Built to order
A quoting tool that answers in the truck
A post-frame builder was quoting on Sunday nights: a spreadsheet, a catalog, and three hours a quotation. This replaced it.
Three screens — the spec, his own cost table, and every proposal he has ever sent. They are wired together, so change a steel price on one and the proposal on another moves while you watch.
The numbers here are made up. The real one prices against that builder's material costs, his labor rate and his margin, and keeps them on the server where a customer cannot read them out of the page. What is honest here is the shape: the same scope letters, the same cost rows, the same four states a proposal can be in.
The proposal New proposal
In the real one this prints as a signed document with the scope letters intact, so a change order six weeks later can cite Scope D and mean something. Proposals are encrypted at rest and sent from the dashboard.
Costs What the owner edits, and nobody else sees
Steel and trim
Structure
Openings
Concrete
Insulation and venting
Carried on the whole job
Every one of these is a row the owner changes himself when steel moves or a supplier raises a price — no ticket, no developer, no waiting. They live on the server: the browser sends a specification and gets priced lines back, so a customer reading the page source finds a building, not a margin.
Proposal log Every one, priced on today's costs
Open any of them and the specification loads into the builder, priced at whatever the cost table says now — which is how you find out what a proposal you sent three weeks ago would be worth today. The real one also records who it went to, when it was opened, and what was signed.
What comes out
The proposal above, printed. Scope letters intact, so a change order six weeks later can cite Scope D and mean something. This is the Kestrel job from the log — open P-2026-0147 in the builder and you are looking at the same document.
(918) 555-01421140 County Road 42 · Tahlequah, OK 74464
Example proposal
Post-frame building
Kestrel Equipment · Muskogee, Oklahoma
P-2026-0147
September 18, 2026
48′ × 72′ × 16′ eave · 14′ × 14′ overhead doors · lean-to 12′ × 72′
Scope A — Site and foundation$33,034
Level and grade the siteCut, fill and grade to level$2,200
Slab, 5″3,456 sq ft, 4,000 PSI, fiber mesh$25,056
Power-trowel finish3,456 sq ft$2,938
Concrete apron400 sq ft at the doors$2,840
Scope B — Structure$15,425
Laminated columns on brackets20 columns, 10 bays at 8.0 ft$4,110
Trusses10 at 48 ft span, 4/12 pitch$6,720
Wall girts1,920 lin ft$1,632
Roof purlins1,821 lin ft$2,459
Splash plank240 lin ft treated$504
Scope C — Roof and walls$58,395
26-gauge steel, roof and walls8,085 sq ft$27,070
Wainscot36″ band, contrasting color$2,678
Trim and flashingCorners, eave, rake, base, J-channel$4,385
Erection labor3,456 sq ft under roof$24,261
Scope D — Openings$8,447
2 × 14′ × 14′ overhead doorSteel, insulated track$4,952
Insulated door panels2 doors$640
Openers2 chain drive, two remotes each$1,090
1 × walk door3′ × 6′8″ insulated steel, lockset$690
Half-glass1 door$145
2 × window4′ × 3′ slider, screen and trim$930
Scope E — Insulation and ventilation$15,571
R-10 blanket8,085 sq ft$10,915
12″ overhangsEaves and gables$3,000
Vented soffit144 lin ft$972
Vented ridge72 lin ft$684
Scope F — Lean-to$19,008
Lean-to12′ × 72′, open, matching steel$19,008
Delivery and overhead$22,482
Total$172,362
Signature ____________________________ Date ______________
Ridgepole Post-Frame Co. is not a real company. A sample from a demonstration; the prices are illustrative.
Signed, dated, and sent from the dashboard — not retyped into Word, not rebuilt from a spreadsheet, and not different from the one before it because it was late and somebody was tired.
Every number on it was priced by the same model running on this page. Change a rate on the Costs tab and the document changes with it.
What this actually is
Sixty-one thousand lines of it, built for one builder in Tahlequah: a public site with a filterable catalog of finished buildings, a budgetary estimator for the people browsing at midnight, this proposal builder, and an owner's dashboard behind it holding jobs, invoices, expenses, crews and the numbers that say whether the year is working.
It is not a template
The options above are post-frame because that is what he sells. Yours would be your options, your price book, your paper. The same shape fits cabinets, fencing, HVAC change-outs, sheds, docks — anything quoted from a specification rather than guessed at.
The price book stays yours
That costs screen is the point. You change a rate; every proposal you write after it is right, and the ones you already sent can be re-priced to see what they would be worth now. Nobody files a ticket, and nobody reads your margin out of the page source.
What it gave him back
Three hours a quotation became ten minutes. At six buildings a week that is most of a working day returned every week — and the quote goes out while the customer is still interested, rather than on the following Sunday.
It keeps working
Steel moves, options change, a crew leaves. The monthly is what keeps the tool true to the business instead of slowly becoming a thing everybody works around. That is the whole difference between software and a spreadsheet.
If you quote from a spec and it takes longer than it should, that is the conversation. It starts with your quoting process, not with software.