Navigating the Quoting Tool Settings
General Settings
General settings include your Default Notification settings, Price Rounding, and selecting your default Scope Groups
Manage Questions
This is where you will set up all the questions you will ask during the quoting process. These questions can be fact-finding about the customer and their home; some may affect the price and time of the cleaning.
Scopes of Work
This is where you will define your Scope Groups and Individual Scopes. You can rearrange these and set up how each scope will be set up.
iFrames
This step contains all of your prebuilt iFrames for the Online Quoting Tool, Testimonials, and Lead Capture Form.
General Settings Set Up
The first thing to set up is your Default Notifications.
These are the notifications that all new customers will have (whether they are added through the quoting tool or not).
The most common options selected are
email 3 days before
text one day before
text on the way
scorecard sent by both email and text
email Invoice
Your General Settings select which scopes will be your default scope group for Office (internal) or Online (external) quoting methods.
You can also select if you would like to use a precursor zip screening textbox that will let you know if a zip code is within your service area or not before collecting any further information.
The Display Manual Address Inputs will show the manual address entries by default. If this is not enabled you can always expand the manual entries if needed.
Finally, this tab will also show price rounding if enabled. You can choose where you want the price rounded and which number you want it rounded to.
Manage Questions Set Up
This is where you will set up and define the factors for all Questions asked in your quoting process.
Questions can be fact-finding only or they can adjust the price based on the input. There are 3 ways your questions can affect pricing:
Multiply Time By
Takes the total calculated minutes and multiplies by the applicable Factor
Add a Fixed Rate of Time
Adds a flat rate of time in minutes
Multiply the Input By
Takes the user-supplied input value and multiplies it by the applicable Factor
Fact-finding questions can be any type of question, but questions that affect the pricing can only be a Select List, Multiple Select List, Whole Number, or Decimal.
Scopes of Work
This is where your Scopes of Work are set up. The bold section headers are your Scope Groups
Scope Groups should contain all of the scopes that a single technician may be assigned.
Example: If your technicians could clean both residential and commercial jobs then both residential and commercial scopes of work should be in the same scope group.
If your technicians NEVER overlap between scopes, such as carpet cleaning and residential cleaning, those should be separate scope groups.
This tab shows how each scope is priced, the base hourly rate, the planned team size, how technicians are paid for that scope of work, the set technician efficiency, and where the scope of work is available to be quoted.
Individual Scopes of Work include:
General Settings
Includes basic settings such as the scope of work name, Quickbooks assignment, and how this scope will be priced. You can also adjust the technician settings for planned team size, technician efficiency factor, technician pay type for this scope, and the trainee position factor!
Finally, there are the online quote visual settings if this scope will be available online.
Rates and fees
Set up your Base Hourly Rate, Minimum Bill Rate per Job, Skip Fees, and Lockout Fees.
Rate Modifications
You will add all service fees such as fuel surcharges, credit card fees, convenience fees, etc that may be used for this scope of work, additionally, you can add add-ons such as linen changes, window washing, fridge cleaning, and oven cleaning that may be added to this scope of work.
Discounts
Here, you can activate promo codes or other discounts you may offer to customers during the booking process.
Frequencies
Each scope of work can have different frequencies. You can define all recurring frequencies on one scope of work (every week, every two weeks, every four weeks) and there are several options for how to define One Time, Initial, and Move In/Move Out cleans either as their own scopes of work or as rate modifications for a single frequency scope of work. We'll go over that in another guide!
Questions and Factors
This is where you will apply the questions you created in the earlier steps of the quoting tool process. You are able to override the default values but the overall settings for the questions are set up in the available questions tab.
Pricing Types
All quoting methods in MaidCentral are used to create a base time the job will take, then multiply that time by the hourly rate that is input for that scope of work. This means that everything that is added to change the time on the job will also change the price of the job.
There are 3 ways that you can price your new quotes in MaidCentral: By Room, By Square Feet, and Simplified Pricing.
By Room Pricing
In this pricing method, each room that is added to the quote will add time to the total base time.
Pros:
Internal quotes will have extremely accurate room listings and pricing based on the rooms that will be cleaned.
You can edit the rate per room and also add factors based on the size of the house in the questions and factors.
MaidCentral quoting was originally based on By Room quoting so there are lots of convenient tools such as automatic room counts for bedrooms and bathrooms and down to the room descriptions within room masters.
Cons:
Customers are not able to add all their rooms on the online quoting tool, you will need to have a variation of your quoting process that can accurately calculate the time of the job based on Bedrooms, Bathrooms, and Square Feet.
A bit more advanced to set up and make sure it is used accurately.
By Square Feet Pricing
This is the best method of pricing for any company that uses the same production rate for all cleans.
Production rate is the number of square feet cleaned per hour.
Example: Company A's technicians clean 500 sqft per hour for all homes, they are expected to take 3 labor hours in a 1500sqft home and 6 labor hours in a 3000sqft home.
It is not common for a company to have the same production rate for all home sizes. Typically the production rate will increase as the home size increases and this is why MaidCentral created Simplified Pricing.
Simplified Pricing
Simplified Pricing allows you to use two existing home sizes and cleaning times to create your entire pricing matrix. It is a variation of pricing by Square Feet but allows the production rate to be variable based on home sizes.
There are three common ways that Simplified Pricing is used.
Purely Square Foot Based
This pricing method does not adjust the base time for anything else, it is only based on the square feet of the home. This is a very simple method of quoting and can make the quoting process so much faster and easier, especially online.
Square Feet Plus Factors
This method uses the base time created by the simplified pricing matrix and then adjusts it based on common factors such as the number of people or pets in the home and the condition of the home when they will start cleaning it.
Square Feet and Bathrooms
This method accounts for the square feet of the house and then adds time using the questions and factors for each bathroom that is in the home. Can also be combined with additional factors but our recommendation is to use as few factors as possible to keep the quoting process simple.