An estimate is a jobcard that hasn't started yet. Same shape, same line items, same parts and labour — just flagged as not-live so it stays out of your live job list and your workflow's status columns.
You write estimates to quote work to a customer. When they accept, Promote to Jobcard flips the flag and the estimate joins the live workflow at your garage's default status.
What's different from a normal jobcard
- Different reference prefix — estimates show as
#Estimate 17while live jobcards show as#17. The counter is shared across both (it's the total count of jobcards + estimates in your company), so the numbers themselves don't restart — only the prefix changes - Own column on the workflow board — estimates gather in a dedicated grey Estimate column at the far left of the kanban, so they don't clutter your status columns
- Own list at
/estimatesin the app - Everything else identical — jobs, parts, labour, inspections, activity log, comments
Estimate Jobs
A whole jobcard flagged as an estimate isn't the only way to quote. An individual job on a live jobcard can sit at the authorisation status Estimate, so you can price up extra work found mid-service without holding the rest of the jobcard back.
Those jobs have two homes:
- The Estimates page has a view switcher at the top with two tabs: Estimate Jobcards (the estimates described above) and Estimate Jobs, which lists every live jobcard that has at least one job still at the Estimate authorisation status, with a count of how many.
- On the jobcard itself, an Estimates tab holds those jobs, separate from the Jobs tab. Each one carries a Send to Jobs button in place of the usual authorisation status dropdown. Clicking it marks the job as authorised, and it moves over to the Jobs tab ready to be worked on.
Only on live jobcards
A jobcard that is itself an estimate has no separate Estimates tab — the whole record is the quote, so all its jobs stay on the Jobs tab.
Permissions
Estimates have their own permission family that sits on top of the ordinary jobcard permissions: estimates.view, estimates.create, estimates.edit, and estimates.delete. Promoting an estimate counts as editing it, so estimates.edit is all you need. Reception gets the first three by default but not estimates.delete, so a receptionist can write and promote estimates without being able to delete them.
When you'd use one
- A customer brings their car in for an assessment and wants a price before agreeing to the work
- You're writing a quote without the vehicle physically present
- You want a pricing draft you can iterate on without it appearing live