5 Best Electrical Estimating Software in 2024

An estimate should not come as a shock to your customers. It should be detailed, precise, simple, and, most importantly, accurate.

Using the pen-and-paper method simply takes away your leisure time. The time that you could spend with your family and friends, or partying, could turn out to be creating estimates manually.

And despite making several paper-based invoices, you still end up losing the electrical repair business because you took ages to create one single estimate that your competitor created and delivered within seconds.

So, what’s that one thing that you lacked and competitors added? It’s their decision to make a leap to the digital estimating process. The market is crowded with the best electrical estimating software, but we have sorted out what’s best for your business.

So, let’s get started.

Quick Electrical Estimating Software Comparison

Top-Rated Electrical Estimating Software Solutions

1. InvoiceOwl

If you are looking for easy-to-use estimate software for quick and accurate estimates, InvoiceOwl is the best software for electrical contractors. It helps electrical contractors to win jobs by creating and sending professional, reliable estimates.

This software not only helps electrical estimators create an estimate but also makes managing multiple estimates easier than ever. InvoiceOwl lets you:

• Streamline the entire electrical estimating system
• Know the real-time status of your estimates with live notifications
• Stores all the data like your client information, item details, and even the applicable taxes and discounts on every item
• Create accurate estimates in a few minutes
• Building brand trust
• Collect ratings and reviews directly from the clients

So, just have a quick look at the advanced features that InvoiceOwl offers.

Key features

• Estimates: Create quick and precise estimates and send them professionally to win more jobs.
• Invoices: Create and send invoices on the go through a computer or your smartphone to get paid faster.
• Online payments: Accept online payments through multiple payment gateways.
• Customer management: Save and manage customer information like contact name, address, email address, and phone number.
• Ratings: Get insightful feedback directly from your customers and showcase it to create your brand reputation.
• Tracking: Track your estimates, invoices, credit memos, and purchase orders, in real-time with status notifications.
• Reports: Get detailed annual reports with a single click to analyze your sales, taxes, and profit & loss.
• Purchase orders: Issue professional purchase orders and manage your inventory efficiently.
• Credit memos: Win the trust of your clients by sending them precise credit memos.

2. PlanSwift

PlanSwift is the apt electrical estimating software for you, even if you are an unskilled estimator. It helps you create detailed estimates. The software is even advantageous to project management companies as it comes with a project management feature.

This estimation software is about working in a team on a project. It might not be wrong to call it project management software. It not only helps you create precise estimates for the entire project but also helps with project management. Furthermore, with this estimating software, you can manage various subcontractors of the project.

PlanSwift helps you estimate in depth. You can estimate every single switch, socket, piece of wire, and every tiny part of the job.

Once you are done estimating electrical work, you can effortlessly either print the estimate or export it to send via email.

3. STACK

STACK is one of the most popular electrical estimating software. This electrical bid manager is the go-to choice for beginners. It is quite easy to use and does not need any training to use the software. However, you might have to try its features once to eventually get used to working with it.

You can save time by using its AutoCount feature. This does all the calculations, like labor units and profit margins, automatically and reduces the chances of human errors in the estimate. Thus, if you are a beginner and not confident about your estimating skills, this is the right choice for you.

With this software, you can easily estimate labor costs, material costs, and electrical equipment rentals. As it comes with a cost database, you can save your rates to create an accurate estimate instantly.

As it is cloud-based software, you can sign in from anywhere. This helps you leave your office and create estimates from the site of your electrical projects.

Moreover, you can manage multiple bids, and that makes it a lead management software too with the auto count.

4. ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan is an all-in-one solution for electrical contractors. It helps you

• Generate estimates for installing new assemblies
• Maintain pre-built assemblies
• Repairing contracts

With its benchmark job cost analysis, you can make faster decisions. It helps you

• Track and manage the job progress
• Monitor individual job costs and track labor costs
• Material costs
• Equipment costs on the project to limit them under the budget

The factor that makes it different from most estimation software is that it provides training in person, online, through webinars, documentation, and videos too. This means you can go through the training at your convenience and in the way that works best for you.

Moreover, this estimation software helps you manage the customer database. Therefore, you have to enter the customer details every time you create an estimate. This is more useful in maintaining customer service relations.

5. Intellibid

Intelibid is an electrical estimating solution that helps electrical contractors create a quick takeoff process. It is available on the cloud (as web-based), Windows desktops, on-premise Windows, and on-premise Linux. The fact that it is available on so many platforms makes it easily accessible.

Electrical contractors like you don’t have much time to do market research every now and then. Thus, the bid electrical estimating software already comes with industry-standard labor units. You can customize these units to create your own material pricing model.

And it has not only labor units but an entire industry-standard database. It includes more than 120,000 material price items for electrical and low-voltage contractors. and over 350,000 pre-built assemblies.

Intellibid works as takeoff software too. When creating a quantity takeoff, Intellibid lets you break down the project into smaller phases so that you can estimate accurately for every phase.

The wise electrical contractors know that the first bid they submit is mostly negotiated, and they have to pitch multiple revised bids to win the job. Thus, this electrical estimation software lets you create multiple bids for the same job for different situations with different labor departments and material prices.

The Intellibit estimating software lets you email the bid to the client via the in-built emailing option. You can send the bid packages to multiple clients. All in all, the software streamlines the entire estimating process.

So, these were some of the top electrical estimation software you should check out if you are tired of creating estimates manually.

New: Using estimating software might resolve many issues and help your electrical contracting company grow exponentially. Also, you can read the published electrician blogs for industry professionals to get more insights into specific topics.

But do you know what might hinder the growth? It’s choosing the wrong estimating software.

Since we don’t want you to commit mistakes, we have prepared a list of things to consider before subscribing to any estimating software.

Expert Buying Guide: Essential Features to Consider

To employ the best estimating software for your electrical contracting business, you need to know a few things.

So let’s go over them quickly.

To choose the best software for your business, you need to match the following things.

• Pricing models

  Pricing is most probably the first thing contractors pay attention to. Every business runs on a strict budget. So, go further only if it is affordable for your company.

  If the budget doesn’t allow you to buy the software you want, you need to revise the budget and priorities.

• Scalability

  Inquire if the software is able to handle the workload of your company.

  Let’s suppose, you have 5 accountants that create 10 estimates a day. Then the software you buy must be capable enough for doing that. If it does not support multi-users, it will not add value to your business.

  And if the software is capable of way more than that, you should rethink buying something that you don’t need.

• Types of core functionality

  Under this category, several types of software work amazingly well for electrical contractors. It includes

  • Cloud-based estimation software
  • Automated take-off software
  • Flexible structure estimating software
  • End-to-end estimating software
  • Accuracy checker software
  • Electrical and construction estimating software
  • Job management software

• Integration capabilities

  Estimating and invoicing software must be loaded with third-party applications so that you don’t spend time juggling between software. InvoiceOwl is one such software that has accounting and payment software integrated. It helps in receiving payments and tax filing, respectively.

  Having such software at your side means getting the job done in less time than your competitors.

  Consider such types of automated estimating software because each type caters to different needs.

  • Estimates and bids generation
  • Item cost database
  • Customer information database
  • Estimate templates
  • Estimate tracking
  • PDF exports

Now that you know how to choose one of the best electrical contractor estimating software programs, let’s look at some of its advantages.

Benefits of Using Electrical Estimating Software

Most businesses either want to purchase an estimation software or are already using it.

So, let’s understand why electrical estimating software is such a growing trend.

• Accurate Takeoffs

  Manual work is prone to human errors. Whereas, an electrical cost estimating system combined with takeoff software capabilities can reduce the chances of estimating mistakes. This not only saves you time in revisions and correcting those mistakes but saves the cost of correcting those mistakes.

• Time-saving

  Most electrical specialty contractors would say time is more precious than money. Thus, estimating needs tools that help you save a lot of time by quickly creating estimates. Software like InvoiceOwl lets you use ready-made estimate templates that can cut off half the time you spend creating an estimate from the scratch. By spending less time soliciting estimates, electricians will have more time to focus on complicated projects like construction projects, remodeling, or repair tasks.

• Increased Accessibility

  If you do not use any software for estimating, you would only create the estimates from your office. And it would demand a pile of paperwork to confirm and verify the minute details of the project. Whereas, estimating software like InoviceOwl lets you create an estimate form wherever you want. You can create it on your computer or smartphone.

  Moreover, it stores all the data in the cloud. Thus, you don’t risk losing any important information, such as your unit prices and customer contact information.

• Bid Management

  Managing all the bids at once is a hectic task. This needs a lot of scheduling and tracking of multiple bids. But, only if you don’t use estimating software. Bid management is made simpler with the quote management tool.

  For example, InvoiceOwl notifies you in real time whenever the client receives, opens, and approves your estimates. So, these are some of the major benefits you see directly when you adopt an estimating solution for your contracting business. Got any questions? We would be happy to answer them all. A few of the questions asked by contractors have been answered below.

Conclusion

Electrical fittings are becoming increasingly important as residential and commercial projects are being developed on a daily basis. And since you are busy doing wiring and fitting, you must want to automate a few sets of tasks.

That’s where you can integrate InvoiceOwl software and automate administrative tasks like estimating and invoicing. Gift yourself an electrical estimating software and see how rapidly your business scales up.