Guide

How SquareTally works, step by step

One job, from the moment it lands in your inbox to the quote you send back. Every screen below is the real interface, recorded on a demonstration project.

By Nicolas Mathieu · Published · About 7 minutes

The whole workflow is five steps, two of them optional. Create a project, paste the job text and let SquareTally read the rooms and the customer out of it, measure the floor plan when there is one, give each room its material and laying style, then create a branded PDF quote or a pair of QuickBooks drafts. Room renders are a fifth step on Pro and Studio.

1Create the project

Everything on a job hangs off a project: its text, its plan sheets, its rooms, its materials and every quote it has produced. Name it the way your shop refers to it — a lot number, a street, a customer — and it is created immediately.

Accounts that quote both sides of the trade are asked one question here: installation scope or material takeoff. Material takeoff prices the wood; installation scope prices the work. A project keeps the answer for its lifetime, so both kinds sit in the same list and each opens the interface it needs. If your account only ever does one of the two, the question is never asked.

Figure 1. Naming the job on the dashboard. The project opens on its four-point checklist, with one button for whatever comes next.

2Read the job out of the text

Most jobs arrive as words. An installer texts the rooms and the square footage, a builder emails the scope, or you write your own notes after the site visit. That text is the primary source in SquareTally: paste it into Job details and press Read the job details.

What comes back is a proposal, not a change. The customer name and address appear with a checkbox, and each room appears with its laying style and its square footage in an editable field. Rooms already on the job are marked as such and left alone. Anything that reads as ambiguous is flagged above the buttons. You untick what does not belong, correct the numbers that need correcting, and press Add to the job.

The same text does a second job later: demolition, subfloor work and extra-work lines are carried into the labor draft, so the notes about pulling up tile in the kitchen do not have to be typed a second time.

Figure 2. Reading five rooms, their square footage and the customer out of the job text. The flag under the list is the one figure covering two rooms — kitchen and dining arrive with their areas blank, for you to split.

3Measure the floor plan Optional

When the job comes with drawings, a measured area beats a stated one. Upload the architect's PDF and pick the sheets that matter — a plan set is mostly elevations, details and schedules, and the thumbnails let you keep the two or three pages with floors on them.

Calibrate the sheet

A PDF has no idea how big anything on it is, so the first move on every sheet is to tell it. Find a dimension the architect already printed — 14'-6" on a wall run is ideal — click one end of that line, click the other, and type the figure as it appears. Zoom in before clicking: the closer you are, the less a stray pixel costs.

On a validated real plan, a room measured this way came to 152.6 sq ft against the 153 sq ft the architect annotated — 99.7%. The scale is saved with the page, so reopening it later resumes where you left off, and re-calibrating recalculates every room already traced on that sheet.

Figure 3. Two clicks on a dimension the architect already printed, then the figure typed as written. Feet-and-inches notation is accepted as it appears on the drawing.

Trace the rooms

Switch to Add room, click each corner of the floor, and double-click to close the shape. Name it, and its area appears in the sidebar with the running total. Odd shapes are just more corners; a bay or a chimney breast costs a few extra clicks and nothing else.

Each traced room takes a laying style, and a direction where the pattern has one. The style is what carries the waste rate later, and the plan redraws with the pattern on it as you choose. A room measured here replaces the square footage the text gave for the room of the same name, and it is the version that can be rendered as a customer visual.

One more tool lives on this screen: Crop sheet, which trims the architect's title block off before you export the page as a client-facing sheet.

Figure 4. Tracing a room, naming it, and watching the laying style redraw on the plan. The sidebar keeps the running total.

4Materials and rooms

Add the woods this job actually uses. Add from catalog searches a vendor catalog and brings back the exact product name, item number and price, which is what makes the quote match the order when it is placed. Typing a material in by hand works too, and a photo can be attached afterwards for the renders.

On the measuring plans you can search your own uploaded dealer price lists instead. A lookup returns the $/sqft with the page it came from and the line quoted verbatim, beside a rendering of that page. You confirm the figure before it fills the project's price field — see how dealer price lists work for zones, tiers and effective dates.

Then every room on the job gets a material and a laying style, in one list. Rooms that came from the text take a typed square footage here; rooms traced on a plan keep the plan's.

Figure 5. Every room gets its material and its laying style in one table. The style is what carries the waste rate through to the order.

5Review, then create the quote

The review screen shows two tables. The first is every room with its area, material, pattern and status, and anything unfinished links straight back to the step that fixes it. The second is the material order — the same rooms grouped the way you buy, per product and laying style.

Waste is applied here, from the rate on each style: commonly 10% for straight and plank layouts and 20% for herringbone, at rates you set. Ordered quantity is the measured area times one plus that rate, rounded up. Measured area, waste percentage, order quantity, markup and the quoted price per square foot are all editable on this line for this quote, and the plan measurements underneath stay untouched.

Figure 6. The two areas left blank at step 2 are filled in, and the estimate preview turns from “Needs attention” to “Ready”. Below it, waste and markup are adjusted per order line.

Output A — QuickBooks drafts

Connect your own QuickBooks Online company once, through Intuit's OAuth screen, and the project can create two linked estimates: a material draft with the priced order lines, and a labor draft carrying the demolition, subfloor and extra-work lines the job text described, with rates left for you to fill. Pick the customer from your QuickBooks customer list, or let a new one be created.

What comes back is the estimate number, the total, the line count and a link that opens the draft in QuickBooks, plus any review alerts worth a second look. Both are drafts in your company file, and nothing is emailed to the customer. More detail on the QuickBooks Online integration.

Output B — a branded PDF quote

No accounting connection is needed for this one. Fill the customer, quote number, issue and expiry dates, tax rate and your terms, and download a material quote on your own letterhead — the company name, address and logo come from Settings, so they are set once and reused.

Both outputs can be used on the same job. Some shops send the PDF to the customer and keep the QuickBooks draft for the books.

Figure 7. Both outputs on one screen: linked QuickBooks drafts against a connected company, or a branded PDF quote. The contract card sits underneath, for after the estimate is approved.

That is the whole loop — the job text goes in, a quote comes out, and the two steps below are the ones you reach for when a job asks for them.

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6Customer visuals Optional

On Pro and Studio, each room traced on a plan can be rendered in the floor assigned to it, using the material's own photo and faithful to the doors and windows drawn on the drawing. It is an illustration of the space rather than a photograph of it, and it is labelled as one. For a customer choosing between two woods it settles the conversation quickly. Rooms that came from the job text have no outline to render, so this step belongs to the measured ones.

7The contract, after approval

When the estimate is approved, the same project fills your own contract. Upload your shop's template once and review the wording and fields SquareTally identifies in it. Per job, fill the customer, address, agreement date, estimate number and contract price, and download a customer-specific PDF to review and upload to DocuSign or whichever service you sign with. SquareTally prepares the document; sending and signing stay with you. Details on flooring contract templates.

8The installation-scope workflow

An installer quoting their own labor works a shorter path, and it is the whole of the Lite plan. Step 1 is the customer, a choice of labor or materials, and the job written out in plain words with its quantities and prices — 520 sqft white oak at $8.75, install at $4.50, 14 stair treads at $65 each, haul away $250 flat. Press Build quote and that becomes editable quote lines with descriptions, quantities and rates. Check every line, set the tax, and create the output: a branded PDF, a QuickBooks draft, or both.

The floor-plan tool is available here too, as an optional step: measure the rooms off the PDF and drop their sizes into the description, where they flow through into the quote lines. See the installer walkthrough for what that plan covers.

9What the checklist is for

Every project carries a four-point checklist at the top: rooms on the job, an area for each of them, a material list, and each room assigned and priced. Under it sits one button for whatever comes next, and pressing it scrolls to the exact field that is missing. The dashboard shows the same state per job, so a list of twelve open bids reads at a glance.

The quote outputs stay locked until those four are done. A quote missing a price is the kind of mistake that gets found after the customer has approved it.

The project checklist reading Ready to quote, four of four, with rooms on the job, every room has an area, material list ready and rooms assigned and priced all ticked, beside a Review and create quote button.
Figure 8. The same checklist that sat at the top of every screen above, on a job that is now complete. Until all four tick it reads “Keep this job moving”, and the button names the piece that is missing rather than the next step in order.

Questions about the workflow

Do I have to upload a floor plan to quote a job?
No. The job-details text is the primary source — the rooms, their square footage and the customer are read out of it. Plans are optional, for the jobs where a measured area is wanted instead of a stated one.
How does SquareTally know the scale of a PDF plan?
You tell it: click both ends of a dimension already printed on the drawing and type what it says. 14'-6" is accepted as written. Every room traced on that page uses that scale, and re-calibrating recalculates the rooms already on it.
Where does waste get added?
On the laying style, which each room carries — commonly 10% for straight and plank and 20% for herringbone, at rates you set. Ordered quantity is measured square footage times one plus the rate, rounded up, and it stays editable at review. The herringbone waste calculator shows the arithmetic on one room.
Does SquareTally send anything to my customer?
No. The PDF downloads to your machine and QuickBooks estimates are created as drafts in your own company file. Sending stays with you.
How long does a job take end to end?
Quoted from the text alone it is a paste, a read and a review. A measured job adds one calibration per sheet and roughly a minute per room to trace, name and style.
Can I try it on one of my own jobs?
Yes. Every plan starts with a 3-day free trial, card required, and pricing runs from $50 to $429 a month per shop with seats included and unlimited projects.

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