Moving to Aestima
Most practices stay on the estimating software they have for one reason: everything they have ever quoted lives inside it, and moving looks like starting again. That is the part we solve first.
Not a blank system and a spreadsheet import you run yourself. We take an export from your current software and move your clients, addresses, estimates, line items, purchase orders and invoices across - with the links between them intact, so an estimate still knows its orders and an order still knows its supplier.
We have done this with a twenty-year database, and we check the result rather than assuming it: every relationship is counted after the import, and anything that did not resolve is reported rather than quietly left empty. Row counts alone will tell you a migration worked when it has not.
Send us an export of whatever you use now and we will tell you honestly what will come across, what will not, and what it will take - before you commit to anything.
If your estimating currently lives on one machine per licence, and the way two people share a job is a network drive or a Dropbox folder, this is what is different.
No file locking and no checking a job out. Two people can work the same estimate - the same room, the same line - and each sees the other's changes as they happen, with no refresh. A large job never has to be split into pieces and stitched back together.
Supplier costs sit on hidden lines behind the client-facing price, so margin is never exposed on a document a client sees. Those lines feed a purchase order that locks once it is issued, and an incoming supplier quote can never overwrite a line already ordered or invoiced. The VAT on the invoice mirrors the estimate exactly, because it is the same calculation, not a second one.
Type a supplier's price in euros or dollars and it converts to your own currency on the spot, keeping a record of the rate it used and when. Show a whole estimate to a client in their currency, with the rate locked the moment you save, so a quote you have already sent never silently re-prices itself.
Send us the estimate or invoice layout your practice already uses and we rebuild it as an editable template inside Aestima, with your figures flowing into it. Your paperwork keeps looking like your paperwork. Every user can also set up the columns they want to see, and keep them.
It runs in a browser, so a new starter needs an account rather than a licence and a machine. Your data is backed up on a schedule and the restore is rehearsed, not assumed.
A client-facing approval portal and direct accounting sync are both on the way rather than finished. If either is the thing that decides it for you, say so when you get in touch and we will tell you where they actually are, rather than selling you a roadmap.
Aestima is built and supported by the person who writes it. That is why the answers are specific.
We will walk you through it against your own kind of work - a real estimate, a real purchase order, the documents you would send out - and answer what your practice actually needs to know.
Request a walkthrough