Electrical — commercial & industrial, 14 electricians
A 60-second MEP calculator that pushes quotes into Jobber.
Volt kept Jobber for residential work but built a LyonHawk Digital bidding calculator for commercial rewires and panel upgrades — multi-variable estimates that push finished quotes straight into Jobber via API.
- average time to price a commercial rewire
- 60 sec
- estimator time per complex bid
- Half day → 1 hr
- re-keying errors since launch
- 0
Starting state
Commercial bids lived in a 40-tab Excel workbook: conduit runs, panel counts, permit fees, labor rates by journeyman vs. apprentice mix, and contingency. An estimator spent half a day on a mid-size rewire, then manually re-keyed the total into Jobber to generate the customer-facing proposal. Errors happened at the handoff.
Constraints
- Jobber had to stay the CRM — the calculator was an input, not a replacement.
- The owner needed margin guardrails so field estimators couldn't underbid.
- Finished quotes had to appear in Jobber with line-item detail, not just a total.
Approach
We sat with Volt's lead estimator for two sessions to map every variable in their Excel model, then rebuilt it as a guided web form with real-time margin display. Jobber API integration shipped in week four — finished bids create a draft estimate with one click.
What shipped
- Guided commercial bid form — panel count, conduit, labor mix, permits, contingency
- Real-time margin display with owner-set floor thresholds
- One-click push to Jobber as a draft estimate with line items
- Bid history log for win/loss analysis independent of Jobber's reporting
What we’d do differently
The labor-mix slider was the feature estimators fought over in testing — we almost cut it for scope. Never skip the variable your expert reaches for first.