Purpose 🧠

Estimating is one of the biggest revenue creating functions in most businesses. It’s also one of the biggest concepts to learn in Aspire, but you may not immediately find a module for it in the blue side menu. Why?

Within a property, you can create Opportunities representing potential new work for your clients.

This article provides an overview of the estimating process in Aspire.

You will learn the basic estimating concepts such as:

Opportunities, Contracts, Work Orders, Estimates, and their Opportunity Statuses.

By the end of this article, you'll have a solid grasp of the estimating workflow in Aspire, supporting you to transition from having potential work to securing profitable jobs!

The two different opportunity types available are Contracts and Work Orders.

Contracts are used for recurring services like maintenance or snow removal that will be delivered over an extended period and can be renewed annually.

Work Orders are used for one-time projects, ranging from small simple jobs to multi-million dollar projects spanning months of work.

Fixed Payment is a contract type that’s great for Maintenance contracts. It’s recommended to set your contracts to span a year and complete a renewal before the contract expiration date.

T&M is used for any contract work that might span across seasons that require extra materials or labor and that extra expense is not yet defined. This goes for contract or work order invoice types.

Per Service is a contract type that is good for when you are offering your customer services on an as needed basis.

Fixed Price on Payment Schedule is a work order invoice type used for work orders that need to be split up by a certain amount. Your customer could pay a deposit up front with this type of opportunity and make installment payments based on a schedule you set up in your opportunity.

T&M on Completion is used for any contract work that might span across seasons that require extra materials or labor and that extra expense is not yet defined.

Fixed Price on Completion is a work order invoice type that is set up to make sure you received a set amount and nothing due more to you based on the approved opportunity. You would be billing one time at the end of the job with this invoice type.

Fixed Price Open Billing is a work order invoice type that allows you to bill your customer part or the entire amount of the opportunity at any time. This is great for construction related jobs.

This Opportunity Status Workflow chart provides a visual representation of the different stages an opportunity can go through in the estimating process.

It shows you Aspire’s statuses, such as New, Bidding, Pending Approval, Approved, Delivered, Lost, and Won.

The workflow starts with an opportunity being created on a property, followed by the creation of an estimate for that opportunity. The estimate then goes through a series of steps, including being marked as Complete, waiting for internal approval, being readied for the customer, and then being sent to the customer.

🧠 The chart below also accounts for potential outcomes, such as your customers rejecting the estimate or accepting it.

✅ To access the Opportunities module, you will need to have View Opportunities or View Only My Opportunities added to your user role.

✅ To create new opportunities from a properties’ detail screen, you will need to have Add Opportunity added to your user role.

✅ In order to edit Opportunities, you’ll need either Edit My Opportunities or Edit All Opportunities added to your user role.

✅ To win Contracts or Work Orders, you’ll need either or both Win Contracts or Win Work Orders added to your user role.

✅To lose Contracts or Work Orders, you’ll need Lose Opportunities added to your user role.

📑To learn more about Property and Opportunity restrictions, read this article.

Accurate estimating is critical for any business looking to maximize profitability on jobs and projects. Aspire's estimating tools allow you to calculate costs down to the last detail, making sure you never leave money on the table!

Because Aspire is a property centric system, creating an opportunity happens within a property, not in the Opportunities module.

💡The folders listed below these two options are for selecting an Opportunity Template, which can be created by saving an opportunity. To learn more about Creating Estimates with Templates, click here.

Below you’ll see the new contract screen that is ready for us to enter in details related to the new opportunity!

Let’s review some of the most commonly used fields!

As you create your estimate, there are fields that have a red asterisk (*) next to them. This means these fields are required to be entered with information before you are able to save your opportunity.

Examples of Required Fields for opportunities are Division, Opportunity Name, Sales Rep and Sales Type.

🧠 You can set up additional Required Fields for opportunities in Administration ▶️ Required Fields.

Enter the name of your Opportunity. This should be a brief description of the work that is thorough enough to identify the opportunity when it is displayed on a list.

Select the invoice type you can set for your customer’s opportunities. The invoice type in the opportunity sets the billing structure for your company to receive payments!

This field allows you to specify the name of the sales rep responsible for the opportunity. The opportunity will be reflected in the Sales Scorecard established for the selected employee. This field will default to the property account owner, but you can change it as needed.

Setting your Division makes sure reports that reflect sales by division will include the cost and revenue for the opportunity.

The Start Date represents the beginning of work for the Contract or Work Order. The End Date represents the end of the work for the Contract or Work Order. For contracts, this date can be left blank. This means that the contract is open ended and will be ongoing.

You have the ability to customize your proposal layouts. Proposal Description 1 and Proposal Description 2 allow you to provide text that will be placed in your proposal when you generate or print it. Enter your descriptions as needed.

Opportunity Invoice Notes on the opportunity will pull into your invoice layouts when you generate or print them.

The Estimator Notes field allows Sales Representatives to add notes that were identified during the sales process. These notes provide assistance to the estimator when they are making the opportunity estimate.

This is a text based note field only, and does not support formatting like other notes fields in Aspire.

Renewal Date and Master Job are fields on the opportunity screen that are not available for work orders. This is because contracts can be renewed while work orders are for one time jobs and would not have renewals or master jobs they are renewed from.

As you build out the estimate details, Aspire tracks the Opportunity Status which is automatically updated based on your progress in the estimating process. When you enter the opportunity fields with information, they are created with a status of New.

This allows you to clearly see where each potential sale stands in the pipeline.

When you’ve entered all of your Opportunity details, then select the 3 dot menu and choose Create Estimate.

Your Estimate allows you to outline your work, the required tools/materials, and total costs. This is done by adding Services, Items, and Kits which accelerate the estimating process!

As you build out your Estimate, the Opportunity status is updated to Bidding.

With line item estimating for materials, labor, and equipment and more, Aspire provides the estimating power for even the most complex projects accurately.

📹To learn more about creating estimates watch Aspire’s Estimating training videos here.

The service group header is a customizable field that allows you to group services provided to the customer during the job. New groups can be added and removed as needed.

For contracts, a special group called Optional Services is provided as the last group in the estimate.

The Service Group Notes text box allows you to enter a description about the service. This description can be included on your proposal layouts, if need be.

For your estimates, you have the ability to add Optional Services to your estimates.

Optional Services are services not specifically requested by the client, added for informational purposes when estimating an opportunity. Optional Services are not included in the estimated customer’s total estimated price.

They can be shown on proposals that your sales rep or account manager provides to your customer to present additional work able to be done for their job!

📑To learn more about the power of Optional Services, read this article.

Unlike a service that must be set up in the service catalog before it can be added to an estimate, a catalog item can be created during the estimating process.

In the example above, we have typed weed into the Item field. Aspire shows you matching items from the item catalog that are similar. There is also an option at the top called New One Time Item.

Clicking on this option shows you a window, and allows you to enter information for your one-time item that is not stored in the item catalog. Selecting Save will add this one time item to the estimate!

📹To learn more about One Time Items, watch this video!

The service level specifies the services that you propose providing to the customer for the work order or contract.

The Service Details screen allows you to alter Display Name, set minimum charges, set up default pay codes and paycode overrides, and more!

The Visit Checklist is optional, and can be set up for the service under the Service Description section:

📑To learn more about Visit Checklists, read this article.

This area is only displayed if the invoice type is set to time and materials (T&M). This table allows you to specify pricing and markups for each of the item types (labor price, material markup, equipment markup, sub-markup, and other markups).

Aspire uses these markup values to calculate prices instead of calculating based on markup and profit specified in the Pricing Settings screen in Admin. It also allows you to specify which item types are taxable using the default from the service as defined in your Service Catalog.

🧠If an opportunity with T&M services is copied from another opportunity or created from a template, the values in this table are copied from the original opportunity or template.

Once the opportunity has been won, the fields in the Pricing Table are no longer available to be edited.

Now that you understand what makes up an opportunity estimate, you can keep adding services and items and prepare to complete your estimate.

After your items and services have been added to your estimate, you can complete it by navigating to the opportunity details screen and selecting the three dot menu.

Choose Estimate Complete to change the status of your estimate from Bidding. Once the Estimate is complete, the Opportunity moves to Pending Approval or Approved for an internal review before being sent to the customer.

📌Note: This status differs depending on if your company has an Approval Workflow set up.

📑To learn more about Workflows in Aspire, read this article and watch this video.

After approval, the status becomes Approved and the proposal can now get sent to your client for a signature!

It’s important to let your customer give you a final approval before moving forward with any work. You have two options to get your customer their job details, either by printing the estimate or emailing them their estimate! To begin, select the three dot menu of the estimate details screen.

The second option for getting your customer’s estimates to them would be to email their proposal. Under the 3 dot menu, select Email Proposal.

The Email Opportunity Proposal screen appears and you are able to set your email recipients, craft a custom message, add tokens to your email, add any additional attachments and enable electronic signature!

Click Send when you are ready to email your proposal to your customer! The status of your proposal changes from Approved to Delivered.

If the customer accepts the Estimate, you can mark the Opportunity as Won in the three dot menu. It's time to begin work!

Each Service listed creates a Work Ticket with specific tasks, locations, and timelines for crews to follow to get the job completed.

When the opportunity is won, the opportunity will then use three Job Statuses for services being performed: In Process, Complete, or Cancelled.

If the client rejects an estimate, then you have a couple actions that you could take to get closer to closing the deal!

You could lose the opportunity, copy the opportunity, create a new opportunity with changes and resend it to your customer for them to approve.

You could also choose to reset the existing opportunity to Bidding, make any necessary changes, recomplete the estimate, and resend it to your customer for approval!

Careful planning and understanding customer needs allow your business to turn potential work into profitable realities!

There are some key terms to know when estimating a landscaping job using Aspire. The different invoice types are important to know as they will help you understand what terms your customer might prefer. They also depict when invoices are able to be sent to your customers!