Golden Horizons
CAPABILITY · VERTICAL-SPECIFIC
AI Construction Estimating
Site-visit photos and voice memo become an itemized estimate the same day.
Audit this workflow →What it does
Accepts photos and a voice memo from the job site. Matches materials and labor against your catalog. Produces an itemized estimate with margin floors applied. Exports to Buildertrend, JobTread, or a PDF for client delivery.
Most residential GCs lose deals in the gap between the site visit and the estimate landing in the homeowner's inbox. You walk the job, take twenty photos, scratch some notes on your phone, maybe record a voice memo about what the customer wants. Then you hand that pile to your estimator, or you are the estimator, and the actual line-item quote doesn't go out for two or three days. By then the homeowner already has a quote from someone else.
Your pricing isn't the problem. The problem is that your quoting process runs on manual handoffs and tribal knowledge. Your markup rules live in your head. Your material allowances aren't written down anywhere. Your labor rates vary by crew and nobody captured why. So every estimate gets rebuilt from scratch, and every one eats the same hours whether the job is a $4,000 bath update or a $60,000 kitchen gut.
The Quote Itemizer changes the shape of that workflow. Before you leave the driveway, you drop your site photos and a voice note into the system: what you saw, what the customer asked for, any site conditions that matter. The build runs those inputs through your pre-loaded pricing rules: material costs by category, labor rates by trade, standard markup floors, allowance bands for finishes the customer picks later. It generates a structured line-item estimate (scope description, materials, labor, markup, and a terms block) that you review on your phone before you're back at the shop.
The estimate never sends without your eyes on it. You review, adjust any line, add or drop scope, then push it to the customer as a PDF or straight into Buildertrend or JobTread. What used to take two days of back-and-forth with your estimator now takes twenty minutes of your review time. The knowledge that was locked in your head, your markup logic, your allowance rules, your change-order language, gets encoded once and applied the same way on every job.
Golden Horizons builds this as a three-week engagement scoped for residential GCs running ten to fifty jobs a year. We encode your pricing rules during onboarding, connect to your existing estimating or project management tool, and hand you a workflow your crew can use on day one with no training.
Use cases
- Kitchen remodel: the contractor walks the space, photographs cabinets, appliances, and plumbing rough-in, and records a voice note on scope. The system produces a line-item quote with demo, cabinet supply and install, countertop allowance, plumbing labor, and a permit line, ready to review on site.
- Bathroom rebuild: photos of existing tile, tub surround, and vanity condition feed in alongside the customer's finish selections. Labor lines for demo, tile, plumbing, and drywall patch generate against pre-loaded crew rates, with a finish allowance line the customer fills in later.
- Deck addition: the contractor records measurements and grade notes from the site visit. The system builds a materials takeoff for framing lumber, decking, hardware, and footings, applies lumber pricing from the current cost catalog, and attaches standard permit and inspection language to the quote.
- Roof replacement: drone photos and a voice note on shingle type and pitch produce a scope block with tear-off, underlayment, shingle supply, flashing, and ridge cap, priced against the contractor's current supplier sheet, with any plywood replacement flagged as a separate allowance line.
- HVAC retrofit: the mechanical contractor notes existing equipment, access conditions, and new unit specs by voice. The system maps labor hours by task (demo, lineset, electrical whip, startup), applies the crew's hourly rate, and adds a materials line for refrigerant, ready for same-day review.
What’s included
- Fixed scope with written acceptance criteria before any build starts
- Customization layer for your brand voice and business rules
- Clean handover with documented runbook and live training
- Monthly ROI report for three months post-delivery
- Source code delivered to your GitHub on handover
What’s NOT included
- Third-party API subscription costs (billed to your accounts)
- Data migration from legacy systems
- Ongoing infrastructure costs after handover
How clients use this
Fixed-scope build with clean handover, documented ownership, and optional support for monitoring, maintenance, and minor changes.
Part of
Used in: Construction Firms
Questions Quote Itemizer (Residential Contractor) clients ask
How do we encode our markup rules and allowances so the system uses our actual numbers?
During the onboarding week, we sit down with whoever owns your estimating, whether that's you, your office manager, or your lead estimator, and map out how you actually price jobs. That covers your markup percentage by category (rough trade versus finish work versus demo), your standard labor rates by crew type, your allowance bands for line items where the customer picks the finish, and your change-order language. We encode those as structured pricing rules in the build. If your markup shifts by job size, say you run tighter margin on larger contracts, we capture that logic too. Once it's in, every estimate the system generates applies those rules automatically. You're not approving a formula you don't recognize. You built it.
Can the system coordinate with vendors, or does it only handle our direct labor?
The build handles both. For work your crew does directly, it applies your internal labor rates. For sub-contracted scope, like electrical rough-in, HVAC, or structural work you sub out, you can set up sub rate lines the same way you'd set an internal rate, or flag those lines as 'sub quote pending' so the estimate goes out with everything itemized except the sub's number, which you fill in when their quote lands. That way the homeowner sees the full scope structure immediately, not a placeholder labeled 'misc trades.' When the sub quote comes in, you update that line and the estimate total recalculates. Most contractors we work with have two or three subs they use consistently, so encoding their standard rates for common scope is straightforward from the start.
How accurate is the line-item output from photos and a voice memo alone?
Accurate enough to review and send in twenty minutes, not accurate enough to skip your review. The system produces a solid 80 percent draft, meaning the scope structure, the line items, and the quantity logic, from your site inputs. It reads photos for visible conditions (existing tile area, cabinet count, access constraints), extracts scope mentions from your voice note, and matches both against your pricing rules. What it won't catch reliably are hidden conditions you didn't note: rot behind the drywall, undersized electrical service, non-standard framing. Those are the lines you review before sending. The point isn't to replace your estimating judgment. It's to kill the two-day clerical delay between your judgment and the homeowner's inbox. Your expertise catches the exceptions. The system handles the structure.
What does the customer-facing quote look like, and can we control the format?
The default output is a clean line-item PDF with your logo, the job address, a scope summary paragraph up top, then itemized sections broken out by trade or phase: demo, rough work, finishes, permits, cleanup. Each line shows a description, quantity or unit, and extended price. Allowance items read clearly as allowances, so the customer knows those numbers move with their selections. Payment terms and your standard change-order language sit at the bottom. You can adjust the format during onboarding: combine or split sections, change the level of detail shown to the customer, add a cover page, suppress internal cost lines so only the customer-facing price shows. The version you review internally shows the full breakdown including markup. The version you send the customer shows what you've decided to show them.
We already use Buildertrend. Does this replace it or connect to it?
Connects to it, doesn't replace it. Buildertrend handles your project management, scheduling, and client portal. The Quote Itemizer handles the front end of the estimating workflow, the part that happens before a project even exists in Buildertrend. Once you approve the estimate, the build pushes it into Buildertrend as a bid or proposal, depending on how your account is set up. From there your normal Buildertrend workflow takes over: client approval, contract conversion, job setup. If you're on JobTread instead, same pattern. If you're running Excel or a standalone estimating tool, we can export a formatted spreadsheet or PDF in whatever column structure you already use. The build doesn't make you change your project management stack. It fills the gap at the front of the funnel where the estimate gets assembled.