Estimates & change order quotes sent to customers

It'd be nice if you could provide an estimate in an email...like the invoice...to a customer a the start of a project or before the start. And then, once a project is working, if you were able to create and send an email with a change order quote when a request is made outside of the scope...that then would track their acceptance of this.

Perhaps it's asking a lot, but you've built such a nice system...I just want it to do everything.

We have contemplated adding estimates but one of the challenges we have learned is that people do bids in very different ways. On the Pelago side of our business we primarily do custom development and our bids are rather involved so generating estimates wouldn't work great within Intervals for us. We do have a Pelago Sales project and keep all of our template documents stored within Intervals. That tends to work for us. It is like really like CRM to keep track of bids, conversations, and the status of the estimate.

Some Intervals users utilize the estimated work at the project level to ball park hours and then copy the project when it becomes active. It is a quasi way of creating templated projects. Also, some Intervals users use invoices for estimates and have created an "estimate" project and they create invoices specifically for that project. If an estimate becomes a project, they just create the project, rename the invoice, and move it over to the newly created project. One of those workarounds may or may not work for your needs.

I'm not quite sure what you're after. Are you saying that you want the invoicing features to be based on estimated time rather than logged time, since you bill fixed costs? I can see how that could be useful.

One way to get a report of that data at present, would be to bring up the relevant project / milestone / tasks on the Tasks tab, then click the CSV (Excel) icon. There's a column for estimated time, and you can tweak the other columns as required.

Yes - please set up a way to create estimates! I am trialing this software and currently use Zoho Invoice, which is very limited compared to this, but does have an estimates area. You could set it up so we have all the tasks listed, and then when we click "make into a project" it simply changes the estimated tasks all into "to-do's". As I type this I realize that by using estimated time this may work, then create a summary of estimated vs. actual and use that as the estimate to mail to the client. But it would be nice to have it be an official part of the program. It does just about everything else and is wonderful!!!