The Company
East Coast Contracting is a residential renovation and construction company based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, handling both exterior projects (decks, fencing, painting) and interior renovations (flooring, bathrooms, new home builds).
The Challenge
Every new job started the same way: before East Coast Contracting could even give a customer a number, someone had to manually work out a full materials takeoff, look up current pricing from supplier catalogs, calculate labor on top of that, and assemble it all into a clean, professional quote. For a deck or fence job with specific dimensions, railing styles, and material choices, that process could easily eat up a significant chunk of a day, time that wasn’t spent on-site or with the next customer. Slower quotes also meant slower turnaround for the customer, at a point in the sales process where speed and clarity make the difference between winning and losing the job.
The Solution
East Coast Contracting now runs their estimating through Bretonia’s Quoting Agent. Instead of building a quote from scratch, someone on the team simply describes the job in plain language, for example a pressure-treated deck of a given size with a specific railing height and style, and the Quoting Agent handles the rest: calculating the real material takeoff, pricing it against actual supplier catalogs, adding labor (including removal and disposal labor when an old structure needs to come out first), and producing a clean, itemized quote ready to send to the customer.
Because the math behind every quote is calculated directly from real pricing and real dimensions rather than estimated by hand, East Coast Contracting gets consistent, accurate numbers every time, not just a faster version of a rough guess.
Implementation
The Quoting Agent connects directly into the QuickBooks account East Coast Contracting was already using, so a completed quote can go straight from a chat conversation to a ready-to-send invoice without re-entering anything into a separate system. There was no new software for the team to learn and no change to how they already managed their accounting, just a much faster path to get from a customer’s request to a finished quote.
