The trade where the quote is always partly a guess
Excavation is unusual: you are pricing what is underneath ground nobody has opened yet. You can walk a site, read the soil, check the mapping and still hit rock at 1.2 metres, or a spring, or fill from a barn that came down in 1970. Every experienced operator has a story about a two-day job that ran six.
That reality shapes what a quoting tool needs to do. A fixed-price-only estimator is the wrong shape for site work. What you actually need is a quote that shows its assumptions, prices the units clearly, and converts cleanly into an invoice reflecting what really happened — without the client feeling ambushed.
Quote the units, state the assumptions
The most useful thing you can do on an excavation quote is separate the rate from the quantity. "Trenching, $4,800" invites an argument when it runs long. "Excavator with operator, 12 hrs @ $185/hr" plus a stated assumption of normal soil conditions does not — the rate was agreed, only the hours moved. Lines worth having in a saved template:
- Mobilisation / float — moving iron costs money whether or not anything gets dug; it belongs on its own line, not folded into the hourly
- Equipment hours — one line per machine, at that machine's rate, with the operator included or shown separately as you prefer
- Trucking — by load or by hour, out and in, since haul-off and import are different quantities
- Material — granular, sand, topsoil, clear stone, by the tonne with the source noted
- Disposal and tipping — priced per load, and worth flagging separately if there is any chance of contaminated fill
- Locates and permits — utility locates are not optional; putting the line on the quote also documents that it was accounted for
- Restoration — grading, topsoil and seed at the end, which is the line most often forgotten and most often argued about
- Stated assumptions — normal soil, no rock, no groundwater, no unmarked services; and the rate that applies if any of those turn out to be wrong
Quoting where there is no signal
Site work is rural work. Half the properties you look at are down a sideroad where the phone shows one bar and then none. Software that needs a live connection to save a quote is software you cannot use in the field, which means the quote gets written up that evening — and by then the customer has two others.
CrewQuote saves the quote locally when it cannot reach the server, photos included, and uploads everything in order once coverage comes back. There is nothing to switch on and nothing to remember. You build the quote the same way regardless.
Photos as the record of what was actually there
Photograph the ground before you break it. Existing grade, the state of the lane, where the tracks will run, anything already damaged. Then photograph what you find: the rock face, the water, the old tile bed nobody knew about, the service that was not on the locate.
These attach to the job. On the change-order side they turn a claim into evidence. On the liability side, a photo of the lane's condition before your float went down it has ended more disputes than any amount of arguing.
Progress billing on a job that runs weeks
A septic replacement or a full site servicing can run for weeks, and waiting until the end to invoice means financing the customer's project with your own fuel card. Progress invoices are issued against a job as it goes, tracked against the same client and quote, and paid through Stripe.
Being honest about the boundary
CrewQuote does not do earthwork takeoff, cut-and-fill volume calculation, GPS machine control or grade modelling. If your quoting starts from a CAD surface, you need a takeoff package and CrewQuote is not it. What CrewQuote does is take the numbers you have arrived at — however you arrived at them — and turn them into a clear quote, a client approval, an invoice and a QuickBooks-ready CSV, with HST applied at the rate you set once.