How a flooring installer quotes a job, step by step

1Create the project

Name it however you refer to the job — the customer, the street, the lot. If your account quotes both sides of the trade, this is where you choose installation scope, which is the workflow described here, over material takeoff, which prices the wood off a plan set. A project keeps that answer for good, so both kinds live in one list and each opens the screen it needs.

On Lite there is nothing to choose. Every project is an installation quote, which is the whole point of that plan.

2Describe the job

Three things go in at the top: the customer's name, their email, and the address. Then pick whether this quote is for labor or materials — it titles the PDF and tells the customer what they are looking at.

Then write the job. Not into fields, into a box, the way you would describe it out loud:

Press Build quote and that becomes five lines with descriptions, quantities, units and rates. The prices came from your sentence — 520 at $8.75, 14 at $65, one at $250 — because you are the one who knows them. There is no catalog to set up first and no price book to maintain, and nothing carries over from the last job unless you write it again.

Write it in whatever order it comes out. Demolition, subfloor, treads, transitions, trim, haul-away and the flooring itself all read the same way, and a line you describe without a price still arrives — it just arrives blank, which is step 4's problem.

3Measure the rooms Optional

Plenty of jobs are quoted off a number you paced out, and that number goes straight in the description. When the job comes with drawings, measuring them beats pacing.

Upload the PDF, pick the sheets with floors on them, then set the scale: find a dimension the architect already printed — 14'-6" on a wall run will do — click one end, click the other, and type it as written. Then trace each room corner by corner and double-click to close it. Areas appear as you go, with a running total.

When you are done, one button drops the sizes back into your description as a line: Room sizes from the plan: living room 214 sqft, hall 96 sqft — 310 sqft total. Rebuild the quote and those numbers flow into the lines the same way your typed ones do. On this workflow the measuring tool is deliberately short — a scale and an outline, no laying styles or waste rules, because a labor quote is priced by the foot you install.

The measuring screens are the same ones recorded in the takeoff walkthrough, minus the style and direction controls. Measuring belongs to every plan, Lite included. If you want the plan to also drive material quantities, waste by laying pattern and vendor pricing, that is the material takeoff workflow.

4Check every line

This is the step that earns the rest. Every line is editable: description, quantity, unit, rate. Fix a word, correct a quantity, add a line for the thing you remembered in the truck, delete one that belongs on a different job.

A line with no rate is marked Required and the outputs stay closed until it has one. SquareTally does not guess at a price it was not given, because a plausible invented number is worse in a quote than an obvious blank. Anything ambiguous in your text is flagged above the table rather than silently resolved.

Underneath sit the quote number, tax rate, issue date, expiry and your terms, then the subtotal, tax and total. Change the description after building and a note tells you to rebuild before creating an output, so the PDF can never disagree with the words it came from.

5Create the quote

Two outputs, and you can use both on one job.

The PDF quote needs no accounting connection. It comes out on your own letterhead — company name, address and logo from Settings, set once — as a labor or materials quote depending on the choice at step 2.

The QuickBooks quote creates a draft Estimate in your own company file through the Intuit-reviewed connection. Pick the customer from your existing list or let a new one be created, and what comes back is the estimate number, its line count and total, with a link into QuickBooks.

Neither one goes anywhere on its own. The PDF lands in your downloads and the estimate sits as a draft. Sending stays with you, which is how it should be for a document with your price on it.

6The contract, once they say yes

When the quote is accepted, the same project fills your own contract. Upload your template once and check the wording and fields SquareTally identifies in it. Per job, fill the customer, address, date, estimate number and contract price, then download a PDF to read and upload to whichever service you sign with. More on reusing your own contract template.

7What this workflow deliberately leaves out

It does not hold a material catalog, apply waste percentages by laying pattern, or read your vendor's price lists. Those belong to the takeoff side of the product, where a dealer is pricing wood off a plan set rather than pricing their own labor.

For an installer that absence is the feature. The quote is a list of what you will do and what you charge for it, and every number on it came out of your own head, in a sentence you wrote. See what the installer plan covers for where the line sits.