go over with, with you guys today for this presentation.
Just kinda talking about these different options. Again, all we did was build one estimate once, and we're able to export all of these different styles of proposals, reports, and surface all this different information.
So really quick, I just want to check back in with the audience, see if anyone has any, outstanding questions, anything you'd like me to go over again, or anything that's, that's still kind of top of mind for you.
Alright. Not not seeing too much coming in here. So, really quick, it it just kinda wrap us up here today. What I'd like to do is just share out some additional resources for you.
So first, this is a full walk through of Clear Estimates. This actually does get a lot more into the estimating.
And actually David asks, have you got time to talk about export to builder trend? Yeah. Certainly. So I can kinda just give you a brief overview of how that works really quick.
So the way the builder trend export works, it's actually a CSV file that you print. This is available on Clear Estimates pro, and it's formatted in a way that builder trend, is able to import. So what it would do is export all of your project details, all of the line items formatted in a way that builder trend understands, and then from within builder trend, there's going to be a specific import and estimate option that would import all of the line item details. So the benefit of the integration with builder trend, obviously, builder trend is far more of a project management tool than Clear Estimates is, but we kind of include more on the estimating side such as the library of costs.
So it kind of allows you to export all of the Clear Estimates cost info into builder trend for any project management. And it would just be, kind of a a process where you download a CSV from your project and then open up builder trend and import it in. I don't have a builder trend account on this particular computer, that I'm able to access right away. Otherwise I would show you that, but I will say, if you click support information, or support and then support information up at the top, I do have a walk through guide that kind of walks through all of that.
And it actually kind of links out to some of their documentation on how to import into their system. But it kind of walks you through step by step what to do and kind of what to expect here.
So that's available.
And I was just going to say also, you know if you still have outstanding questions about that, feel free to reach out to me. And I'm going to share my contact info with you in a second if you'd like to keep that conversation going.
But just really quick, while we still have time here, I'm going to just share out a couple of resources for you. This is a QR code. This will take you right to a resource on, basically it's a training walk through of Clear Estimates, and it really gets into the estimating portion.
If this QR code isn't working for you, I'm also going to share the link to this in the chat here for you.
And then also I wanted to share this resource on formatting your proposals. So this goes through a lot of what we covered today, but also kinda tackles common troubleshooting. If you're having problems with the formatting in your reports, this kinda addresses some of those, common issues.
So once again this is a QR code that you could scan with your phone and I'm also going to share a link here in the chat. Now if you're watching on YouTube today and you can't see the chat and if you're having any problems, with this QR code, then just feel free to send me an email. Just reach us at support at Clear Estimates dot com if you need those resources sent over, if you'd like to continue, if you still have any questions about builder trend, if you just like to chat or if you'd like to you still have questions about the presentation, feel free to reach out. Also if you're working in Clear Estimates, there is this blue chat button down in the bottom right and we are available.
Here, let me stop my camera again so you could see that. We're available nine to five eastern Monday through Friday. So if you're working in the software, feel free to send us a message whether you're, you know, got a project question, not sure about something in the software or you just like to chat, feel free to reach out.
I do want to thank everybody so much again for joining in for the presentation today. Thank you for your questions. These were great questions. A lot of fun having you and we look forward to catching up with you at the next one.