Quoting software for Australian tradies
Most quotes are not lost on price. They are lost on the fortnight of silence between sending one and remembering to ring about it, or on the version where nobody can agree what was included. Job quoting software is worth having when it fixes those two things and stays out of the way otherwise.
Search for quoting software and you will get four unrelated products on one page of results. This page starts by separating them, then describes what Opsler actually does with a job quote — from the site visit through approval to the invoice — for an Australian trade business, with the boundaries marked.
Quoting software versus estimating, invoicing and CPQ
Four different products compete for the word “quote”, and they solve genuinely different problems. Buying the wrong one is expensive in a way that is not obvious until about month three.
| Category | The problem it solves | Who needs it |
|---|---|---|
| Job quoting software | Turning a price you have already worked out into a document the customer accepts, then into the job and the invoice | Trades quoting from experience and a price list. This is Opsler. |
| Estimating software | Working out what the job should cost — takeoffs from drawings, material schedules, labour units, supplier pricing | Tendered commercial work priced from plans. Opsler does none of this. |
| Accounting quotation software | Issuing a quote from the ledger so it becomes an invoice cleanly | Businesses whose quoting is simple and whose accounting is not. Xero does this well. |
| CPQ | Configure, price, quote — rule-driven product configuration with approval hierarchies and discount governance | Enterprise sales teams with configurable products. Not a trade tool at all. |
The CPQ row is worth dwelling on, because it is why this search is so noisy. CPQ is enterprise software for sales teams configuring complex products, and it shares nothing with a tradie writing a quote for a hot water replacement except three letters. If a vendor is talking about approval workflows, discount governance and quote-to-cash, you are on the wrong page for a trade business.
The blur between the first three is more forgivable. People searching quotation software, quote software, quote and invoice software, quotes and invoices software, quoting and invoicing software, or just a quoting app for the phone in their pocket, are usually describing the same wish: one place where the quote becomes the invoice without retyping. That wish is reasonable and it is what the rest of this page is about.
Start with the customer, site and job scope
A quote in Opsler is raised against a customer record and a property, not typed into a blank template. That sounds like a small distinction and it is the reason the rest of the workflow holds together.
The customer record carries the service address, an optional separate billing address, contact numbers, notes and every previous job at that property. So when you quote a second bathroom for a landlord in Ipswich, you are quoting with the first one visible — what it included, what it cost, how long it took. Quoting from history rather than memory is the single largest improvement most small trade businesses get from software, and it is worth more than any template.
Scope is captured as the quote's line items rather than as a paragraph of prose. A paragraph is where disputes come from; eleven priced lines are hard to misremember. Whether you are an electrical business pricing a switchboard upgrade or a plumbing business pricing a hot water replacement, the mechanism is identical.
Build a clear itemised job quote
Lines come from a price book you maintain — labour from your service catalogue, parts from inventory, or a one-off custom charge. Each line carries its own quantity, unit price and tax treatment, so a quote that mixes GST-inclusive materials with differently treated labour still totals correctly.
Opsler also supports a three-tier quote on a single document — good, better, best — where the customer chooses a level rather than accepting or rejecting one number. It works well for replacement work where there is a budget option and a better one. One thing to know before you use it, because it is the sort of detail that causes an awkward phone call: the tiers are cumulative. The better tier bills its own line plus the good tier's line, and the best tier bills all three. So if you want a better tier that the customer pays $9,000 for, and the good tier is $3,500, the better line is priced at $5,500. Check the total the customer will see before you send it.
What the quote builder deliberately does not do: no supplier catalogues, no live material pricing, no takeoff from drawings, no labour-unit libraries, and no automatic margin optimisation. If copper moves, you update your own price book. The assumption throughout is that you have already worked out the number and you want to present it well.
Apply ABN and GST requirements correctly
You configure a named GST rate and decide whether it applies to labour, to parts, or to both. Each quote line picks up the treatment, the breakdown calculates, and your ABN and business details print on the document. When the quote becomes an invoice, that treatment carries through rather than being re-entered.
Now the part that matters more than the feature. The Australian Taxation Office sets out what a tax invoice must contain — the supplier's identity and ABN, the GST amount or a statement that the total includes GST, the date, a description of what was supplied, and additional requirements once you cross the higher value threshold. Meeting those requirements is a function of how you set the software up and what your accountant advises. It is not something a vendor can confer on you.
So, precisely: Opsler renders your ABN and your configured tax treatment onto quotes and invoices. It does not validate your ABN against the register, lodge a BAS, remit GST, or certify that any document meets ATO requirements. Check a real quote and a real invoice with your accountant before you rely on either — a fifteen-minute review at the start is cheaper than a correction across six months of documents.
Send the quote and record customer review or approval
The quote goes out by email as a link. The customer opens it in their own browser — no account, no password, no app to download — enters a one-time code sent to their email address, picks a tier if you offered tiers, and signs on screen, typed or drawn. The approval is stored against the quote with its timestamp.
The one-time code is doing real work there. It ties the acceptance to the person who controls that email address, which is a meaningful step up from a reply saying “yeah go ahead” and considerably better than a verbal yes on site.
Be clear about what this is not, because the category uses the term loosely. This is not a dedicated e-signature product. There is no certificate of completion, no signer audit trail of the kind DocuSign or Adobe Sign issue, no witnessing, and no integration with a service that provides them. For a $3,000 job that is comfortably enough. For a contract where you may need evidentiary weight in a dispute, run a proper e-signature service alongside and treat the Opsler approval as the operational record rather than the legal one.
Rejection is worth a sentence too: a customer declining a quote may give a reason, but is not required to. If your process depends on capturing why you lost work, that has to be your phone call, not the software's.
Manage revisions, variations and quote status
Every quote sits in a state, and the value of the state model is that you can see at a glance what is with a customer and what has gone quiet.
| State | What it means | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Being built. Not visible to the customer. | Send it |
| Sent | With the customer, awaiting a decision. | Follow up yourself — nothing chases automatically |
| Approved | Customer entered the emailed code and signed. Timestamped. | Convert to a job |
| Rejected | Customer declined. A reason is optional, not required. | Revise and resend, or close it out |
| Converted | Now a job, carrying its line items. | Schedule and do the work |
The “follow up yourself” line is the honest one. Opsler shows you which quotes are sitting in Sent and how long they have been there. It does not chase them — no automated follow-up sequence, no reminder emails on a schedule, no open-tracking to tell you whether the customer looked. If your quote conversion depends on systematic chasing, you will be doing that chasing from a list rather than having it done for you, and you should factor that in.
Variations are handled by revising and resending, or — cleaner for anything substantial — by raising a separate quote for the additional work, so the approval trail matches what was agreed. There is no side-by-side version comparison and no counter-signature on the original.
Convert an accepted quote into the job and invoice workflow
This is the join that justifies the whole category. An approved quote converts into a job carrying its line items intact. The job goes onto the dispatch board, gets assigned, gets done with photos and a signature, and the invoice is raised from that same record — same lines, same amounts, same customer, same property.
Nothing is retyped at any of those three handoffs, which matters more than it sounds. Every re-key is an opportunity to transpose a digit, drop a line, or invoice the quoted price for work that grew on site. On a business doing forty quoted jobs a month, one missed variation a fortnight is real money.
From there the job lifecycle takes over — scheduling, the field record, invoice status through to paid — which is the territory of the job management software page rather than this one.
Mobile, offline, payment and accounting boundaries
Quoting on site, from the driveway, is where a lot of trade work is actually won, so the mobile position matters.
Opsler installs from the browser onto a phone or tablet and then behaves like an app. It is not an App Store or Google Play download, which is a trade rather than a shortcoming: no store review sitting between a fix and your phone, no install step for a new starter, one address that works on whatever device is in the ute. If a store listing is a hard requirement, this is not for you.
Offline, a tradie can create estimates and invoices with no connection and they sync once signal returns, along with job completion, photos, signatures, checklist ticks, notes and status changes. What needs a connection is anything that has to reach the customer or the office in the moment — sending the quote for approval, reorganising the diary, pulling up a customer who was never loaded on that device. Draft on site, send when you have bars.
Payment: recorded, not processed. Opsler is not a payment processor, takes no platform fee, and no money moves through it — but you can attach your own payment link, your Stripe or Square page, to an invoice or job so the customer can pay you directly through your own processor. What Opsler will not do is take a deposit automatically at the moment a quote is accepted; the link is something the customer acts on, not a charge that fires on approval. Accounting: a file, not a connection. Opsler exports QuickBooks-formatted and Xero-formatted CSV that you import yourself on the Pro plan — not a sync, not two-way, not real time. Xero, Tradify and AroFlo all describe live accounting connections; if that is the requirement, they are the honest answer. Mobile behaviour in more depth sits on the tradie app page.
Quoting software evaluation checklist
Eight tests, run on a real quote you are about to send anyway. If a tool fails three of them, it is not your tool.
- Build a quote with at least ten line items mixing labour and parts. Time it. This is the thing you will do most often.
- Send it to your own email and accept it as the customer would, on a phone. Judge it as they will — if approving is fiddly, some percentage of them will not.
- Convert the accepted quote to a job. Check every line arrived and nothing needed retyping.
- Raise the invoice from that job and compare it to the quote line by line.
- If you use tiered quoting, price a three-tier quote and confirm the total the customer sees is the total you intended. The tiers are cumulative.
- Configure GST, produce a real invoice, and put it in front of your accountant before you commit.
- Draft a quote in aeroplane mode. Confirm it survives and syncs when you reconnect.
- Ask what happens to a quote nobody follows up. If the vendor promises automated chasing, ask to see it working on a real quote — this is the most commonly overstated feature in the category.
All eight run on the free Budding plan except the accounting export in step six: two seats, 50 jobs a month, unlimited customers, 100 inventory items in one location, 21 core features, free forever. Pro is US$25 per seat per month with no seat minimum, and the 14-day trial does not ask for a card.
Common questions
Two halves, two different answers. Signing: yes, in the practical sense. The customer opens the quote from an emailed link, enters a one-time code sent to their email address, and signs on screen with a typed or drawn signature. The approval is recorded against the quote with its timestamp. What that is not is a dedicated e-signature product — there is no certificate of completion, no witnessing, no signer audit trail of the kind DocuSign or Adobe Sign produce, and no integration with one. For a $3,000 bathroom quote that is almost always sufficient; for a contract where you need evidentiary weight, use a proper e-signature service alongside. Paying: partly, and the distinction matters. Opsler is not a payment processor — it takes no platform fee and no money passes through it — but you can attach your own payment link, your existing Stripe or Square page, to an invoice or a job, and the customer sees it when they open their job link. They pay you directly through your own processor at your own rates, and Opsler records that the invoice was paid. What it will not do is charge a deposit automatically the moment a quote is accepted; the link is something the customer chooses to act on, not a charge that fires on approval. If an automatic deposit at acceptance is what your cash flow depends on, that is a genuine reason to look at a platform that processes payments itself — and to weigh the percentage it will take for doing so.
For some builders, honestly, and not for others — and the dividing line is contract structure rather than trade. If you are quoting renovations, extensions, small works or fit-outs as a single price with itemised inclusions, this works exactly as it does for a plumber or a sparkie: itemised lines, customer approval, conversion into scheduled work, invoice from the same record. If you are running staged construction contracts with progress claims, retention, contract-sum variations and a schedule of rates, you need construction contract software and Opsler will frustrate you inside a month. There is no progress-claim billing, no retention handling and no contract-sum tracking. That is a deliberate scope choice, not a roadmap item.
You revise it and send it again. The customer's earlier approval, if there was one, stays recorded against what they actually approved — which is the point. In practice most variation disputes on small jobs come down to somebody remembering a verbal agreement differently, and the defence is a quote history showing what was priced and when it was accepted. Opsler keeps that history against the customer and the property. What it will not do is version-diff two quotes side by side or ask the customer to counter-sign a change on the original document. If a variation is significant, the clean approach is a fresh quote for the additional work so the approval trail is unambiguous.
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