Quoting software that shows what the job costs you

See your cost on every line, as you build

Pull items and materials straight from your price book and each line shows the catalogue cost of the materials behind it — quantity included — right beside the price you're charging. You're not guessing at last month's price or working the sums out afterwards on the back of a docket.

One deliberate detail: when a line's cost can't be resolved — the material isn't linked, the name matches two things, or your role isn't permitted to see costs — the figure is hidden rather than shown as $0.00. A zero would read as "these materials are free", and that's the one number you don't want to trust by accident.

• Line items, materials and labour, with per-line discounts
• The catalogue cost behind every material and item line, shown live
• GST re-derived on the server every time you save — client-side totals are never trusted
• Your quote validity, payment terms and GST rate come from your settings, not retyped each time

The explicit markup percentage lives on the material itself, in Materials and Inventory, where you also get total cost value, sell value and potential profit across your stock.

Your crew can quote without seeing your buy price

Cost, markup and selling price are stripped out of the response at the server for roles that shouldn't see them — not hidden with CSS, not filtered in the app where a determined person could dig them out. On a quote, a user without financial field access gets every money field, per-line price, discount and amount removed before the data leaves the building, including on the offline sync feed. Your apprentice can build a quote all day and never learn what you pay for a switch. See permissions.

Scribble it on site, tidy it up later

Saving a draft uses relaxed validation — you don't need the client's email, phone or the site address to get a quote started with the customer standing in front of you. The full checks only bite when you open it to send. And quoting works with no signal: quotes sync with per-line merging, so if you and the office both touch different lines of the same quote, both edits survive instead of one wiping the other.

Three ways for a client to say yes

Your client can accept in their no-login client portal, simply reply "I accept" to the quote email (checked against the email signature and the sender address on the quote), or you can record an acceptance taken over the phone. They can also decline in the portal with a reason — and if you sharpen the price and resend, the decline clears and the quote goes back to sent.

Acceptance is bound to the exact PDF the client was looking at, so there's never a question of which version they agreed to. A quote past its expiry date can't be accepted at all — the client gets an "expired" notice instead of quietly locking you into old pricing. If you want a signature, the tech can capture one on the device at the moment of acceptance and it's stamped onto the quote.

Every send is archived, hashed and versioned

Each time you send, My Apprentice stores a content-hashed, versioned snapshot of exactly the PDF that went out — v1, v2, and so on. Months later, an owner, supervisor or admin can pull that precise version back out of Document History. If a customer says "that's not what I was quoted", you're not arguing from memory.

Editing a quote the client has already accepted is blocked until you explicitly acknowledge you're doing it, and the earlier snapshot survives either way. Every meaningful event — created, edited after send, accepted internally, accepted by the client, declined, emailed, deleted — lands in the audit trail.

Chasing, without the chasing

Unanswered quotes get up to three automatic nudges — three days after sending, seven days, then three days before the quote expires — each with the PDF attached. It's on by default and configurable in settings. Most quotes that die, die of silence.

A yes becomes a job, then an invoice

Accepting converts the quote into a job in one click: the client, site address, title, description, the quoted value and any shifts you've set all carry across, and the priced quote stays linked to the job for the life of the work. Accept twice and you get the same job back, not a duplicate.

The zero-re-keying path to money is quote → invoice: advancing an accepted quote copies every item, material and labour line verbatim onto a draft invoice, derives the invoice number from the quote number, sets a due date and links the two together. That's also idempotent, so you can't accidentally raise the same invoice twice.

Extra work that comes up later goes onto the job as materials and shifts and flows through to the invoice from there. Where the client needs to sign off on the extra scope, you send it as a second quote they accept the same way.

Frequently asked questions

→ Open the live demo and build a quote on sample data — no sign-up. Or see the pricing.