Free Commercial Electrical Quote Template (And Solving the Challenges of Commercial Electrical Estimating)

In this post, we share a PDF template that you can use for creating commercial electrical quotes. We’ll describe how to download the template and use it in your business.

However, while the template below can provide your staff with a consistent means of documenting quotes, a static PDF template cannot solve the most painful and consequential occurrences in the commercial estimating process, such as:

• Inefficient communication among master electricians, field technicians, and office staff that leads to days-long delays in getting estimates to customers

• Sending technicians to jobs only to realize that the technician doesn’t have the right skill set to accurately assess and draft an estimate for that particular job

• Forgetting to collect or losing key job information during the bidding process, which causes further delays

• Organizing and accessing handwritten quote documents (or miscellaneous Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Word docs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc.)

• Failing to follow up on unsold estimates and losing business to competitors

• Maintaining cash flow as you navigate multiple stakeholders to get paid 

Solving or failing to solve these challenges can make or break commercial electrical service businesses. So, in addition to sharing our free bid template below, we’ll also explain how commercial service software like ServiceTitan can help you solve each of these issues, allowing you to streamline your estimating processes and maximize your profits. 

Below, we’ll cover:

• How to Download and Use Our Free Commercial Electrical Quote Template

• How Commercial Electrical Businesses Use ServiceTitan to Manage and Streamline the Quoting Process

ServiceTitan‘s commercial electrical software helps businesses boost efficiency and profitability by improving their quoting process and linking it to a range of other business processes to build a seamless workflow. To learn more about our electrical software, schedule a demo today.

Download Our Free Commercial Electrical Quote Template

To use this commercial electrical quote template,download it here and save it to your computer. 

After saving it to your computer, you can customize it by adding your company name, contact information (phone number, office address, etc.), and company logo. 

Our commercial electrical quotation template consists of three main sections:

• Commercial Electrical Quote: Fields to document all relevant quote and client information including job site, contact details, job name, job description, etc.

• Billing/Payment Information: Fields to document customer billing details and payment terms.

• Commercial Electrical Job Costing: A job costing table that breaks down projects into their estimated sell price, actual cost estimates (material and labor costs), and profit margin.

Whenever you need to provide a commercial customer with an estimate, you can simply input the specific project details into the contractor estimate template, rename and save the file, and send your quote to the customer.

Keep in mind that having a job estimate template to document quotes is just one of many tools needed to successfully execute the process of quoting electrical work. You also need systems and tools for:

• Getting the right techs to the right jobs to collect information and draft quotes

• Communicating about estimate details between field and office staff

• Storing, organizing, and accessing quotes

• Following up on unsold estimates

• Billing customers and getting paid in a reasonable amount of time

Holistic estimating software—such as ServiceTitan—can handle all of these workflows and more. In the next section, we’ll walk through some of our features that help to streamline estimating.

How Commercial Electrical Businesses Use ServiceTitan to Streamline the Quoting Process

1. Assign the Right Electricians to the Right Jobs with Our Scheduling and Dispatch Tools

Commercial electrical businesses—particularly dispatchers—need to know which skills individual technicians have so they can assign them to jobs appropriately, and avoid delays caused by sending the wrong techs. 

For example, some electricians may be great at installing electrical fixtures where others have better training in electrical troubleshooting skills. Others may be good at working on generators, while some haven’t had training in that area. Depending on the customer’s particular situation, some techs will be a good fit to assess that job, and others won’t. 

In ServiceTitan, technicians can be labeled by certain skills so that when dispatchers want to assign a job to a technician, the technicians listed in the drop-down menu are organized by skills based on the job type that was selected during the call booking and scheduling process. 

Technicians who have the right set of skills for the job at hand are listed first. This helps to avoid sending techs with the wrong skills to collect estimates at jobs, only to have to reschedule with a different tech for a later date—delaying the whole process and providing a poor customer experience. 

Similarly, dispatchers need to consider geographical location to avoid having techs spend more of their time driving long distances to jobs, rather than actually doing the electrical estimate or job they’ve been hired to do.

However, in a busy commercial electrical company, it’s unrealistic to expect dispatchers to know about the skills, training, location, and availability of every electrician working there. They also can’t be expected to have a detailed knowledge of the entire geographical area you cover, so as to prioritize jobs based on their location.

ServiceTitan helps to solve this challenge, too. Our routing tools allow dispatchers to easily take into account geographical location in addition to tech skills when assigning and routing jobs. 

Dispatchers can also monitor exactly where techs are in real time, allowing them to make adjustments on the fly. If one tech takes longer than expected, their next job can be reassigned to another available electrician right away, to avoid delays.

2. Seamlessly Document and Share Job Details Between the Field and Office to Deliver Quotes Faster (And Access Them From Any Device at Any Time)

With ServiceTitan, businesses no longer need to waste time tracking down paper forms, traveling between the job site and office to pass off job information that pertains to an estimate, or inefficiently communicating through multiple channels and devices (email, phone calls, texts, etc.).

With our mobile app, commercial electricians can enter all of their field notes and photos directly into ServiceTitan. They can then access or double-check these notes, images, and videos from anywhere, at any time. And anyone else in the organization who needs to can access them as well.

These details can be used to share relevant information with customers about the issues techs find on site (particularly useful in commercial contexts where decision makers often aren’t on site when technicians assess the job). They can also be utilized to defend invoices in the event that customers try to get out of paying for work that was done (more on this below).

If the estimate at hand is for a small business such as a mom-and-pop restaurant, techs can easily build an estimate on site (leveraging our built-in pricebook functionality) and either send or present it to the business owner on the spot. 

Alternatively, for larger jobs or shops that have office staff in charge of creating commercial estimates, managers have access to all of the information they need to begin drafting the quote at their earliest convenience (they can even begin drafting quotes while technicians are still at a job site). 

For example, they can begin checking inventory, pricing out equipment and materials, and calculating estimates in real time, significantly reducing the time and friction that it typically takes to draft an estimate. 

As soon as all of the relevant estimate details and pricing are set, techs or office staff can send your electrical estimate off to the customer in PDF format to be reviewed by relevant stakeholders.

3. Track and Follow Up on Unsold Estimates to Improve Close Rates

Once quotes have been sent out, ServiceTitan makes it easy to track their progress and follow up on open bids. Our Follow Ups feature provides lists of sold and unsold bids, leads, recurring service events, and more.

By pulling up your Unsold Estimates, for example, you can see all of your open estimates, filtered by business unit, job type, or technician. For each one, you can see dates for when the estimate was sent, whether it was opened, what date it needs to be followed up, and more. 

You can also set reminders to alert your staff when bids need follow-up, ensuring revenue opportunities don’t needlessly slip through the cracks.

4. Defend Your Work and Get Paid Faster

Electrical companies often don’t get paid for a job because the documentation that a given customer requires is lost or forgotten. With ServiceTitan, all the notes and photos associated with jobs are stored and organized so you always have what you need to defend your invoices and get paid.

In addition, by leveraging our Customer Portal, you can give your commercial customer access to view their invoices, job histories, and make online payments directly through their custom login account. 

As a result, our users have reported that they don’t just make a lot more money — they get paid much faster. Often, before handling their billing and payment through ServiceTitan, companies said they had an expected accounts receivable window of 75 to 90 days. Many of our users cut that down to 40 — relatively low, given that commercial customers generally don’t pay for at least 30 days.    

Our Free Electrical Estimate Template Is One of Many Tools Needed to Execute Commercial Electrical Work

As we've discussed, a template alone isn't enough to overcome most of the challenges associated with traditional electrical quoting processes.

To really improve the quoting process—and seamlessly incorporate bid management, dispatch, invoice processing, and more—the best option for most commercial electricians is to adopt a best-in-class electrical contractor software like ServiceTitan.

If you want to start streamlin­ing your electrical company’s commercial quoting, booking, dispatch, scheduling, and invoice processes, request a free, personalized ServiceTitan demo.