Building an estimate on the map

This is the main screen of the field app — where you turn a property, its trees, and your rates into a number you can hand to a customer.

Starting with the customer

Enter the customer’s name and start typing their address — suggestions appear as you type, and picking one fills the address and centers the map on the property. Phone and email are there too, useful for anything you send them later.

The map is your canvas

The map is a live satellite view, not a static picture. Tap anywhere on it to drop a pin for a tree, and a row for that tree appears below. Tap an existing pin and the screen jumps to that tree’s row — handy once you’ve got several trees down and need to find one again. If maps can’t load — no connection, or maps isn’t set up for the account — you can still enter every tree by hand; nothing here requires the map to work.

Each tree gets its own row

A row holds everything about one physical tree: a label if you want one, its species (type to search, or add one that isn’t listed), its service — removal, trim, or stump — cleanup, DBH, and whichever multipliers from your rate matrix apply. Grinding the stump of a removal is its own line, priced separately, but it stays attached to the same tree and the same pin rather than showing up as a second tree.

Measuring DBH

You can type a trunk diameter straight into the DBH field if you already know it. If you’re reading a tape instead, there’s a second field for that: enter the distance around the trunk, not across it, and tap “Use tape reading” — the app converts that circumference to a diameter for you. Getting the direction backwards is the single most expensive mistake available here, since it would inflate the tree’s price well beyond what the trunk actually supports.

Reading the price

Every row shows its own line price as you fill it in. The estimate as a whole totals up to a computed number and a guardrail band around it — a firm number and a range either side of it, not the three tiers your online estimator shows a homeowner.

Setting your quoted total

The number you actually tell the customer goes in a separate “Quoted total” field — it can match the computed total or differ from it. If you quote outside the guardrail band, the app asks for a reason before it lets you save that total, so there’s always a record of why a job was priced above or below what your rate matrix predicted.

Saving, and moving through statuses

Save keeps your work. From there, a segmented control lets you move the estimate through its stages as the job progresses — Draft while you’re still pricing it, Quoted once you have a number, Sent once you’ve followed up with the customer, and Won, Lost, or Expired to close it out. Moving an estimate to Sent can also notify your CRM automatically, if your office has connected one from the dashboard.

What to watch out for

A tree’s DBH is shared by every service on it — the removal and its stump-grind companion both price off the same measurement, so correcting one corrects the other.