Free Painting Cost Estimation Software
Whether you’re a painter or a general contractor, estimating the cost of painting can be a time-consuming part of the job. It’s also an important one, determining how likely you are to win a bid and how profitable the job will be. In the digital age, painters get to enjoy the many benefits of automation through estimating software, which comes with advantages like greater accuracy and professionalism, helping you can create better bids, work more efficiently and increase earnings.
What Does Painting Estimating Software Do?
Painting estimating programs can help you build detailed bids that incorporate all materials and labor costs into your estimates. They create digital proposals and eliminate the hours you might otherwise spend with a ruler, a calculator and a blueprint. Some of the things you can do with basic estimation software include:
- – Creating bills of materials for your supply orders.
- – Determining required quantities.
- – Generating detailed bids with libraries of items and assemblies.
- – Calculating material and labor costs.
- – Exporting professional-looking proposals to submit to clients.
Free painting software can help in other areas, too, like:
- – Collaboration: Painting estimation software can provide a virtual space for employees and stakeholders to come together. Everyone can access your documents, make updates and review estimates from anywhere they have internet access. You determine who gets to make changes and bring their attention to any updates or changes.
- – Fast estimations: A paint bidding app should offer tools to help you work faster, such as simple interfaces, templates and pre-built databases. From taking measurements to automatically calculating quantities, your painting bidding software should vastly streamline your estimation process.
- – Cost reduction: Of course, working faster can help save by reducing labor requirements, but free painting software can also help you by improving accuracy, so you can spend less time fixing errors and avoid going over budget. The fact that it’s free can help your bottom line, too, when compared to more expensive options.
- – Ease of access: Estimating with pen and paper or desktop-based software means you need to have your documents or computer on hand to see your estimates or make changes. You might need to travel back to the office to get a simple measurement or carry important paper files with you to a dirty jobsite — it’s easy for physical documents to get lost or damaged. Painting software can keep your files in a digital format, easily accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection.
- – Organization: Painting cost estimate software can keep those files in one place and support easy organization with tools to help you label, sort and search through your documents.
How Painting Cost Estimate Software Helps Contractors
The construction industry is quickly diving into the digital era, and software will play a major role moving forward. While addressing common challenges like labor shortages and cost reduction demands, estimation software can help improve and standardize the industry overall.
Your partners and clients expect quick, professional results and anywhere-access to work documents. The right technology offers a competitive edge and modern-day resources for painting contractors and general contractors.
Below are just some of the benefits you can experience with free painting software:
1. Better Communication
By connecting you with other members of the project, like employees, other contractors, architects or the client, you can keep everyone on the same page to eliminate miscommunications. From small changes to major redesigns, cloud-based software connects you with everyone involved while giving you complete control over what other users can do and see.
Improving communication can help you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes and deliver a competitive edge over other businesses. Good communication permeates other parts of the business, helping to boost the quality of your work, add to your bottom line and give your clients a stellar experience.
2. More Accurate Bids
From overlooking your need for a ladder to miscalculating how many gallons of paint you need, inaccurate estimates can drastically affect your profitability and cause problems down the road. Manual estimations are at the mercy of human error, which is especially risky if you don’t have someone else verifying your results. Paint estimation software can help improve your accuracy by pulling from databases or incorporating your real-world costs.
Opting for reusable templates means you can rest easy by knowing your costs are correct for future projects. Computer-based calculations and measurement tools help you get detailed data that considers contextual factors, such as associated labor costs, supplies and waste. Plus, with detailed collaboration tools, you can ensure the specifics get passed on to everyone involved.
3. More Efficient Processes
Estimating costs manually is an inefficient process, especially when a free program can give back all that time you spend hunting down prices and calculating quantities. You might waste hours or days collecting the information needed for one bid that may or may not turn into a paying job. With free paint estimate software, you can put those hours to good use, like finding new jobs or improving your bid in other ways.
While paint estimation software can help streamline the bidding process, it can also help improve efficiency during the project with better accuracy. Errors often call for costly or time-consuming fixes that eat away at potential profits. Accurate calculations can help eliminate these errors, so you can work with more confidence to stay under budget and ahead of deadlines.
4. A Better Image
Bids are all about putting your best foot forward. Estimation software helps you look polished and professional. Some free software programs will plaster their logos all over your estimates, but others like STACK allow you to brand your proposal with your company’s information. Estimation software helps you keep up with the competition by taking a more modern, responsive approach to building bids and providing accurate work.
After all, potential clients would rather work with someone who delivers a timely, polished estimate and finishes the job within budget than someone with a messy, inaccurate estimate delivered beyond the deadline.
5. More Profitability
All of these aspects can help you build more profitable projects. Fewer errors, higher win rates, fast takeoffs and an array of other benefits make estimation software a particularly helpful solution for maximizing your revenue. Take Nationwide Paint Co. as an example. This commercial painting company sped up its bid process by 500% with STACK, allowing the team to increase its number of bids from three per week to up to 15 a week!
6. Risk Mitigation
A dependable estimation tool can make all the difference in avoiding problems. From ensuring you don’t accidentally underbid to using correction features that alert you to missing items or assemblies, your software can help catch errors and build a better safety net for your work. For instance, you might use it to reduce overhead and increase your rainy-day fund or include terms and conditions in your proposals to protect you from unexpected costs.
The STACK Difference
Some of the best estimating software for painting contractors comes from STACK. STACK offers preconstruction and construction programs with a wide range of tools for every step of the job. The free version of STACK’s estimating software allows you to see how STACK fits within your unique workflow. The software is packed with robust estimation and precon tools to help you streamline your work and win more bids.
Here’s just a taste of the capabilities you’ll get with STACK’s free painting estimate software:
1. Pre-Built and Customizable Databases
Our comprehensive databases allow you to pull from a large library of painting supplies or add your own materials. Build your estimates faster and more reliably by simply selecting the right item from a trade-specific materials database. STACK can use your measurements to calculate the amount needed for a project and help you quickly move on to the next step.
2. Customizable Templates and Assemblies
One of the biggest benefits of estimation software is repeatability. Many bids and proposals rely on the same pieces of information and configurations of supplies. STACK offers takeoff templates and custom assemblies you can reuse again and again to ensure high quality and consistency with every bid.
3. Proposal and Report Generation Tools
Generate polished proposals with all the necessary information, like your brand name, terms and conditions and contact details. With a standardized format and a professional image, you can offer easy-to-read proposals your clients understand at a glance. Then, quickly create reports for takeoff summaries, takeoff details and material, labor and equipment costs.
4. Documentation Resources
Organize your files from one place with a repository for project plans and other documents, such as schedules and bills of materials. Our tools can help you sort through these documents quickly and include:
- – AutoNaming: Automatically name your plan pages based on your naming rules and eliminate having to look for the right plan amidst dozens of untitled documents.
- – Plan and Keyword Search: Find what you’re looking for with phrase searches that dive into different plans in your library.
- – Automatic Plan Hyperlinking: Reference a plan within another document and STACK can automatically create a hyperlink for easy access, so you and your collaborators can quickly jump to the other plan.
5. Cost Management Tools
Prices can change quickly and depend on many factors, so STACK delivers tools to help you ensure they’re accurate. We offer reliable estimates on commonly used items and customization options to input your actual costs for frequent supplies and labor. STACK can also help you manage markup, profits and overhead costs within your projects. With a paid subscription, STACK supplies immediate access to regional item costs and helps you link labor and material items to your takeoff.
6. Ease of Use and Best-in-Breed Customer Service
STACK was designed to be intuitive and easy to use. Even the most old-fashioned contractor can learn STACK in no time. The interface is simple and far from intimidating, so all of your team members can learn it quickly, reducing common delays and complexities that could frustrate workers.
We also offer free training and ongoing support to help you make the most of the program, including access to our robust knowledge base, on-demand resources and chat support from directly within STACK.
7. Cloud-Based Access and Collaboration
Desktop-based software can be slow and limiting. You can only access it from certain devices, and collaborating with multiple people is cumbersome. If your computer gets lost, stolen or damaged and you haven’t backed it up, all your files are gone.
STACK uses a modern cloud-based system so you can access the platform from nearly any device with internet access. Your files reside in secure cloud servers, where they’re better protected from loss and theft and won’t take up precious space on your hard drive. With a cloud-based system, you get frequent updates with no frustrating downtime on your end. We’re always improving through weekly updates pushed to STACK through the cloud.
Plus, our paid subscriptions allow you to work with others simultaneously and keep your team on the same page. Users can chime in and access plans from the office, the jobsite or a client meeting. Collaborate with versatile features for marking up plans, sharing them and inviting external and internal team members.
8. Integrations
Contractors use an array of programs to get the job done, and making sure they play nicely together can help improve the value of each one. STACK works alongside word processors, document storage solutions, accounting software, customer relationship management programs and many other tools you might have in your arsenal.
Some of the industry-leading tools you can use with STACK include:
- – Intuit Quickbooks
- – Dropbox
- – Dodge Data & Analytics
- – OneDrive
- – Procore
- – Google Drive
- – TotalBid
- – 1build
9. Takeoff and Measurement Tools
Get the most accurate takeoff possible with STACK’s unlimited measurements, location and phase grouping, a smart legend and accurate measurement tools. STACK offers a significantly faster takeoff experience than using pen and paper, so you can impress clients and generate more bids per week.
10. Scalability
If you’re trying to grow your business, STACK can grow with you. Start with a free account, and if your needs evolve, we’re here to help. Once you start raking in more jobs with STACK, you can add more users or simultaneous projects with a simple upgrade. Then, you’ll get immediate access to the resources you need and our fast onboarding and on-demand training tools.
When it’s time to branch out, you can take advantage of STACK tools across other trades, like drywall, insulation, roofing or general contracting. STACK is your one-stop shop for preconstruction.
Start Your Free Painting Estimate With STACK
Manual painting estimates won’t cut it in today’s competitive market. Thankfully, the ability to create professional, accurate, efficient estimates is just a few screens away and completely free to start using.
Ready to see how free painting estimate software can help you win more bids and work more efficiently? Sign up now to create a free account, and learn why over 65,000 users turned to STACK in 2022 alone!
