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⏱️ Estimate Labour Honestly

Turn the way you already price work into an app that sends, chases, and closes quotes on its own. These prompts build the whole estimate loop: a price book you control, a builder that does the arithmetic, a link the customer accepts with one tap, and the follow-up that happens whether or not you remember.
  • Tested prompts
  • Edit for your use case
  • Works across models
  • Save in Taskade
Estimate Labour Honestly

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I always underestimate labor and then wonder where the profit went. Build me a labor estimate app. Keep a rates project with one record per role holding the hourly pay, the on-costs, and the resulting loaded hourly rate I should actually charge against. For each job let me build an estimate from lines that each name a role, a crew size, a duration in hours, and whether it is billable work, travel or setup. Total the labor cost and show it beside the materials cost as a share of the job. Keep a record of the hours actually worked on each completed job so I can compare estimated against actual. Add an AI agent that looks at a new estimate, finds the most similar completed jobs, and tells me whether my hours look realistic and by how much I have historically been out. Automate a scheduled monthly report on estimate accuracy by job type. Two logins: an estimator who builds estimates, and an owner who sets the rates.

STATUS · LIVE
v1

01 / Spark - intelligence awakens

Estimate Labour Honestly

Price labor by role, crew size, and duration with loaded rates, travel, and setup, checked against what past jobs actually took.

// the spark catches · intelligence awakens · the answer unfolds

Labour is the number people guess and then regret. This builds it properly: who, how long, at what rate, plus the travel and setup that never make it into the estimate.

What's Included

  • A rate per role with a loaded cost, not just the hourly wage.
  • Crew size and duration separated, so a two-day two-person job prices correctly.
  • Travel and setup time as their own lines rather than an optimistic rounding.
  • An assistant that compares your estimate to what similar jobs actually took.

How To Use

  1. Use a loaded rate that includes on-costs. The bare wage undercharges every time.
  2. Estimate crew and duration separately or you will conflate them.
  3. Price travel honestly. Two hours on the road is two hours nobody is earning.
  4. Log actual hours afterwards and let the app correct your instinct.

Combine it with the material takeoff for a full job cost, and record the real hours with time tracking prompts.