Quotes, variations & invoicing
This is where Keystone earns its money back on the first job — pricing quickly, catching every extra, and turning approved work into cash without hunting through emails.
Before you start
Have one or two recent supplier invoices or receipts to hand if you want to improve the evidence behind a suggestion. The working Price Book is derived from traceable commercial evidence; it is not a replacement for your own judgement or a supplier's current price.
Step-by-step
- 1
Feed the AI estimator a couple of invoices
Open AI Estimator → Price Book and add one or two recent supplier invoices or receipts through the existing commercial workflow. Keystone keeps the source evidence and derives a current working view with freshness and traceability visible.
New observations can improve the derived view, but older evidence remains traceable and manual overrides remain explicit. Review a material change before relying on it in a live quote.
- 2
Draft your first AI-priced quote
Open AI Estimator → New quote. Describe the job in a couple of sentences — or paste an enquiry email. Add the customer.
Keystone drafts a fully itemised quote from the derived Commercial View, including materials and any configured labour, plant or prelim assumptions. Review confidence, freshness and the evidence behind every suggested line.
- 3
Review, tweak & send
Read it back. Adjust anything that's off, set your margin and confirm the labour assumptions came from an accepted assembly, known rate or explicit business input. Click Send to customer only after review.
The customer gets a branded quote with a one-click accept button. When they accept, it converts straight into a job — no re-typing.
- 4
Turn the approved quote into a customer-ready proposal
From the job's Commercial journey → Proposal, choose the linked quotation, relevant approved proof and any supporting documents. Keystone creates an editable, branded proposal without recalculating the price.
Mark the draft ready only after the scope, assumptions and customer-facing wording are right. When you issue it, Keystone sends a private, expiring link through the normal customer-message route. The customer can ask a question, accept or decline; the result appears on the job timeline and in Priorities.
- 5
Raise variations before you do the work
On any live job, click Add variation. Describe the change, Review the suggested price line against the same derived commercial view, then send it for customer approval by email or portal.
Golden rule: raise the variation the moment the customer asks — before the extra work starts. Un-priced, un-approved work is the single biggest cash-flow leak in construction, and Keystone won't let it slip past you: the job record flags any variation that's stuck.
- 6
Turn the finished job into an invoice
When the job's complete, open Invoicing → New invoice. Keystone pulls the accepted quote plus every approved variation into one invoice.
If you've connected Stripe under Integrations, "Send" also raises the invoice in Stripe and payment lands straight in your account. No re-typing into Xero, no chasing statements.