Estimating for QuickBooks Enterprise
An emailed request for quote becomes a priced quote in your own sheet, every line mapped to QuickBooks’s item list at your markups. Your estimator reviews it, sends it and enters it as an estimate in QuickBooks.
Sales & estimatingUpdated Oct 202620 ERPs
See it work on QuickBooks.
Click through the steps. Fictional data, in QuickBooks’s terms; the real thing runs on QuickBooks.
Attached material list for the detached garage at Lot 14 Birchwood. Need pricing by Friday.
Customer, project, due date and the material list, from the estimating mailbox.
The problem, as it happens in QuickBooks.
A request for quote is an email with a material list or a set of drawings attached. The estimator reads it, finds each item in QuickBooks’s item list, checks cost, applies the house markup for that customer, and builds the quote in the same Excel sheet the yard has used for years. Then a revision comes in.
The desk writes over a thousand quotes a year. Most of the time goes into reading and retyping, not into the pricing decisions that win the job.
How it works.
- 1
The request becomes a card
Forwarded into the estimating mailbox or opened by hand: customer matched to the customer record, project, due date, attachments. The estimator sees it on the desk with the due date on it.
- 2
Lines are read and mapped
Items read out of the material list or taken off the drawings, mapped to the item list in QuickBooks, with the matches a person should check flagged. A drawing is measured into regions the estimator confirms before anything is priced.
- 3
Costed and priced
Cost from QuickBooks, price from your versioned markup policy by customer and category. Supplier quotes you hold are priced from where you have them. The estimator sees the margin per line, not just the total.
- 4
The quote, in your sheet
The house Excel sheet and its PDF, versioned. The estimator reviews, downloads and sends from their own mailbox, and enters it as an estimate in QuickBooks. Revisions are a new version, not a new file.
How it connects to QuickBooks.
Lunica reads the item list and the customer record through the QuickBooks SDK on the machine that hosts the company file, under a read-only connection: current cost, the price level and markup each account carries, and the quotes already in QuickBooks’s history, so a revision is priced against what went out last time. Supplier quotes you hold are read from the share or mailbox where you keep them.
Nothing lands in QuickBooks without a person and nothing is sent on its own. The quote is written into your own sheet and PDF; the estimator sends it from their own mailbox. It goes into QuickBooks as the QuickBooks SDK where it allows, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared, and Lunica records the number afterwards so the pipeline and QuickBooks agree.
What a week looks like.
- Reading and retyping stop being the job.
- Every quote is priced on the same policy.
- Revisions keep their history.
- Pipeline, hit rate and expiring quotes in one view.
Questions
Does it send the quote?
No. It tells the estimator a quote is ready. The estimator sends it from their own mailbox.
Does it write to QuickBooks?
No. Lunica reads QuickBooks and prepares the quote. A person enters it as an estimate in QuickBooks, and Lunica records the number afterwards.
What about takeoffs from drawings?
Drawings are measured into regions a person confirms before anything is priced.
Will it match our sheet?
It writes your sheet, not ours. The output is the Excel file your customers already recognise, plus a PDF.
Pass-through quotes from a manufacturer?
Attached and priced from the supplier’s quote on file, with its validity date tracked.
Where does it run, and what does the model see?
On one Windows server inside your network, beside the company file, reading through the QuickBooks SDK on the machine that hosts the company file, under a read-only connection. The model sees the request, its attachments and the items it is matching, not the whole item list.
Does it need a server?
Lunica runs on one Windows server inside your network, beside the company file, set up and maintained by Lunica. It reads QuickBooks Enterprise through the QuickBooks SDK on the machine that hosts the company file, under a read-only connection. There is no inbound connection from outside your network.
What does Lunica read in QuickBooks?
The customer record, open items and terms, purchase orders and receipts, the item list, quotes and order history, as each workflow needs them. Read-only, and only the rows a task is about.
Can it post to QuickBooks?
Nothing lands in QuickBooks without a person. What belongs in QuickBooks goes back as the QuickBooks SDK where it allows, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared.
What about our documents?
Invoice copies and scans keep living in the attachments on the transaction. Lunica reads them when a workflow needs one and never writes to them.
The same workflow, on another ERP.
Estimating is written for every system on the list. You’re reading the QuickBooks version.
Lumber and building materials
Wholesale distribution
General business
- Dynamics 365 Business Central
- NetSuite
- Sage 100
- QuickBooks Enterprise
- Acumatica
- SAP Business One
- Epicor Kinetic
Another system? Tell us which →
See it on your QuickBooks data.
Thirty minutes. We walk the workflow on QuickBooks data, then map it to yours.