Quoting & estimating
Price bespoke work quickly without losing the detail that protects your margin.
- Cost build-ups: materials, labour, machine time, margin
- Templates seeded from similar past jobs
- Quote versions and approvals in one thread
For bespoke & made-to-order manufacturers
Every job is different. Your system should keep up.
Joinery, fabrication, machining, furniture: if no two orders are the same, off the shelf ERP never quite fits. We build OpenMercato around how your workshop actually runs, from first enquiry to final invoice, at a fixed price, owned outright.
Order 4021
· Walnut kitchen, Harbour Wood
In progress
Sound familiar?
The bottlenecks we see in every made-to-order workshop.
None of these mean anyone is doing a bad job. They are what happens when a bespoke business runs on tools built for businesses that sell the same thing twice.
| The bottleneck | What changes |
|---|---|
| Every quote built from scratch, in a spreadsheet only one person understands | Quote templates with a cost build-up: materials, labour, machine time and margin, reusable across similar jobs |
| Drawings and revisions scattered across email threads | Every drawing, photo and sign-off attached to the order it belongs to, with the current revision marked |
| Deposits and stage payments tracked by memory | A payment schedule on the job record, raised, sent and chased from the same screen |
| Nobody knows which jobs made money until year end | Cost in against price out, live on every job, so margin is visible while you can still act on it |
| The whiteboard is the production schedule | A live job board everyone can see: what is in build, what is waiting on materials, what ships this week |
| Materials bought job by job, surplus nobody tracks | Stock and offcuts booked back in and allocated to the next job that needs them |
What the system covers
From first enquiry to paid invoice, in one place.
These are the building blocks we scope around your workshop. You get the ones that pay back, built the way you work, not a module list to grow into.
Orders & job tracking
One record carries each job through the stages you define, visible to the whole team.
- Your stages, not generic ones
- Drawings, photos and sign-offs attached to the job
- A live board of everything in the workshop
Purchasing & stock
Buy against the job, book surplus back in, and stop ordering what is already on the shelf.
- Purchase orders linked to jobs and suppliers
- Stock locations and offcut tracking
- Costs land on the job automatically
Stage payments & invoicing
Deposits, stage payments and final invoices tracked as the job moves, not reconciled afterwards.
- Payment schedules on the job record
- Invoices raised from the job in two clicks
- Overdue payments flagged before they hurt
Margins & reporting
See clearly which jobs, customers and types of work actually make you money.
- Cost in vs price out on every live job
- Margin by job, customer and work type
- Cashflow view across the order book
Works with your tools
Built around the tools you already rely on, so nothing gets retyped twice.
- Xero, Stripe and GoCardless
- Royal Mail and major couriers
- New integrations scoped, priced and built in
What it changes in practice
Bespoke joinery
Metal fabrication
Outcomes from past builds.
Quoting a typical kitchen went from two days to under two hours, using cost build-ups seeded from past jobs.
Anonymised; details available on a call.
Live margin tracking showed 6 of 40 open jobs running below 10% margin, in time to re-price the next batch before the quotes went out.
Anonymised; details available on a call.
Questions
The things manufacturers ask us first.
If your situation is not here, a short call is the quickest way to get a straight answer.
Book a 30 minute call
Yes. Spreadsheets are the most common starting point we see.
One source system is included in the build price; we clean
what we can, surface what we can't, and you sign off on a
sample before cut-over.
Yes. Cost build-ups, BOMs and variants are scoped around how
you actually estimate, whether that is per-job cost sheets,
reusable templates or full bills of materials with stock
allocation.
Yes. Tablet-friendly screens for clocking time and booking
materials against a job are a common part of the scope, kept
deliberately simple so they get used.
Yes. Xero is one of the integrations we ship most often,
alongside Stripe, GoCardless and the major couriers. Invoices
raised in the system land in your accounts without retyping.
Most builds run over a small number of months: discovery, a
proof of concept of the risky parts first, then the agreed
scope demoed every fortnight. You have a clear timeline before
any money changes hands. See
how we work for the full sequence.