“What would 3.0 metre ceilings cost?” — answered before they leave the room.
Not a guess, and not “I’ll get back to you on Monday”. Taller walls change the frames, the plasterboard, the paint and the tiling, and the number the client hears has all of it in — because it comes from your estimate, not from a price list somebody made up two years ago.
Available on the Estimator plan and above
The moment a client is ready to spend more is the moment you cannot price it
They are sitting in your display home asking about ceiling height. The honest answer takes an estimator half a day, because taller walls are not one line — they are the frames, the plasterboard sheets, the cornice, the paint, the wall tiling and whatever else measures off that height.
So the industry does one of two things. It quotes a round number off a laminated sheet and hopes it covers the cost, or it says it will come back next week, by which time the client has stopped feeling generous. One leaks margin on every house. The other leaves the upgrade unsold.
You set the options up on the design, not on every job
A group is one decision the client makes — Wall height, Wet area tiling, Kitchen benchtops. Inside it, the first choice is the standard, which is whatever the estimate already has, and each upgrade beside it carries its own worked-out price.
A choice says what the estimate should look like if it is picked, not how much to add. That is the part that matters: going back to the standard puts the estimate back exactly as it was, however many items the upgrade touched.
A take-off field
A measurement for the whole house. Wall height 2.7 → 3.0, and every item that reads it follows: frames, plasterboard, paint, the tiling.
A room at a time
A question answered per room on a take-off sheet. Tiles to the ceiling in the ensuite and the bathroom, but not the laundry — the salesperson ticks the rooms.
A product
Swap an item for another of its own products. Laminate benchtop → 20 mm stone, with the maker, the edge detail and the colour range on the card.
An item in or out
Put something in the price or take it out. Ducted air in, the split systems out — one choice, both halves.
One group can make several changes at once, which is the whole point — ducted air conditioning is one choice to the client and four line items to you.
Your margin, or a fixed figure, or rounded to the nearest hundred
Each upgrade is priced at the estimate’s own margin by default. You can price it on the variation markup structure instead, or type a fixed figure for the ones you sell at a set price. A calculated price can be rounded up to the nearest dollar, ten, hundred or thousand, so the client hears $15,000 rather than $14,860.12.
Every price is worked out once and saved, so the sales page adds any mix of them up instantly rather than recalculating a whole estimate while somebody waits.
Upgrades that feed each other
Raise the ceiling and the wet-area tiling gets taller, so the tiling upgrade is worth something different. SmarteBuild works out which groups affect which — through the take-off fields and the item formulas — and prices the follower against the parent’s choice instead of pretending they are independent.
And the bit that is left over
Even then, several upgrades together are not always the sum of their parts. So the chosen set is applied to a working copy of the estimate and priced once more, and the difference appears on the client’s own total as effect of choosing these together. No quiet rounding error.
The sales team never opens the estimate
They open the job’s upgrades page and tick. Each choice adds its line to the price panel: the base price, each upgrade, the together figure, and the total inc GST with the difference from the base underneath. Costs and margins are never shown on that screen.
A proposal is one set of choices with its price, and a second proposal starts from the first — so “what if we did the benchtops but not the ceilings” is two clicks and a saved comparison, not a new quote.
Switch it on per job and the client can pick in their own portal. They can also ask for something you did not offer, and the question lands on the sales page with their choices beside it. Sales staff who do not need a login get a link of their own, with a password.
The signed proposal becomes the estimate, without anybody retyping it
This is the step that normally goes wrong. The client signs, and somebody has to remember to put thirty item changes into the estimate before the frames are ordered.
| On signing | What that means later |
|---|---|
| Every upgrade goes into the estimate | The orders you raise are for the house they bought, not the standard one. |
| The contract price becomes the signed total | Cost-to-date and margin are measured against what was actually agreed. |
| The estimate as it was is kept, read-only | Filed as (before upgrades), and Compare with puts the two side by side. |
| Every item that moved is recorded | A list of what changed, so a question in six months has an answer. |
| The estimate locks | The price the client signed cannot drift afterwards without somebody unlocking it. |
It will not quietly change an order you have already sent. Before signing, any sent order or tender holding an item these upgrades touch is listed, so you raise the extra order or ask for a new quote on purpose. A supplier has seen what they were sent.
After the contract, the same screen makes a variation
Clients keep choosing things after they have signed. Press offer upgrades as a variation and the choices start from what they have already agreed, priced against that — so the figure is the difference, not the whole upgrade again.
Saving it makes a draft variation carrying the real cost of every item change and the price the client was shown. It goes out for approval like any other, and approval alone never changes the estimate: somebody still applies it.
Both halves of it
You set the options up once. The sales team never touches the estimate.
What it connects to
Nothing in SmarteBuild is an island — that is the point of it. Sales Upgrades reads from and feeds into these.
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Bill of Quantities
The costed spine of the job — items, rates, markups and margin
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Tenders
Build a trade package, invite subbies, compare what comes back
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Variations
Price a change, get it approved, and carry it into the contract
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Client Portal
One page for your client about their job, and no more "can you resend that?"
Want the detail?
The help centre documents Sales Upgrades step by step, with worked examples — written for people using it, not for a brochure.
Start with one job and see
Try the whole thing free for 30 days. No credit card to start, and no lock-in contract.