For landscape contractors, producing quotes and estimates for prospective customers can be a process that makes or breaks a business.
Not only do you need to be able to deliver professional quotations relatively swiftly in order to stay competitive, but a miscalculation of labor costs, materials, or spacial measurements can swiftly eradicate any profits you might make from a project.
ZevBit has been designed to help streamline the quotation and estimating process, as well as making it more precise for businesses and clients. It’s a relatively new suite of software designed by landscape contractors for landscape contractors. But could it save you time and money?
Today, we’ll be taking a closer look at ZevBit’s primary features, seeing how it might be able to give your company an edge in the landscaping game. We’ll also be thinking about how it might measure up alongside the competition and whether there are any potential downsides to this relatively new suite of software.
What is ZevBit and who is it designed for?
ZevBit is something of a new kid on the block when it comes to landscape contracting software. Their suite of project estimating and CRM tools have been designed by people with landscaping business experience, people who know the daily tasks and challenges faced by landscaping professionals and small company owners in the field. The software creators, Alex and Austin, were unsatisfied with any existing landscaping estimating software already on the market. So in 2021, they started ZevBit, with the goal of making it more detailed and more accurate than other estimating programs.
The software itself aims to make the estimating process for pricing up possible jobs as quick and as accurate as possible. The idea is to save landscaping professionals time and money that would usually be spent calculating every small detail of a job, giving them the tools instead to build-out a quote on-site in a matter of minutes.
By using scalable labor and material costs specific to your business and set by you, the software then takes project data you enter and gives you a complete breakdown of estimated costs and pricing recommendations. You can then use it to produce professional looking quotes there and then for a prospective customer to look at and electronically sign.
What are ZevBit’s main features?
ZevBit’s two core functionalities at this time are its estimation software and its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
The company claim to have a number of other features in development that will soon become available to subscribers, including data analytics, payroll and accounting software, scheduling assistants, work tracking functions, and more. These, however, are not currently available.
When you sign up to ZevBit, you will be taken through a detailed but intuitive onboarding process, in which you are able to set a number of parameters and prices specific to your business. This allows you to scale and customize your own operating costs, the profit margins you wish to aim for, your installation methods, and other variables that are unlikely to be the same from one firm to the next.
Once this onboarding is complete, you can then take the software with you via your phone, tablet or laptop to on-site projects. With a few measurements and details about the work required, you can have the software construct detailed, item by item quotations ready to be shown to the client right there and then. The software should be able to accurately estimate working hours required, lists of materials, and signal potential profits based on different pricing models.
If you and your client are happy to proceed, the software can then generate fully customizable, professional-looking quote sheets ready for the customer to sign. It removes the need for you to return to the office to calculate a quote, only to call the customer back later to find they’ve gone with another bidder who was quicker off the mark than you.
ZevBit’s CRM software helps you track customer communication, keep an eye on potential leads, and see where you’re up to in the bidding process. It helps you keep all your customer details in one place and can help you stay on top of follow-up calls, check-ins, and other day-to-day tasks.
ZevBit are also planning to add a number of analytics features to the CRM dashboard, helping you better evaluate lead conversions and tailor marketing strategies according to which avenues seem to be proving most productive.
What are the advantages of ZevBit?
ZevBit present their software as being a huge time and money saver for any small landscaping business relying on manual, pen-and-paper calculations for their estimating.
Your prospective clients are likely to appreciate being able to see the quotation being drawn up in front of them, making the process appear trustworthy through its improved transparency. It also allows you to maximize your efficiency, turning a sales pitch into a fully detailed project calculation, and hopefully a confirmed sale.
It may also give you an edge when it comes to securing new commissions, helping you secure clients on-site, in the moment, rather than leaving them waiting for quotations and back-office calculations. The software’s e-signature system can help get clients onboard before other tenders have a chance to swoop in or muddy the water with competing offers.
Finally, as long as your fixed prices and company-specific data is accurate, the software could help significantly reduce the risk of estimation errors. Such errors can prove costly, sometimes catastrophically so, with under-estimation leading to projects that eat into rather than generate profits, and over estimation losing you valuable work.
What are the disadvantages of ZevBit?
ZevBit is clearly in a relatively early stage of its development. Though the company advertise a comprehensive suite of tools designed with landscaping contractors in mind, many of these tools are not yet available to clients and don’t appear to have been publicly tested. The ‘one-stop-shop’ that the company advertise as wanting to produce for landscaping business is, in many respects, still being built.
The accounting software, scheduling assistant, data analytics, and advanced CRM features that could position ZevBit as a software solution that covers all bases have yet to be made part of their subscription offer.
Similarly, there is currently very little customer review data available to indicate whether the software proves useful during real-life applications. With time, and with a growing number of subscribers, it should become easier to gauge how real landscape contractors have found using ZevBit’s tools.
Although their website gives some idea of how the software works and how it might help you save time and money, you will need to contact the company directly for a more detailed demo of its core functionality. The onboarding process in which you insert data relating to your company costs is also, at this point, relatively opaque without contacting the company directly for a demonstration.
The software appears to have been designed specifically with landscaping contractors in mind. The scaling nature of its estimating process looks like it would work well for relatively predictable projects such as turf laying, paving, or bed preparation, but it’s unclear at this stage how easy it is to factor in other, less scalable costs, such as specific installations or bespoke services that can’t necessarily be estimated based on dimensions alone.
What alternatives are there to ZevBit?
ZevBit is not the only software on the market that advertises its ability to help contractors produce fast and accurate estimates. That being said, it is one of relatively few software suites that appear to have been specifically designed for landscape contractors.
Other software companies, such as Benchmark, offer a range of estimation tools for a range of industries, including landscaping, but do not necessarily have small software packages designed specifically for that purpose by experienced professionals.
How much does ZevBit cost?
ZevBit currently advertise a one-price for all subscription model, costing $97.99 a month. They offer free 15 minute video demos for anyone interested in finding out more about their software’s functionality.
Big Picture Review of ZevBit
I only learned about ZevBit earlier in 2023. Prior to this I was only familiar with the big names in landscape estimating software: Jobber, PlanSwift, and others. After signing up for a demo and free trial myself to get a better understanding of it’s workflow, I have become a huge fan. The user interface is very intuitive and just flows easily from CRM to project overview to project details. You can easily adjust any of your numbers to get the most detailed cost estimate imaginable. After just a few minutes of using ZevBit for myself, I could tell that it was created by landscapers. Only people who have actually worked in the industry would include the types of details that’s are in this software. If you want super fast, super accurate quotes for your landscaping jobs, give it a try for yourself.
