Do we own the source code and the data?
Yes. The source code, the database and the data are yours, hosted where you choose.
Case study · Specialty trade & industrial contracting
Construction Quotes: a contractor's spreadsheet, rebuilt as a system
A browser-based operations platform for US industrial and mechanical contractors. One quote number carries a job from the first estimate through field labor, payroll and invoicing to the cash collected, with the margin visible at every step.
- Client
- A US industrial and mechanical contracting company
- Built for
- Plant maintenance, demolition, fabrication, rigging
- Delivery
- Live in production · multi-tenant · self-hosted
What the contractor gets
Faster quote to cash, margin visible per task while the job is open, labor cost landing the same week, and an office that does not grow with the crew.
Faster
Quote to cash
Billing starts from work already itemised and priced.
Visible
Margin per task
Planned against actual, while the job can still be corrected.
Same week
Labor cost on the job
Crew hours land on the task they were worked on, not at month end.
Flat
Office headcount
Doubling the crew does not double the office.
And you own it
Source, database and hosting are yours: a capital asset that transfers in a sale, not a per-seat bill that rises as you grow.
It pays for itself on administrative time alone. The compounding value is a bid book that sharpens every quarter.
What Construction Quotes is
Custom estimating and job costing software for contractors who bid work, send crews and bill for it. It does the arithmetic the spreadsheet did and keeps an audited record of what every job actually cost.
Built against one such company’s real workbooks and real job history. Other industries we build operational systems for.
Who this is for
NAICS 238 - specialty trade contractors
- Size
- 15 to 250 employees
- Bids
- Fixed-price and time-and-materials, side by side
- Biggest cost
- Field crew hours
- Mechanical & HVAC
- Plant maintenance
- Millwrighting
- Structural steel
- Rigging
What changes on day one
- The spreadsheetOne workbook, understood by one person.
- The systemPricing rules any trained estimator can use.
- The spreadsheetHours arrive on paper, late.
- The systemHours posted to the task as real cost.
- The spreadsheetMargin is known once the job closes.
- The systemMargin on screen while the job is still open.
- The spreadsheetGrowth adds office staff.
- The systemGrowth adds crews, not administrators.
How one quote number carries a job from bid to cash
One number runs all four stages and nothing is re-keyed between them, so planned cost and real cost sit on the same record while the job is still open.
- 01
Estimate
Split a job into tasks, then price labor, materials and rentals on each.
- Markup per quote
- Overtime factor
- Rate snapshots
- 02
Win the work
Print the quote, email it from the app, and track it through the pipeline.
- Estimate · Quote · Project
- Frozen revisions
- 03
Do the job
Crew hours are typed into a weekly grid and land on the task as real labor cost.
- Friday to Thursday
- Regular and OT per day
- Rental POs
- 04
Get paid
Invoice ticked work, then record what comes in and see what is late.
- Staged draws
- Past-due total
- QuickBooks import file
Where the margin becomes visible
The quote holds planned spend; payroll and vendor bills record actual spend. The Quote Summary puts the two on the same row, per task.
The screens that run the business
Seven screens carry most of the working day, and every capture below is from the live system rather than a mockup.
Every screen shown here is a real capture from the working application. Company names, staff names, customer names and contact details have been blurred to protect the client’s commercial information. Layout, figures and behaviour are untouched.
Screen 01: Owner’s dashboard
Every headline number on one screen, and every row links into the quotes behind it.Open quotesWork in progressPlanned gross profit Screen 02: Quote register
Every quote and estimate in one filterable table.Fixed-price or T&MQuoted totalInternal costGross profitMargin Screen 03: Task breakdown
A job split into tasks, with every labor, material and rental line hanging off a task.FabricationDemolitionMaterial handlingCode, schedule, status and value per task Screen 04: Planned against actual, per task
Tells an owner where a bid was wrong while there is still time to act on it.Quoted labor and materialReal payroll spentVendor billsMargin per task Screen 05: The weekly payroll grid
Hours save as they are typed and land on the job as real labor cost.Friday to ThursdayWorker, job and cost codeRegular and overtime, every day Screen 06: Money owed, at a glance
What is outstanding, what is past due, what has gone to QuickBooks.Record a paymentReprint the PDFEmail the customerEvery action has a name on it Screen 07: The Excel Bridge
History moves in from the company’s own workbooks, and reports move back out.Always by handAlways previewed before it writesSkipped rows explained by sheet and line
Behind them sit the quote log, global search, customer and employee records, staged billing plans, the permission grid and the activity log. The full delivered list of 124 capabilities is next.
Everything the system does
124delivered
124 delivered capabilities, grouped by the part of the business each one serves.
Showing 124 of 124 delivered capabilities.
Quoting & estimating18
- Quote register
- New quote builder
- Tasks by category
- Task codes per job
- Labor lines
- Material lines
- Equipment lines
- Rental lines
- Duration pricing
- Markup per quote
- Overtime factor
- Rate snapshots
- Live totals
- Fixed price or T&M
- Contractor breakout
- Duplicate a quote
- Frozen revisions
- Auto-supersede
Numbering & status10
- Per-customer numbers
- Reserved number pool
- Void a number
- Release a number
- Restore a number
- Bulk number actions
- Custom status list
- Estimate / Quote / Project
- Phase chips
- Stats exclusions
Job costing8
- Planned vs actual
- Cost per task
- Real cost so far
- Gross profit
- Margin percentage
- Variance view
- Vendor bill capture
- Job cost from hours
Payroll15
- Weekly hours grid
- Friday to Thursday
- Regular and OT pairs
- By job or by worker
- Cost code book
- Admin-defined code kinds
- Non-job time codes
- Pay override
- Overtime check
- Week notes
- Submit a week
- Payroll PDF
- Payroll Excel
- Email the week
- Phone landscape use
Invoicing & cash15
- Invoice ticked work
- Custom invoice builder
- Staged billing plans
- Progress draws
- Derived invoice status
- Read-only invoice numbers
- Void an invoice
- Invoice number recovery
- Record a payment
- Reverse a payment
- Outstanding total
- Past due total
- Payment links register
- Invoice notes
- Invoice attachments
Purchasing7
- Rental purchase orders
- Vendor picked per PO
- Lines at internal cost
- Delivery charge
- PO PDF
- PO status
- Buy list export
Documents12
- Quote PDF
- Estimate document
- Invoice PDF
- Quote summary PDF
- Email quotes
- Email invoices
- Email POs
- Email delivery log
- Notes on any record
- File attachments
- Links to portals
- Company file library
Master data9
- Customers
- Company contacts
- Vendors
- Employees, full HR
- Pay rate history
- Materials catalog
- Rental catalog
- Categories
- Durations
Excel & QuickBooks8
- Pull from Excel
- Preview before commit
- Undo a session
- Redo a session
- Push to Excel
- QuickBooks import file
- Blank template
- Per-row skip reasons
Control & security10
- Custom designations
- Permission grid
- Pay visibility control
- SSN locked to admin
- Login lockout
- Activity log
- Process run log
- Database backups
- Data cleanup preview
- Bulk delete guard
Platform12
- Multi-tenant
- White-label per client
- Company logo upload
- Platform owner panel
- Request access signup
- Per-org reporting
- Mail server test
- Global search
- Search down to tasks
- Clean deep links
- Quote log register
- Self-hosted
What it runs on
PHP 8.2 on CodeIgniter 4.7 with MySQL, built as a single-page application with real clean URLs, so every screen is a bookmarkable link.
- PHP 8.2
- CodeIgniter 4.7
- MySQL
- Single-page application
- Real clean URLs
- Server-side PDF generation
- Native Excel read/write
- Self-hosted
More on the technologies we build on and on security and access control.
The engineering decisions that matter
Numbers never break relations.
Re-issuing a quote number cannot orphan the work attached to it.
Saved lines keep their own rates.
Changing a rate today never reprices a quote sent last month.
Nothing syncs behind anyone’s back.
Every Excel transfer is triggered, previewed and undoable.
The problems US contractors keep running into
Every row below is a documented failure mode in American specialty contracting, and the right column is what this system does about it.
- The problemWork finishes in week one and the invoice goes out in week five.
- Resolved byInvoices raised from work already itemised and priced, with staged draws.
- The problemNobody can say on a Monday what is overdue.
- Resolved byOutstanding and past-due totals on the invoice screen.
- The problemOvertime is worked out by hand, creating wage-and-hour exposure.
- Resolved byRegular and overtime recorded as a pair every day, with an overtime check across the week.
- The problemChange orders are agreed on site, then never billed or later disputed.
- Resolved byFrozen revisions keep every version that was sent, with an audit trail.
- The problemQuote numbers collide when several people issue them.
- Resolved byA controlled number pool per customer, reserved and released on the record.
- The problemEveryone sees everything, including pay rates and employee data.
- Resolved byA permission grid: pay and margin hidden by role, personal data admin-only.
If several describe your week, read the where-to-start guide and the outcomes we hold ourselves to.
Owning it against renting it
Software you rent disappears the day you stop paying. Software you own is capital that transfers in a sale and carries no per-seat penalty for growth.
| Renting a platform | Owning this one |
|---|---|
| Per seat, per month, forever - the bill rises as you hire. | Adding a user costs nothing. |
| You fit your process to the product. | The product was built from your own workbooks. |
| Your history sits in a vendor’s database. | The database is yours, hosted where you choose. |
| An operating expense that leaves nothing behind. | An asset that transfers with the company in a sale. |
Every year it runs, it is worth more, not less.
How that is structured commercially: pricing models and pricing.
What it is worth at the point of sale
Buyers discount anything that looks like it lives in the owner’s head. Clean job-cost history proves the company can price and deliver without the founder.
Where we pushed back
“Anyone can edit any list” collided with “pay rates must stay private”. The honest answer was a permission grid, not a blanket yes.
Per-customer numbering was questioned until their own quote log showed reserved blocks per company. Then it was built.
What the outcome depends on
Returns arrive when hours are entered weekly and vendor bills are filed against the job that incurred them. Those are habits, not features, and we said so before a line was written.
Build one for your business
Construction Quotes was built for one company’s workbooks, numbering and week. We build the same class of system for yours.
We start from what you already use.
Your spreadsheet, your quote log, your documents.
You get a working phase early.
A workflow you can run the business on, not a twelve-month wait.
You own the result.
Source code, database and data, hosted where you choose.
It keeps growing with you.
New requirements become the next phase.
Three questions worth answering first
Q1
What breaks first if your key person leaves?
That is usually the part to systematise first.
Q2
Where is the same number typed twice?
Every duplicate entry is a standing cost.
Q3
Can you say what last quarter’s jobs cost?
If that takes a week, you are bidding on memory.
Related: the software we build, how we sequence a build, how we test what we build, solutions and AI automation.
Questions US buyers ask before commissioning a system
Ownership, migration, field use, accounting and access control are what owners ask about first.
Can it import our existing estimating spreadsheets?
Yes. The Excel Bridge pulls years of history in from your own workbooks and pushes reports back out. Every transfer is started by a person, previewed before anything is written, and undoable.
Does it work on a phone in the field?
The weekly payroll grid was built to be usable on a phone held sideways, because that is how the client office collects hours. Every screen is a real URL, so it opens on any device.
How does it get invoices into QuickBooks?
Invoices are exported as a QuickBooks import file, so the bookkeeper loads one file instead of re-typing thirteen. There is no background sync.
Is the system priced per seat?
No. Adding a user costs nothing, because the system is owned rather than rented. Commercial job-cost platforms charge per seat per month, and that bill rises as you hire.
Who can see pay rates, margins and employee records?
Only the roles you allow. Custom designations drive a permission grid, Social Security numbers are admin-only, and every action is logged with the name of the person who took it.
What does it cost to replace a spreadsheet estimating system?
Scope sets the figure, so we do not publish one. Send us the spreadsheet you run on today and we will price a first phase against it.
Could this be built for a business that is not a contractor?
Yes. The pattern - estimate, deliver, cost, invoice, collect, all under one number - is the same in manufacturing, distribution and field service.
More answers about working with us, what clients say about delivery, or the full project portfolio.
Send us the spreadsheet you run on today
Send us the spreadsheet you run on today and we will tell you plainly what it would take to replace it.
Or email contact@opencollartech.com and call +1 516 373 0561. Prefer a form? Use the contact page.
What happens next
You send the spreadsheet you run on.
We scope a first phase against it.
You decide whether to build it.
Live in production · multi-tenant · self-hosted