Estiquik: the software that understands residential renovations better than any other estimating platform

That is a big claim, and a claim like it is worthless unless it is earned in the details. General-purpose estimating software understands a job: a list of lines, a quantity, a rate, a total. A renovation is not that. It starts on a drawing or in a walk-through, it is priced by the room and by where the house stands, it changes after the contract is signed, and it is bought by a homeowner who has never read a quote before. Here are the specific decisions Estiquik makes because of that — and, at the end, the things it deliberately does not try to do.

It starts with the drawing, not with a blank line item

Every other estimator opens on an empty table and waits for you to type. Estiquik can open on the plan. Attach the PDF, set the scale from the sheet's own scale note — 1/4" = 1'-0" — or from any dimension you trust, and trace: an area for flooring, a run for baseboard, a click on each pot light. The quantities land on the estimate as line items, with the price deliberately left blank, because a takeoff measures and a takeoff that invents prices is worse than one that doesn't.

Where it shows that it understands the trade is in what it does with those measurements:

• It counts what you order, not just what you measured. Sixty-nine square feet of drywall rounded to whole sheets is 96 square feet — correct, and not what a merchant sells. Choose "4×8 drywall sheet" and the item says 3 sheets to order, and can send the estimate three sheets rather than an area.
• Openings come off as openings. A window is 5 × 6 feet. It is not a full-height strip of wall the width of the window, which is what you get when a length-based tool subtracts a traced deduction. Doors and windows are entered the way you'd write them by hand — how many, how wide, how tall — and come off once per face you're boarding.
• One tracing, both surfaces. Trace the room once and it knows the ceiling (the area) and the walls (the perimeter × the height). A hand-checked 11.83 × 15.16 ft room with an 8 ft ceiling, one window and one door comes to 18 sheets; at the 7'-4" ceiling on the drawing, 17. The app shows its working under the number so you can check it against your tape.

None of that is exotic. It is just the arithmetic a good estimator does on paper, done the same way every time, on every job.

A renovation is priced by the room — and by where the house is

A kitchen in Windsor and a kitchen in Vancouver have the same cabinets and very different labour. Estiquik ships seven renovation templates — kitchen, bathroom, basement, flooring, painting, deck and ADU — and prices them on arrival with labour and material rates for more than sixty states and provinces, with the tax worked out for the region (13% HST in Ontario, and so on). You adjust from a realistic number instead of building one from zero.

Then there is your pricing. The price list is your own rate book: item, unit, price, supplier, and it fills an estimate's unit prices by item name. It was built with two rules a contractor can rely on. It matches on the whole item name — "Plywood" will never quietly price itself as "¾ plywood sheathing" — and it never overwrites a price you typed. If your supplier sends a CSV with Unit Price (CAD $) as the column heading, it reads it; it doesn't ask you to rename your supplier's export.

Contingency and markup are different money

Most tools give you one "markup" field. A renovation needs two ideas kept apart: contingency is the money you expect to spend on what the wall is hiding, and markup is the money you keep. Estiquik keeps them as separate percentages on every estimate, applies them in the right order, and — this is the part homeowners notice — lets the client's copy show the price and not your breakdown. The estimate is profitable by construction, not by remembering to add something at the end. There is a longer piece on this: Contingency vs. markup.

The job changes after you've signed

This is where general-purpose software gives up. The client wants the pantry after all; the subfloor is rotten; the "while you're here" list grows. In Estiquik a change order is a numbered, priced document linked to the estimate it amends, with a running revised contract value, deductive change orders for removed work, and a Review & sign button of its own. The verbal extras that get forgotten and eaten at invoice time have somewhere to live.

Getting paid follows the same shape as the job. Progress billing puts a payment schedule on the estimate — deposit, draws, completion — with one invoice per stage and an optional holdback, and the estimate itself knows what has been invoiced against it. Read Deposits, draws and holdback, explained if you want the reasoning.

The homeowner is not a procurement department

The person on the other end of a renovation quote has usually never signed one. So the estimate goes out as an email with a Review & sign button; they read it on their phone and sign by drawing or typing, and you get an email the moment it happens. If they go quiet, a polite follow-up goes out in your name after three days, with the sign button included and a stop link at the bottom. The day before you're due, they get a reminder that you're coming. When the invoice lands, it can carry a pay-by-card button that settles into your own Stripe account, and an overdue reminder goes out the day after the due date with a fresh link.

Add a public booking page for site visits and a Leads pipeline from enquiry to won job, and the whole arc of a residential renovation — first call, walk-through, priced quote, signature, changes, draws, final payment — runs through one screen instead of five apps and a shoebox.

What it doesn't try to be

A claim to understand renovation better than anyone is only credible if it comes with a list of what it leaves alone. Estiquik does not do dispatch, GPS or timesheets for a service fleet; if you run twelve vans, Jobber is the better tool, and we say so on our own comparison page. It is not a builder's ERP for new construction with purchase orders and supplier feeds; Buildxact is. It does not connect live to a supplier's catalogue — the price files contractors can actually get are CSVs, and a scraped feed that breaks silently would price someone's job wrong. And it is not an accounting system; it syncs clients, invoices and payments to QuickBooks Online and stops there.

It is an estimating and paperwork tool for residential renovation, for crews of one to ten. That narrowness is the point. Every decision above exists because the product is allowed to assume it is looking at a house.

Try it on a house you're quoting

The live demo runs in your browser on a fictional contractor's jobs, no sign-up. The Free plan keeps three estimates you can build and print, with no card and no clock. And if you have a plan set for a job in front of you right now, book thirty minutes and we'll take it off together — that is the fastest way to find out whether any of this fits how you work.

Kshitiz Dalal is the founder of Ted Kam Consulting Ltd, the company behind Estiquik.