PayPolka

Estimates

Send an estimate to agree on the work and price before you begin. Your client can review it through a link and accept or decline online. You don’t need a project first, and once the estimate is accepted you can invoice the full amount or bill in stages.

Creating one

New Estimate on the Estimates page, or New estimate on a client page. The form asks for:

  • Client, picked from a drawer. Inactive clients sit in their own section.
  • Subject, a short title like “Kitchen remodel”.
  • Issue date and Valid until. Valid until is prefilled from the default validity in Settings, Documents.
  • Tax rate (%) and Discount rate (%). The tax rate starts from the client’s default.
  • Notes, shown to the client.
  • Attachments: PDF, images, text, CSV, Word, Excel, or ZIP. 25 MB per file, 100 MB per estimate.

Numbers are assigned in sequence per account as EST- plus your prefix and a two-digit sequence: EST-M01, EST-M02. The prefix is in Settings, Documents.

Lines

Every line has a Type, Description, Quantity, and Unit price. Type is Labor, Service, or Item. Service and Item both bill quantity times unit price; the word is what your client reads. Labor is hours at a rate and usually comes from a labor category. Item is everything else.

Two buttons add rows. Add from catalog opens a drawer of your labor categories and catalog items; Add line item adds a blank row. See Labor categories and catalog.

Each row has a Price TBD checkbox. Tick it and the quantity and price fields grey out, the line shows TBD on the estimate, and it adds nothing to the total. Use it for the part you’ll price at cost later. When the whole estimate is invoiced, a TBD line comes across as a $0 placeholder for you to fill in.

Statuses

Draft, sent, accepted, declined. Two more cases show on screen as Archived: an estimate you archived by hand, and a sent estimate past its valid-until date, which also reads “Archived (expired)” under the title. The list’s filter chips are All, Draft, Sent, Accepted, Declined, and Archived; expired estimates sit under Archived.

Sending

Send estimate opens a dialog showing the recipient (the client’s primary contact) with an optional Note that goes in the email. The client gets a public link. If the client has no primary contact with an email, the dialog says so.

On a sent estimate the button becomes Resend estimate. The Actions menu also has Mark as sent for a draft you delivered some other way, and Mark as accepted and Mark as declined for a sent estimate, each with an optional internal note.

Online acceptance

The public page shows the estimate, its total, notes, attachments, and your terms link if you’ve published one. Two buttons: Accept estimate and Decline.

Accepting asks the client to type their full name to sign, with optional notes. PayPolka stamps the time and IP address and shows the signature on your copy. Declining takes an optional reason. Both go into the estimate history at the bottom of your page, and PayPolka emails the account owner either way.

Expired, declined, archived

An expired estimate can’t be accepted or declined online, and Resend estimate gives way to Reactivate estimate. Pick a new valid-until date and the client can accept again.

A declined estimate has Reopen estimate in the Actions menu. It goes back to draft so you can edit and resend. The old decline reason stays in the history.

Archive estimate hides one from the default list with an optional note. Archived estimates keep everything and have Unarchive estimate.

Accepted estimates can’t be edited. The Edit estimate button is replaced by Change order.

Change orders

Scope grows. Instead of editing the accepted estimate, Change order starts a new draft for the same client with the subject prefilled as “Change order 1 to EST-M01: Kitchen remodel” and empty lines. It’s a separate estimate with its own number, its own acceptance, and its own invoicing. The original lists its change orders in a band at the top, each change order links back, and the numbering counts per original estimate.

Copy estimate link puts the public URL on your clipboard. It’s a bearer link: whoever has it can open the page, once the estimate has been sent; a draft is not public. Links expire after the days set in Settings, Documents.

Regenerate public link in the Actions menu makes a new one and the old one stops working. Use it if a link went somewhere it shouldn’t have.

Delete estimate is the last item in the menu and works at any status.