Quick Start
You don’t need a week to get started. Most contractors are fully set up and sending their first bid in under a day — often over a single afternoon. This page is the shortest path.
30-minute core setup
Section titled “30-minute core setup”Pour a coffee, open Settings, and run through these in order. Each one takes a couple of minutes.
- Company basics — name, address, phone, email, logo. Settings → Company.
- Labor rates — operator, truck driver, general labor, mobilization, overhead percentage. Settings → Company → Rates. These power every bid calculation from here on.
- Business-day length — usually 8 hours. Settings → Scheduling.
20 minutes — your resources
Section titled “20 minutes — your resources”The lists that populate bid dropdowns. You can be thorough later; add what you need to bid today.
- Equipment — name, type, hourly rate, fuel capacity. At minimum, list whatever you’ll use on your first bid.
- Personnel — your crew with roles and hourly rates.
- Vendors — your key suppliers and subcontractors.
- Materials — at least the top few materials you regularly bid, each with one vendor source + price.
- (Optional) Locations — your yards and offices so the AI can compute mobilization distance.
On Business Plus with QuickBooks? Skip customer and vendor entry — connect QuickBooks and they sync automatically.
10 minutes — invite your team
Section titled “10 minutes — invite your team”Optional for your first bid, but worth doing before you need timecards:
- Click Invite on each personnel record — they get a magic-link email, download the mobile app, and sign in. No passwords.
- (Optional) Group people into Crews if you typically run the same teams together.
Send your first bid
Section titled “Send your first bid”Pick a job you’re actually quoting this week. Two paths:
- AI Bidding Chat — describe the project, answer a few clarifying questions, and the AI drafts a complete bid using your rates and resources.
- Manual Bidding — build every line item yourself. The form auto-fills rates once you pick personnel, equipment, and vendors.
Either way, review the allocations, hit Send, and the bid goes to the customer as a professional PDF — or through the Customer Portal for e-signature (Business or higher).
Optional — publish your marketing website
Section titled “Optional — publish your marketing website”Another 15 minutes — included on every plan:
- Configure your Company Marketing Website — subdomain, template, hero image, services, gallery.
- Enable the Quote Request form.
- Publish and add the URL to your email signature, business cards, and Google Business listing.
New quote requests land in your dashboard with a one-click Create Customer & AI Bid action — so future jobs go from “web visitor” to “sent bid” in minutes.
What’s next
Section titled “What’s next”After day one you have:
- A fully configured account.
- Your first bid sent.
- Your team on mobile (if you invited them).
- Optionally, a live marketing website capturing leads.
From here, keep the flywheel spinning:
- Use the AI daily — every bid trains your prompting reflexes.
- Keep rates and materials current — the AI only bids as well as the data it sees.
- Set up Smart Notifications — get emails on new quote requests, low inventory, and bid status changes so nothing slips.