The estimate was day one. The budget is every day after.
One upload is the whole setup. Add an estimate to the job and Estimate Budget builds the working budget in a single pass: trade groups, labor and material split per line, buyout allowance against your target margin, fixed overhead, budgeted labor hours, and a sequenced schedule are already there when the page opens. From that one screen you buy out vendors, issue customer scopes and material sheets, hand the crew a task list, log receipts, and watch profit move. Xactimate and Symbility estimates both work. Symbility line totals are restated onto the Xactimate convention first, so the budget means the same thing either way.
Upload one estimate. The entire budget exists.
Most job-costing tools ask you to build the budget. Estimate Budget builds it. The estimate you already have is the only input, and the work of turning it into trade groups, allowances, documents, and a schedule happens for you before you touch anything.
Add the estimate
Drop the Xactimate or Symbility PDF onto the job. Nothing else is asked of you: no template, no chart of accounts, no manual takeoff.
The budget is built
Lines are read, grouped into trades, split into labor and material, priced against your target margin and fixed overhead, and laid onto a schedule. One pass, no second setup step.
Run the job from it
Buy out vendors, issue scopes and task lists, log receipts, move bars on the timeline. Every number and document downstream reads off the same budget.
Everything after that upload is editing, not building. You are always adjusting a budget that already balances, never assembling one from an empty page.
Baseline vs. actual, by trade, updated as costs come in.
One estimate, designated as a budget baseline.
Pick the estimate that represents what the job should cost, and Estimate Budget designates it: an explicit, recorded event, not an inference. Everything downstream compares against that baseline until you deliberately re-baseline.
Formation & decomposition
The baseline breaks down into work orders and material takeoff by trade, so a gross-margin and bid/no-bid picture is available before a single actual cost is logged.
Customer alignment
A homeowner-facing scope summary and material-selection sheet read off the same underlying budget data: no separate document to keep in sync.
Eight tabs. One budget underneath all of them.
The budget page is not a single report. It is the desk the job runs from. Each tab is a different job to be done against the same underlying numbers, so a change in one is instantly true in the others.
The whole job on one screen
Estimate line total, buyout allowance, fixed overhead, margin retained, budgeted labor hours and duration, project state, and a plain-English 'Simple math' card that shows how each number was reached. Planned profit sits directly above profit as it sits today.
Documents for every audience
A customer scope of work with no pricing anywhere, a customer scope with pricing, a material selection sheet by room with allowances and signature lines, and a technician task list cut by trade group or hand-picked line item. Saved, editable, re-issuable, shareable by link.
Trade groups you control
Every trade category with its allowance, labor and material split, and execution type: self-perform, subcontract, or material only. Drag cards together to merge groups, reclassify anything that landed unclassified, and set a margin override on a single group without touching the rest.
Traceable to the source line
Every line the estimate carried, with quantity, unit, unit price, RCV, the trade it was assigned to, and the labor hours behind it. Nothing in the budget is a figure you cannot trace back to a specific line on the PDF.
Buy the job out, vendor by vendor
Select one or several trade categories, generate a priced package with a signature block, then lock and issue it. Overlaps are caught before the package goes out, and a locked package becomes an expected-to-pay commitment instead of a number in someone's inbox.
Receipts read for you
Photograph or upload a receipt or invoice and vendor, amount, date, and category are extracted, each field scored High, Check, or Low. Low-confidence fields must be confirmed before posting. Split one receipt across several rows and point each at the package it belongs to.
Profit as it sits today
Spent to date, owed on issued packages, still to buy out, allowance left or over allowance, cost-to-complete, and forecast at completion that reads spend against reported progress. Tie-out breaks are named with the exact fix, and the whole picture exports as a financial control report.
A real schedule, not a list of bars
Generated from trade sequencing as a critical-path network: finish-to-start, start-to-start and finish-to-finish links, lag for cure time, weekends excluded, one trade per room at a time. Drag and resize bars, group by trade or vendor package, see float and the critical path, check weather against work days, then lock it and export it landscape.
A frozen baseline. A living budget. Never confused for each other.
A job budget has to do two contradictory things at once: stay a fixed reference point, and keep up with reality. Estimate Budget resolves that by modeling them as two physically different things.
The baseline
Written once, at designation, and never edited. Re-baselining appends a new version. The prior one stays queryable for historical variance, it is never overwritten.
The living budget
Edited freely as work orders, change orders, and corrections happen. Variance against the baseline is computed at read time: always current, never a stale snapshot.
From target margin to profit as it sits today.
Every reader of job progress (field, office, customer, carrier) reads the same underlying log, not four different spreadsheets that drift apart. Costs are appended, never edited in place: a correction is a new entry plus a void of the old one, so the history stays intact.
Target margin, then buy the job out
Set the margin you intend to make and the line totals become revenue: the buyout allowance is what is left after your margin, with tax and O&P excluded so neither ever gets counted as profit. Override the margin on a single trade group and it propagates to that group's line items and scopes while every other group keeps inheriting the budget-wide number.
Labor and material, split per line
Where the price list carries the split it is used directly; where the PDF does not disclose it, the split is derived and labeled as derived. Sub-bid packages show the dollar amount and the labor/material breakdown per trade category, not one lump sum.
Sub-bid packages you can issue and lock
Select one or several trade categories, generate a package with a signature block, then lock and issue it. Overlapping packages are caught before they go out, and a locked package becomes an expected-to-pay commitment in Actuals instead of a number in someone's inbox.
Receipts and invoices, read by OCR
Photograph or upload a receipt and vendor, amount, date and category are extracted for you. Each field is scored High, Check or Low, and anything low-confidence has to be confirmed before it posts. One receipt can be split into several expense rows and pointed at the buyout package it belongs to.
Customer, technician and sub-bid scopes
Three audiences, three documents, generated from the same budget: a clean scope for the customer, a task list for the crew selected by trade group or individual item, and a priced sub-bid package for the vendor. Each one is saved, editable, and shareable by link.
Profit as it sits today
Under the planned figures, a live row: spent to date, owed on issued packages, still to buy out, allowance left or over allowance, and the resulting profit as a percentage of billable, with the dollar swing against planned profit called out in red when it is eroding.
Variance by trade, exportable
Category-level variance between allowance, committed and actual spend, with cost-to-complete computed at read time from the living budget rather than stored as a third copy that goes stale. Export the whole picture to CSV or PDF.
Schedule the work, then lock it in motion
Mark a project in motion to freeze the budget, then run the job on a Gantt timeline by trade or by vendor package. Bars are dragged and resized, dates persist, and the timeline exports as a landscape PDF for the site trailer wall.
Every document the job needs, off the same budget.
Nothing here is typed twice. Each document is generated from the live budget, saved against the job, editable, re-issuable when the scope changes, and shareable by link, so the copy your vendor holds and the copy your customer signed can always be traced to the same source.
Customer scope of work
Tasks by area, no pricing anywhere. What the homeowner signs off on.
Customer scope with pricing
The same scope with the numbers shown, for the conversation that needs them.
Material selection sheet
Materials by room with the budgeted allowance, supplier and product fields, and signature lines for sign-off.
Technician task list
The crew's assignment, cut by trade group or individual line item: work to do, no dollars.
Sub-bid buyout package
Priced per vendor, with the labor and material breakdown by category and a signature block. Lock it and it becomes a commitment.
Schedule PDF
The full timeline in landscape, dated and ready for the trailer wall.
Financial control report
Allowance, committed, actual, cost-to-complete and profit, by trade and in total.
Actuals & variance CSV
Every recorded expense and category variance, for your accountant or your own spreadsheet.
Roll every job's budget up into one WIP and cash-flow picture.
Subscription plans add an org-level financials view reading across every budget in the organization: work-in-progress and cash flow at the portfolio level, not job by job.
Available to Starter, Business, and Enterprise plans. See pricing for what each tier includes.
What people ask about Estimate Budget.
Short, direct answers about how the budget is created, what comes out of it, and what it costs.
How long does it take to create a job budget?+
One upload. You add the estimate PDF to the job and Estimate Budget builds the budget in a single pass: trade groups, labor and material split per line, buyout allowance against your target margin, fixed overhead, budgeted labor hours, and a working schedule are all there when the page opens. There is no second setup step, no template to fill in, and no manual takeoff.
What can I download or issue out of Estimate Budget?+
A customer scope of work, a customer scope with pricing, a material selection sheet with signature lines, a technician task list cut by trade group or individual item, a priced sub-bid package per vendor with a signature block, a landscape schedule PDF, a financial control report, and a CSV of actuals and variance. Every document is saved, editable, re-issuable, and shareable by link.
Does Estimate Budget work with Symbility estimates?+
Yes. Symbility line totals are restated onto the Xactimate convention during intake, so the baseline, the buyout allowance, and every downstream document mean the same thing regardless of which platform wrote the estimate.
How does the buyout allowance get calculated?+
Line totals are treated as revenue. The buyout allowance is what remains after your target margin, with sales tax and O&P excluded so neither is ever counted as profit. Set the margin budget-wide, or override it on a single trade group and it propagates to that group's line items and scopes while every other group keeps inheriting the budget-wide number.
Can I track self-performed labor as well as subcontracted work?+
Yes. Each trade group is marked self-perform, subcontract, or material only. Self-perform groups carry budgeted labor hours and a labor rate so crew time is measured against the allowance; subcontract groups become expected-to-pay commitments the moment the package is issued.
How do actuals get entered?+
Photograph or upload a receipt or invoice and vendor, amount, date, and category are read for you, each field scored High, Check, or Low. Low-confidence fields must be confirmed before they post. One receipt can be split across several expense rows and pointed at the buyout package it belongs to.
Is the schedule editable?+
Fully. The schedule is generated from real trade sequencing: a critical-path network with finish-to-start, start-to-start, and finish-to-finish relationships, lag for cure time, weekends excluded, and one trade per room at a time. From there you drag and resize bars, group the timeline by trade or by vendor package, and your manual dates hold as hard constraints. Lock it when the job goes in motion and export it for the trailer wall.
What people say after
a real budget.
Unedited feedback from contractors and estimators who use Estimate Budget.
"Used Estology on a $47,000 water loss. It found the missing line items and price drift in about ten minutes. The carrier accepted the supplement the same day."
"As a general contractor, I used to spend hours cross-referencing estimates. Now I upload both PDFs and have a defensible line-by-line report before lunch."
"I needed to explain why the contractor's estimate was higher than ours. Estology gave me a clear, sourced breakdown that both sides trusted."
"We had three competing estimates on one file. Estology showed exactly where each one differed and why, so the negotiation took one call instead of five."
"My position letter practically wrote itself. Every variance was sourced back to the original estimate pages, so the adjuster had nowhere to push back."
"I caught $12,000 in dropped scope the adjuster missed. Without a side-by-side comparison, that would have come out of my pocket."
"Used Estology on a $47,000 water loss. It found the missing line items and price drift in about ten minutes. The carrier accepted the supplement the same day."
"As a general contractor, I used to spend hours cross-referencing estimates. Now I upload both PDFs and have a defensible line-by-line report before lunch."
"I needed to explain why the contractor's estimate was higher than ours. Estology gave me a clear, sourced breakdown that both sides trusted."
"We had three competing estimates on one file. Estology showed exactly where each one differed and why, so the negotiation took one call instead of five."
"My position letter practically wrote itself. Every variance was sourced back to the original estimate pages, so the adjuster had nowhere to push back."
"I caught $12,000 in dropped scope the adjuster missed. Without a side-by-side comparison, that would have come out of my pocket."
Included in every project.
A $10 project includes up to 2 budgets across every job in it. Budget is never billed per edit or per actual logged. Your first project is free to try, with one budget and no downloads. Team plans remove the cap entirely.