For years, NaDonte Jones did estimates the old-fashioned way — poring over blueprints and using different-colored highlighters to categorize various materials needed for jobs, then price them out.
“I’d manually input all of that information,” says Jones, owner of NJ Jones Plumbing in Syracuse, New York. “Doing it the old-school way was very tedious. With everything else I had to do, it might take me a couple of weeks to develop a bid for, say, a large, $1 million project.”
But these days, Jones works smarter, not harder, thanks to Design Estimating Pro software from McCormick Systems (a Foundation Software company). The estimating software enables him to develop job estimates in hours, he says.
Furthermore, Jones says he used to avoid larger jobs because of the time it took to create estimates.
“The most I would do was an estimate for plumbing a small house,” he says. “But with this software, I can quickly do take-offs for large projects, like a school remodeling project or a new large home or commercial building. It’s helped me tremendously to get more work and be more profitable.”
Using the software is so much faster because Jones can upload digital blueprints into his computer. Then he uses a mouse to point-and-click on various materials and components needed for a job — pipes, fixtures, couplings and the like. The software then automatically calculates the project costs, including the labor rate, he says.
“It cut the time I spent doing estimates by 80 to 90%,” Jones says. “That’s critical because I’m still the mouth of the bottle — everything goes through me. So I can’t be sitting around too long screwing around with estimates. I need to focus more on day-to-day operations — get out in the field, making sure things are getting done.”
Jones says he paid a one-time $3,000 fee for the cloud-based software and also pays an annual subscription fee of $700.
“It’s a great deal,” Jones notes. “I’ve been using it for five or six years and have probably captured $3 to $5 million worth of work with it.”
The software includes a fully loaded, prebuilt plumbing database for any type of project, including residential, commercial and industrial work. The software’s database features more than 40,000 items and 20,000 prebuilt assemblies for fixtures, as well as provides built-in material costs and labor units. For an additional fee, the system will automatically update the prices of materials, based on data from popular supply houses.
Read more about NJ Jones Plumbing in the February 2025 issue of Plumber magazine.
