For hardwood flooring dealers
Priced from the sheet you actually buy at
A dealer's cost is not a list price. It is one vendor's sheet, at your tier, in your zone, effective from a date — and it is replaced three or four times a year. Estimating software that does not know that is asking you to do the pricing twice.
Your cost per square foot lives on a vendor PDF, not in a software company's catalog. SquareTally prices jobs from the dealer sheets you upload — the same files your reps email you — and records which sheet, which page and which line every number came from.
What a dealer's price shelf actually looks like
One vendor is rarely one price list. Prefinished and unfinished are separate sheets with different products on them. A preferred-dealer sheet and a displaying-dealer sheet carry the same species at different numbers. Zone 1 is not zone 2. And a distributor's in-stock sheet is a third thing again: the subset you can have this week, at that distributor's figure.
Your shelf is almost certainly deeper than the brand count suggests: several sheets per vendor, across everything you carry, with effective dates spread over a year or more. That shelf is the real input to an estimate. Every hour spent flipping through it with a calculator is an hour not spent bidding.
| What the sheet says | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Dealer zone 1 | A regional band. The same SKU carries a different cost in another zone, so a sheet from the wrong zone quietly misprices the whole job |
| Displaying, preferred or premium dealer | Your standing with that vendor. Two dealers can hold the same brand and buy at different numbers |
| Prefinished / unfinished | Separate lists, and the products on them do not overlap. Quoting one from the other is not a rounding error |
| In stock at a named distributor | The subset available now, at that distributor's price rather than the mill's |
| An effective date on page one | The day the previous sheet became history. A quote priced from a superseded sheet is a margin conversation later |
Getting the shelf in
Drop the PDF in. The vendor, what kind of sheet it is and its effective date are read off page one, and shown to you to agree with or correct. The sheet is stored whole, so the page a number came from can be put back on screen months later.
Looking a cost up
Ask for the cost of a product and the answer comes back with three things attached: the figure, the page it was found on, and the line quoted verbatim — beside that page rendered on screen. You confirm it before it is saved onto the product.
That is deliberately one more click than an automatic fill. A cost nobody looked at is how a wrong number gets into a bid, gets approved, and is discovered at the purchase order.
When a vendor re-issues, the old sheet is superseded rather than deleted. Products priced from it keep their link back to the page they came from, so a job quoted in March still shows the March line. New lookups come off the current sheet.
From the shelf to the estimate
Measuring happens on the architect's PDF — calibrate the scale against a dimension already printed on the drawing, then trace each room. Waste follows the laying pattern rather than the room: straight and plank commonly 10%, herringbone and chevron 20%, at rates you set. See how flooring takeoff works for the measuring side of it.
What lands at the end is grouped the way you buy — per product and laying style, waste applied, rounded up — and it lands as two draft estimates in your own QuickBooks Online: one for material, one labor skeleton for you to price. Both are drafts. You review them and you send them.
Per shop, not per seat
Dealer estimating is rarely one person's job. The owner prices the big ones, the estimator takes the rest, and somebody at the counter needs to look up what a job was quoted at. SquareTally is priced per shop with unlimited users on all three plans, so a second estimator is a hiring decision rather than a budget one.
Questions dealers ask
- Can it price from my own dealer price lists?
- Yes. You upload the vendor PDFs your reps send — the prefinished sheet, the unfinished sheet, the zone and tier you buy at — and costs are looked up from those. There is no shared catalog of list prices standing in for what you actually pay, because no software company knows your terms with your vendors.
- Does it handle dealer zones and tiers?
- It holds whatever sheets you hold. A zone 1 sheet, a preferred-dealer sheet and a distributor's in-stock sheet are three separate price lists, each labelled with its vendor, its kind and its effective date. You choose which one a cost comes from.
- What happens when a vendor issues a new sheet?
- The re-issue supersedes the one it replaces instead of deleting it. Anything already priced from the old sheet keeps its source page, so an old quote still explains itself.
- How do I know the cost on the estimate is right?
- Because you confirmed it against the page. Every lookup returns the number, the page and the line quoted word for word, with that page on screen next to it, and nothing is saved onto a product until you agree with it.
- Do I need a seat for every estimator?
- No. Every plan is per shop with unlimited users — $49, $149 or $299 a month. Adding people does not change the bill; the plans differ on how many projects a month you run.
- Does it work with QuickBooks Online?
- Yes, as an Intuit-reviewed app connected to your own company. Each job writes a material draft and a labor draft. It never touches invoices, payments or banking, and it deletes nothing.
Read next
- Flooring takeoff software — measuring from a plan set, and why waste follows the pattern.
- For design-build firms — the same plan set, with every room rendered in the floor chosen.
- Pricing — $49, $149 or $299 a month per shop, unlimited users on all three.
Bring a plan set and a price sheet
Twenty minutes on one of your own jobs. We upload your vendor sheet, measure the rooms, price the material off your own numbers and draft it into QuickBooks, live.
Request a demoPrefer email? support@squaretally.com