ProjectQuoting Review: Value for money bet for small businesses

So we signed up for a ProjectQuoting.com free trial. Here is an unbiased ProjectQuoting review based on real usage from a small landscaping business.

While we don’t regret getting the premium subscription, here is what you need to know about the platform.

The problem of a small landscaping business owner

Last month one of our consultants had a chat with a small landscaping business based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The owner shared that he is having trouble managing several projects as he looks to expand his team and scale his business. It has only been 3 years since he got in the landscaping business and he thought it would be easier to scale as he hires more people in his team.

With the network, the owner was able to increase his daily leads to 4 a day. But now with the leads he didn’t know which ones were worth taking up without going to the actual site.

He shared that he has the best people he can get but they all look for cues from him when it comes to managing even the smallest jobs. The owner was looking for a solution to cut back on the manual admin work and make his pre-quotation work easier.

There were a few other problem areas he looked to solve:

• How can a small business manage projects from multiple clients and keep all the data with them so it can be referenced later?
• How can someone who wears multiple hats create estimates quickly so that the company can focus on profitable leads without needing to go to every site?
• How can a small business owner manage discounts and schedule services if he wants to start lawn care subscriptions as a service?
• With the increasing team, how can a manager find the easiest routes for all the workers to save time and money?
• If the owners already have a few systems in place, how can they make sure that the newest system can work well with their existing system so that overall work is reduced and not increased?

While researching for a solution, our consultant came across the ProjectQuoting platform. They were able to find some ways the above problems can be solved through this platform.

Keep on reading to find out how ProjectQuoting fares for small business owners – where it excels and where it lacks.

Also read: ProjectQuoting Review: Value for money bet for small businesses

ProjectQuoting Usage Review

ProjectQuoting is a property measurement and quoting software for landscaping or lawn care services.

Mainly built for effortless quote creation and solicitation based on the quotes, it also has a customer management functionality along with the ability to generate invoices, route management and lead capture through website forms and widgets.

The software is developed by “Quotonamy LLC“.

Online property measurement

Pro

ProjectQuoting has a satellite/map-enabled property measuring system. With the system in place, you can enter a property address and start measuring property size using satellite images.

The measuring tool is easy to use and allows you to create quotes using the measured area. You can use this measured area to set off the pricing that you created (tiered, based on size).

The calculated area can then be added as an opportunity (quote) and sent to a contact.

Con

It is worth noting that you cannot enter your full address in a single line. The address has to be broken and added. There is an additional possibility that your address isn’t recognized so you have to move the map to the correct address manually.

Pro

Apart from this, when you create a new contact (ProjectQuoting has a built-in CRM as well, which we will talk about in a bit), you can’t add measurements while you creating that contact.

There is an option to add measurements of a contact later from the CRM (total size only, you can’t have multiple properties with a single contact).

Con

But you can add only manual measurements. It would have been much better if the property measurement tool could be used while adding new contacts or while adding property information to an existing client.

Quote creation and invoicing

Pro

You can measure property using their online property measurement tool and get the size of the client’s lawn using a few clicks.

Apart from this, with the measurement you can create a quote (called a new opportunity in ProjectQuoting.com).

In the quote, you can add your services and send the quote to the prospect using email, SMS, online link, or even a QR code (See the sample QR code below). These multiple options are helpful as they make it easier for your client or prospect to view the quote and select the services they find useful.

You can also upload digital documents such as blueprints, certifications, and other social proof documents for better solicitations in your quotation.

We created a proposal for a customer. Here is a sample of what a PDF quote looks like from ProjectQuoting.com.

With the quotes that are accepted by the customers, and the work is invoiced, you can get the payment using integrations such as QuickBooks, Square, Paypal, Stripe, and more.

There is flexibility when it comes to invoice creation – you can edit price invoices while the invoice is live. This is helpful when the scope of work changes or the client has additional requests that weren’t in the original quote.

While you can change the invoice on the go, you need to ensure your contract with the clients allows you to do so (deviate from the original quote).

Invoices are charged seperately and cost you in addtion to your subscription. You can buy invoice credits groups of 25 for $0.75 cents per credit.

We were able to add discounts and add service level discounts but these have to be configured before in the platform.

Con

Even though the promo codes, credit, and prepay discount systems in the platform are helpful for incentivizing prospects, we found it difficult to add discounts while creating invoices for customers (adding discounts in line items instead of overall discounts).

Latest update on sending quotes to customers:

All our quotes landed in the spam folder of the emails we added.

Services

Pro

You can configure the services that you offer as a landscaping business in the platform.

Apart from adding the services, you can use the “addons and surcharges” feature to help add small-value services to your quote.

Example: While pushing the quote for backyard redesign, you can add junk removal and power washing pavements as add-ons.

The Addons and Surcharges can be added as a default in quotes and can’t be avoided by a client. You can also keep them optional so the customer can select and choose what they want. Pretty handy tool to get more revenue from your existing services.

When you add a new service, the platform shows you two options – create a service yourself or use a pre-made template.

The DIY option works just fine. But with a pre-made template, you’d expect to get all the details pre-filled so that you can do a few tweaks and get that service going for you quickly.

Con

But ProjectQuoting is a bit different.

It gives you an industry to select first, and when you select any one (such as lawn care), it will show you some samples. After you select and import a pre-made service – it imports 75% of the required configuration for adding a new service. It doesn’t include a description and leaves out some details for you to figure out.

We selected “lawn care” as the industry and imported Core Aeration as the service. We were able to import tiered pricing for the service but the description was missing along with a few key details.

Pro

This being said, the adding services functionality is still very helpful because for a small business, you’d have a few core services and you would want to use these in every quotation.

Marketing/Lead generation

Pro

The platform gives you some powerful lead-capture opportunities. While the features itself doesn’t generate leads for you, they help you capture more of them so you are set when running any marketing campaign for lead generation.

Currently, there are 5 sub-features of marketing.

• Public profile page – This lets you create your micro website with a set format. Your customers can go to your link, book services, and pay you from the page directly.

• Automated opportunities – with this feature, you can send automated quotes to some of your contacts at a scheduled time.

• Email campaign – you can send mass emails to your contacts. These are charged extra (.003995 Cents per address sent). This means if you are sending one email to a bulk list of 10,000 addresses, you will need to pay $40 for each email.

• Coupons and discounts – This is a nifty feature that allows you to generate coupon codes for your customers so they can get a discount. This can be used in your marketing campaigns where you advertise about service discounts. When a customer enters this coupon code on your quote page (online), they can see the discount getting applied.

• Lead form & quoting widget – This is a live form that you can place on your website or create your micro website and then place the form for lead capture. The form helps your prospects to measure their lawn, add their services, and pay directly to you. They can also ask for a quote by giving you a lead for a landscaping job.

As you can guess, these do not work themselves. For actual leads to come through to you, you need to drive those contacts to these touchpoints which can then help you ease the points of friction which might result in more leads.

Con

We found the public profile configuration to be typical. You need to add an image URL for adding your logo and services/product images. For a nontech person, it’s going to be difficult. There are no instructions on how you can upload images on the free cloud drives and add the URL here.

We didn’t get the chance to test and review the email marketing feature. We did test the discount and coupons feature. It works as expected.

Pro

You can create a discount code in the backend. Your customers can apply the code during the checkout process after they have selected the services and add-ons.

Routing and Scheduling

Pro

With projectquoting, you can efficiently create your routes between several places at once. You just need to enter the address and if the platform can accurately get your address, it will automatically show you the best path for your vehicle.

You can also view routes to a property by going to the opportunities section of the platform.

Additionally, you can also save the routes and view them anytime either from your laptop or your phone.

Con

ProjectQuoting is unable to map all routes. We fed it a sample of 10 routes – some were closer by and some far apart. It was only able to calculate routes where it recognized the address. For some addresses that it didn’t recognize, it skipped calculating routes in the calculation.

Pro

Another useful feature is to manage jobs. Along with routing, you can create members (employees), and crews, name them, and assign them to a particular job.

Con

For crews to work, you need to manually add all crew details. We couldn’t find an option to import crew details which could come in very handy. Because due to the nature of the landscaping business, our client gets a lot of temp workers during the season. Now adding every member detail is a pain without an option to upload a one-off sheet.

Pro

You can also use a calendar to find all events (including the automated or pre-scheduled services)

Job and work scheduling is charged seperately and cost you in addtion to your subscription. You can use the module for using job and work orders for an additional $10/month.

Customer management

Pro

ProjectQuoting has a built-in basic CRM (customer relationship management). It’s useful for keeping a history of each activity that happened with an account.

All events get recorded automatically. When you send an opportunity, receive a response, send an SMS, and more — everything for a customer is recorded in the CRM.

The platform lets you create categories for your contacts so you can segment them. These categories are helpful when you want to segment contacts in a way so you can send bulk opportunities or emails to them.

We created 6 contacts. We were also able to upload the contact list using the Excel file. There is a nifty bulk upload option here which is missing in the crew/member feature.

Con

While uploading your existing contacts, you need to make sure that your address is in the correct format, otherwise the field will be uploaded as blank.

Pro

We didn’t stress test for how many contacts you can upload at a time. The website says you can upload unlimited contacts but doesn’t specify how many can you upload in one go.

It might be best to do it in chunks if you have a million records. We speculate that a few hundred should be doable at any point in time.

Integrations

Pro

There are only two integrations available as of now in ProjectQuoting. One is an Active campaign for email marketing and another one is Quickbooks for syncing customers and generating invoices.

Con

The integration screen is harder to reach once you are logged in. We used the onboarding option to get to integrations, but it isn’t available right on the main sidebar which has all the other features listed.

We didn’t test how well ProjectQuoting works with ActiveCampaign and Quickbooks because we don’t have subscriptions to either of these.

ProjectQuoting Review Summary

ProjectQuoting does the job well for small businesses because it has the most functionality they would need for day-to-day operations, quotations, and invoicing.

It does an A1 job for quoting and invoicing. We found extra pricing a bit surprising as it’s not something that is advertised on the website. We are happy with the overall pricing because it’s something even a very small business can pay.

The platform can do a tad better with job scheduling and time sheets. The time sheet function for now just seems like a digital copy of the manual that our client used to create. We think all other functions can be integrated to make the workflows smoother.

Quick feature and functionality check:

Alternatives:

• See BEST Landscaping Estimation Software [+Takeoff, AI, Automated Picks].

Review Disclosure

We did not receive any compensation for doing this review of projectquoting.com. Our reviews are completely unbiased based on actual usage and suitability according to our experience experts.

The aim of publishing this review is purely to help you make an informed decision.

Read our review and editorial disclosure here.