A per-trade price book, three line types, markup at two levels, change orders and supplements signed on a phone, and a cost sheet that puts what you priced beside what you spent. When a job is awarded, the contract locks.
Tear-off, three-tab down to deck
Architectural shingle, 30-yr
Ice and water shield, eaves + valleys
Load, lay and fasten
30-yd dumpster, two hauls
City building permit
Subtotal
$32,593.80
Invoice markup · 12%
+ $3,911.26
Contract total
$36,505.06
Work moves across a kanban board from first phone call to closed file. The board is not decoration — the stage a row sits in decides whether the contract is editable, whether a PWO exists, and what the buttons on the screen say.
01
Opportunity
Captured, not yet qualified
02
Lead
Qualified, contact made
03
Estimating
Price book, lines, bid photos
04
Sent
Out for acceptance
05
Approved
PWO minted, lines frozen
06
Lost
Closed with a reason
07
Operations
Orders issued to vendors
08
In Progress
Crews on site
09
Quality Control
Punch list and sign-off
10
Billing
Invoice, then QuickBooks
11
Closed
Costed and filed
The switch is automatic. Before it is won, every screen, list header and export calls the record an Opportunity. The moment it crosses into the Approved zone it is a Project, it has a PWO number, and the estimate lines are a snapshot rather than a draft.
Everything the job touches hangs off one record instead of five places. Meetings, insurance claim detail, estimating, vendor orders, files and a full activity trail.
Estimating
Orders
Nobody should be re-deriving the cost of a square of architectural shingle from a text message they sent in March. The catalog is per-company and per-trade, and it grows out of the work you have already priced.
Every company gets its own catalog, organized by trade. We seed it with platform-default rows so a new account is not staring at an empty table on day one — after that it is yours to shape. Nothing is shared with another contractor.
Labor, Material, and general support for the things that are neither — permits, dumpsters, fees. The split is what makes the cost sheet at the end of the job mean something.
Set markup on an individual line where the margin is different, then apply an invoice-wide markup that compounds on top. Both are visible in the totals — nothing is buried in a rate.
Build child estimates under the same opportunity and rename each one — good, better, best; two roof systems; phase one against the whole building. The customer sees the version you send. The rest stay on the record.
Eleven trades ship with the platform. If your organization prices something we did not think of, add your own — custom trades sit beside the defaults in the same price book.
Every line you type on an estimate, a change order, a labor order, a material order or an invoice is harvested as a candidate price-book row. Nothing is added behind your back — candidates land in a pending queue.
Triage is three buttons. Add it and it joins the catalog at the price you charged on the job. Dismiss it and it stops asking. Leave it pending and it waits. The catalog ends up reflecting what your crews really do, not what someone thought they would do when the account was set up.
Ridge vent, 4-ft section
harvested from Material order
Drip edge, D-style, installed
harvested from Estimate line
Chimney flashing rebuild
harvested from Change order
Skylight curb reflash
harvested from Invoice line
Overnight tarp, per night
harvested from Labor order
Sources: estimate lines · change orders · labor orders · material orders · invoice lines
A frozen contract is only useful if there is a clean way to add to it. Change orders and supplemental estimates are first-class documents with their own acceptance flow — not a note in the margin of the original estimate.
Replace 14 sheets of decking found rotten at tear-off, plus additional ice and water shield over the affected area.
+ $2,184.00
Sign here
Signature renders into the generated PDF
Priced off the same price book, with their own e-sign acceptance flow and their own printable document. The customer signs for the addition specifically — so when the final invoice lands there is a signed page behind every dollar that was not in the original contract.
Supplemental estimates carry their own separate acceptance — which is what insurance work demands. Estimate acceptance, change-order acceptance and supplement acceptance all use a drawn signature pad that works on a phone in a driveway, and the signature is rendered into the PDF rather than referenced from somewhere else.
Budget
$32,594
Actual
$32,830
Variance
+ $236
The frozen estimate becomes the budget. Actuals arrive from the labor orders, material orders and invoice lines already sitting on the project, and each actual keeps the record it came from.
So when material runs $681 over, you can open the order that did it instead of arguing about it. Do that on enough jobs and the price book stops being a guess.
A bid request fans out to multiple contractors at once. Each one gets a real bid in their own pipeline, prices it with their own price book, and never sees anyone else’s number. The location picks. The round closes itself.
Losing contractors are moved to Lost automatically and sent a courteous notification. They are never shown the winning price.
Four doors into the same inbox: a public estimate-request form anyone can fill out, an in-app submission from a location already on ManageSync, manual entry by the ManageSync team, and the API.
One request becomes several bids — one per contractor, each living in that contractor’s own pipeline. Competing bids get no PWO and carry a Competing bid badge until a decision is made.
Propose one to five time windows. The manager accepts one or asks for different times. An overlap guard stops you from offering a window you have already committed elsewhere.
On a competing bid, Submit estimate replaces Send for approval. The customer is not signing anything yet — the bid goes to the manager running the round, priced from the same price book you use on your own work.
The manager runs Present to location. The bids go across together, the location reads them side by side and picks one. No one is bidding against a number they were shown.
The winner crosses into Approved: PWO minted, contract frozen, pushed to QuickBooks. Every other bid moves to Lost automatically and its contractor gets a courteous notification email. The round closes for everyone at once.
They post the request to the marketplace, watch the bids come in, and close it themselves. ManageSync stays out of the middle.
Charged to the winning contractor on award. Nothing is owed if you do not win the work.
The ManageSync team takes the request to contractors capable of the work in that market area, manages the site meetings, and presents the bids to the location.
Paid by the site owner, with the $500 deposit taken up front credited in full against it.
Contractors triage inbound work from a Bid Requests inbox — Start Bid, or Decline.
Vendor orders, insurance claims, site meetings, photos, and two kinds of link that let people outside your company do exactly one thing — and nothing else.
Generate both straight off the estimate. Choose how much transfers — header only, automatic line transfer, or a hybrid you edit before it goes out. Assign a vendor, start from an order template, email the order to the vendor, and print a document that looks like it came from your office.
A dedicated Insurance tab on the project holds the claim detail, backed by a carriers list. Supplements and change orders hang off the same record, so a claim that grows does not turn into a folder of loose PDFs.
Send a tokened link. Your sub uploads photos and documents to the job without an account, without a license, without you creating a user for someone who will be gone in a week.
One public link shows the customer a milestone timeline and nothing else. No pricing. No photos. No documents. It answers where we are without opening your file, and you can revoke it the moment the job closes.
Schedule the walk, add attendees, put it on the calendar and send the invite email. Bid photos are filed by section of the building rather than dumped in one roll, and attachments live beside them.
Estimates, change orders, supplements and vendor orders all print under your own branding from the Branding settings. The customer is doing business with you. The paperwork should say so.
No. The Standard contractor plan at $50 per user per month includes the full estimating stack — price book, multiple estimates, change orders, supplements, labor and material orders, and the project cost sheet — on your own work, with no marketplace involvement at all. The Marketplace plan adds inbound work orders and bid requests on top.
Crossing into the Approved zone snapshots every estimate line, locks the contract, mints the PWO number and pushes the record to QuickBooks Online. From that point the priced scope is a fixed document — new scope goes on a change order or a supplement, where it can be signed for separately. If the deal is moved back out of the Approved zone, the contract unlocks again.
Yes. Acceptance uses a drawn signature pad, so a finger on a phone screen works exactly like a stylus on a tablet. It is available on estimate acceptance, change-order acceptance and supplement acceptance, and the captured signature is rendered into the generated PDF rather than stored off to the side.
Yes. Upload your logo once in Branding settings and it carries onto printed estimates, change orders, supplements and vendor orders. ManageSync does not put itself on your paperwork.
Each contractor gets their own bid record inside their own pipeline. Competing bids carry a Competing bid badge and are never issued a PWO, so there is nothing shared to look at. The round is presented by the manager running it — contractors do not see each other’s pricing before or after. When the location picks a winner, the losing bids are moved to Lost and their contractors receive a notification email.
On an unmanaged bid request — where the location posts to the marketplace and closes it themselves — the winning contractor pays a $500 project win fee on award. Nothing is owed if you do not win. On a ManageSync-managed project the site owner pays a $500 deposit up front, credited in full against a 3% fee on the awarded contract total. Full details are on the pricing page.
Pick a scope you are quoting this week. We build it in the price book, add a change order, take the signature and read the cost sheet back to you at the end.