Suggestions What are you actually using to manage quotes, jobs, and invoices? (not looking to sell anything)

[yngerassi]

Hey Signs101, looking for some honest feedback from people who actually run shops.

I'm a developer and I've been building a job management tool specifically for small sign shops. Not another ShopVOX — that thing costs $250-450/month and is built for shops with 20+ employees. I'm targeting the 1-10 person shop that's either on spreadsheets, sticky notes, or just wing it day to day.

Here's what I built:

• Quotes built for sign shops — sq ft pricing, materials, markup, not generic line items you have to hack together
• Pre-built templates for your most common jobs so quoting takes seconds not 20 minutes
• Customer proof approval portal — send a link, they approve or request changes, you get notified. No more texting proofs back and forth
• Invoices directly from the quote with online payment built in — no chasing checks
• QuickBooks export so your books stay clean without double entry
• Job board so you always know what's in production, what's waiting on approval, what's ready to install
• Setup in under 10 minutes — no onboarding calls, no training, just log in and go

Pricing is $99/month for most shops. A fraction of ShopVOX.

My honest question to you all: is this actually solving a real problem, or do most small shops just not care about software and never will? Would you use something like this, or is spreadsheets-forever the reality?

Brutally honest answers only please — I'd rather know now than after I launch.

 

[dypinc]

Sounds like something for more like a 5-20 person shop. I don't think most under 5 person shops do enough to justify a $99 per month cost when they probably already have a working system that suits fine for small shops. When you think about what accounting software already costs most small shop can get by with what they already have.

No to be brutally honest the only way I would even consider it would be if it was NOT ONLINE based and available for Mac and Windows. Think FileMaker Pro.

 

[yngerassi]

Sounds like something for more like a 5-20 person shop. I don't think most under 5 person shops do enough to justify a $99 per month cost when they probably already have a working system that suits fine for small shops. When you think about what accounting software already costs most small shop can get by with what they already have.

No to be brutally honest the only way I would even consider it would be if it was NOT ONLINE based and available for Mac and Windows. Think FileMaker Pro.

That’s exactly the kind of honest answer I was hoping for — thank you.
The price point pushback makes sense. For a 1-2 person shop doing 10 jobs a month, $99 probably doesn’t pencil out. I’m reconsidering whether the sweet spot is really 5-20 employees like you said rather than trying to go smaller.
On the offline/desktop point — genuinely curious about this. Is that a trust thing (don’t want job data in the cloud), a speed thing (web apps feel slow), or something else? I ask because FileMaker is a pretty specific reference — are there a lot of shops still running local databases like that?
Not arguing, just want to understand the reasoning before I decide whether that’s worth building for.

 

[dypinc]

That’s exactly the kind of honest answer I was hoping for — thank you.
The price point pushback makes sense. For a 1-2 person shop doing 10 jobs a month, $99 probably doesn’t pencil out. I’m reconsidering whether the sweet spot is really 5-20 employees like you said rather than trying to go smaller.
On the offline/desktop point — genuinely curious about this. Is that a trust thing (don’t want job data in the cloud), a speed thing (web apps feel slow), or something else? I ask because FileMaker is a pretty specific reference — are there a lot of shops still running local databases like that?
Not arguing, just want to understand the reasoning before I decide whether that’s worth building for.

The offline/desktop point - your questions all apply and I do not consider the internet to be reliable enough infrastructure wise (solar storms and weapon of war).

You should really look at FileMaker Pro, it local server options etc.

 

[White Haus]

Sounds like you've built a pretty good solution. I think the $99/month price point is fair considering competition out there, and if it was a nice, polished solution I'd pay that price.

We're a team of 3 at the moment and use a makeshift combination of a few things:

-Mostly hand-written/calculated estimates. Have some spreadsheets/calculators for certain items.
-Editable PDF or Corel templates for our work orders/dockets
-Smartsheet software for our job board and daily production schedules
-Quickbooks Desktop for creating estimates/invoices/all other bookkeeping activities

I've played around with FileMaker in the past, evaluated SignTracker, SignVox etc. over the years and have yet to find a solution I was completely happy with. Especially comparing the value vs. the astronomical rates they charge.

I think my biggest want/need is to be able to quickly write up orders to hand off to production staff, and have that order "card" (Kanban style) easily moved around on a schedule. Bonus points if card size can be edited to match the estimated production time, ie: small projects are smaller cards, larger projects are larger cards etc.