Carpentry Quoting Without the Guesswork

How to Price a Merbau Deck Without Losing Your Shirt

Price a deck by the square metre for labour, but by the linear metre for materials, and add separate lines for all hardware. Quoting a flat per-metre rate hides the real cost. The price of 90x19mm Merbau decking changes constantly. You also need to account for the substructure like treated pine joists, bearers, stirrups, joist hangers, bugle screws, and decking oil. Forgetting even one of these can eat up your profit. QuoteMate’s deck calculator pulls live timber prices and automatically suggests all the required hardware, from the M10 bolts down to the stainless steel screws. Always add 10-15% for wastage on decking boards.

Pricing Framing and Trusses with Live Material Costs

The biggest mistake in framing quotes is using old prices for MGP10 pine or LVL beams. The price from CSR or your local timber yard can shift weekly. A quote that sat with a client for a month could now be unprofitable. Your quote needs to be based on today's price, not last quarter's. You also need to factor in fixings, bracing, and delivery costs, which are often missed on smaller jobs. This protects your margin on every stud wall or roof truss you build. As a rule of thumb, check the latest AS 1684 standard for tie-down requirements and bracing.

Quoting Fix-Outs: Doors, Skirtings and Architraves

Price fix-outs per item or per linear metre, but never forget the cost of consumables and prep work. It's easy to price the door or the length of skirting, but the profit is lost on the small stuff. This includes door hardware, packers, glue, nails, and gap filler. A client might supply the main door, but you're still on the hook for the full installation kit. A good quote lists these items separately so the client sees the full scope of work. For a standard internal door hang, budget around $25 for consumables on top of the door hardware, which can start from a $35 passage set at Bunnings.

Manage Every Carpenter Job From Inquiry to Paid

Quoting is only half the work. QuoteMate tracks every carpentry job through a 9-stage pipeline — inquiry, quoted, accepted, scheduled, in progress, completed, paid, closed, or cancelled — with timestamps stamped automatically so you can see where every dollar is sitting and where the bottleneck is. Schedule jobs in two taps with Google Calendar sync, snap and annotate on-site photos against the job (not lost in your camera roll), keep a brain-dump checklist of materials and to-dos for the day, and chase quotes automatically if a customer goes quiet.

See how carpenters run jobs in QuoteMate →