Fourth Shift Estimator

Every Job Quoted Right

With Fourth Gear Estimator, you can dramatically increase the accuracy of your estimates, making sure that nothing is missed or overlooked.

Not only does Fourth Gear Estimator integrate directly with your Fourth Shift item definitions and inventory, but it also breaks down every line’s material, labor, and overhead costs for easy review. And if that weren’t enough, you’ll also see margin calculations for your overall estimate, as well as each line, helping you to ensure that your estimates have built-in profitability.

In addition to this, Fourth Gear Estimator also allows you to define configuration scripts that can streamline complex and customizable estimates while reducing potential mistakes. With Fourth Gear Estimator, you could for example create a configuration script for quoting the construction of a table, allowing your estimators to specify the table size, the types of material used, as well as add-on items such as built-it electrical outlets. The possibilities are near endless.

Estimate With Precision On Standard And Custom Jobs

Creating an estimate can be complex, requiring you to come up with quotes for items in inventory, vendor items, custom items that you build especially for a customer, and even items that you modify based on a customer’s needs.

Whether you’re quoting on a job for a commercial kitchen or to fulfill a customer’s request for a custom product, keeping track of the kind of items in an estimate – and how much they cost – is key.

Fourth Gear Estimator has multiple item types that let you choose items from your Fourth Shift item master list, as well as lets you create derivative and custom items for customers based on configuration scripts or ad hoc definitions. Each item type is easily identifiable with a visual badge, helping you to make sure you’ve estimated the right type of item each and every time.

And with Fourth Gear Estimator, you’re also able to give meaningful titles and descriptions to each of your line estimates, making it easy for you to keep track of what’s been quoted and what’s not.

Streamline Estimates With A Powerful Configuration Engine

At the heart of Fourth Gear Estimator lies a powerful configuration engine that helps you define configuration scripts for your estimators that dramatically streamline estimation efforts while helping to ensure profitability.

Rather than require your estimators to define every item that makes up a product that you quote and sell, Fourth Gear Estimator allows you to define configuration scripts that do the hard work for you.

Using configuration scripts to build out estimates, your estimators simply need to answer a series of question and answer prompts (such as the size needed, the type of material used, etc.), and the configuration engine takes care of the rest.

And although Fourth Gear Estimator’s configuration engine might make things look simple, don’t let that fool you: It’s capable of supporting even the most complex estimation scenarios, complete with support for formulas, conditional dependencies, and even “for each item” setups.

With Fourth Gear Estimator, you can create estimates in hours that would normally take weeks.

Two-Way Integration With Fourth Shift

Perhaps best of all, Fourth Gear Estimator integrates natively with Fourth Shift: You’ll be able to see all of your Fourth Shift customers, items, and other information you need for producing estimates right in Fourth Gear Estimator. And when you’re ready to turn an estimate into an order, Fourth Gear Estimator does the heavy lifting there for you, too. With one click, Fourth Gear Estimator can automatically post your estimates to Fourth Shift – including estimates with custom bills.

This creates a fully integrated experience for your employees that keeps them focused on the task at hand – rather than having to look up or rekey information into Fourth Shift.

Always Ensure Your Quotes Are Profitable

It can be easy to lose track of dollars and cents on large, complex estimates. But ensuring that your estimates are profitable is always critical to the bottom line.

That’s why with Fourth Gear Estimator, margins and markups are treated as first-class citizens.

Not only will you see how big or small your margins are on your estimates, you’ll be able to see how much margin each line contributes to your overall profit margin.

And to help you make sure that you’re making your margins, Fourth Gear Estimator supports line-level and estimate-level markups that allow you to specify a fixed or percentage-based markup that you can use to ensure profit margins and targets.

Supports Formulas, Rules, And Dependencies For Complex Estimates

With Fourth Gear Estimator’s powerful configuration engine, you’re able to define complicated and nuanced configuration scripts for products that you configure and customize for your customers.

With it, you’ll have a powerful tool that you can wield to tackle the toughest of estimating problems:

• Define formulas to determine pricing based on material and size – and even how many dependent components are needed for making an item.
• Define configuration rules that make sure your estimators don’t miss an item, make a mistake, or quote an invalid product configuration.
• Create conditional dependencies that let your estimators add items and components based on qualifying rules and criteria.
• Create validations that ensure that estimators only quote configurations that meet certain specifications.

Professional, Customer-Ready Quotes

And of course, what good is creating an estimate if you can’t share it with a customer?

Fourth Gear Estimator produces professional, attractive, and customizable PDFs of your estimates that you can print, email, or even fax to your customers.

Customer-ready estimates show only customer-facing quotes and pricing and enable your customers to clearly and cleanly see the details of your professional estimation.