By the Kore Komfort Editorial Team | Last Updated: May 3, 2026 | ~10 min read

Somewhere between the estimate and the signed contract, most small contractors lose jobs they should have won. Not because their price was wrong. Because the quote looked like it was typed on a phone at a gas station, or it took three days to arrive, or the customer never got a clear way to say yes.

Jobber fixes that problem. The quoting workflow is one of the platform’s strongest features, and when it’s set up correctly it turns a process that used to eat an hour into something you can run in five minutes from a job site parking lot. This guide walks you through exactly how to do it, including the details that most setup articles skip.

Why the Quote Step Is Where Most Contractors Lose Money

Most contractors think of a quote as just a price. It’s not. It’s the first time a customer decides whether your operation looks like something they want to hand money to. A professional, well-organized quote that arrives fast and is easy to approve tells the customer you run a tight business. A sloppy quote that takes two days and arrives as a photo of a handwritten notepad tells them the opposite.

The second place money gets lost is in the gap between quoting and closing. Every hour a quote sits unanswered is an hour the customer is still taking other calls. Jobber’s digital approval process closes that gap by making it a single tap on a phone for the customer to say yes. No printing, no signing, no scanning, no emailing back. That friction reduction alone changes close rates for most operators who try it.

The third place is scope. A flat-price quote leaves money on the table because customers who would have added services had no easy way to say so. Jobber’s optional add-ons fix that without requiring you to upsell in person. We’ll cover that in detail below.

If you’re still evaluating whether Jobber is the right platform for your business, our full Jobber review covers pricing, features, and who it works best for.

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What You Need Before You Create Your First Quote

Before you build your first quote, spend twenty minutes on setup. It pays back immediately and prevents you from rebuilding the same line items over and over.

Your products and services list. In Jobber, go to the Products and Services section and enter the work you quote most often with your standard pricing. This becomes a searchable library you pull from every time you build a quote. Name your items clearly — “HVAC tune-up, single unit” is more useful than “tune-up” when you’re in a hurry on a job site. Add your standard labor rates here too.

Your company logo and branding. Go to Settings, then Branding, and upload your logo. This appears on every quote, invoice, and customer-facing document. It takes two minutes and it’s the single fastest way to make your business look more established.

Your default quote terms and notes. If you have standard language you put on every quote — warranty terms, payment expectations, scope exclusions — add it to your default quote footer in Settings. Write it once and it appears automatically.

At least one client record. You can create a client on the fly while building a quote, but it’s faster if the customer is already in your system. New clients only need a name and contact method to get started.

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Step-by-Step: Creating a Quote in Jobber

These steps apply to both the desktop browser version and the Jobber mobile app. The mobile app is slightly simplified visually but hits the same functions.

Step 1: Open a new quote. From the Quotes section in the left navigation, click New Quote. On mobile, tap the plus icon from the Quotes screen. Jobber will prompt you to select or create a client first.

Step 2: Select or create the client. Start typing the client’s name and Jobber will search your existing records. If they’re new, click Add New Client and enter their name, address, phone, and email. The address matters for scheduling later — enter it accurately now and you won’t have to fix it when the job gets booked.

Step 3: Add the job title and any internal notes. The job title appears on the customer-facing quote. Keep it clear and specific — “Replace water heater, 50-gallon gas unit” is better than “Plumbing work.” Internal notes are visible only to your team and are useful for job site details, access instructions, or anything the technician needs to know.

Step 4: Build your line items. This is the core of the quote. Click Add Line Item and either type a description or search your Products and Services library. Set the quantity and unit price. Repeat for each line. We cover line item strategy in the next section.

Step 5: Attach photos or files if relevant. For jobs where the scope depends on what you saw on site — a roof inspection, a crawl space issue, a drainage problem — attach photos directly to the quote. The customer sees them when they open the quote, which adds credibility and reduces the “what exactly am I paying for?” calls.

Step 6: Set the quote expiration date. Jobber lets you add an expiration date to create urgency. For most home service work, 14 to 30 days is standard. Seasonal work — spring HVAC tune-ups, pre-winter weatherization — warrants a shorter window.

Step 7: Review and send. Preview the quote to see exactly what the customer will see, then choose to send via email, text, or both. Jobber generates a link to the quote in the Client Hub where the customer can review, ask questions, and approve.

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Building Your Line Items the Right Way

How you structure line items affects both how professional the quote looks and how well it protects you if there’s a dispute later. A few principles that hold up across 30 years of trade work:

Be specific enough to be defensible. “Labor” is not a line item. “Install 50-gallon gas water heater, includes removal and disposal of existing unit, new flex connectors, and pressure test” is a line item. If a customer calls six months later and says you didn’t do something, your quote is your evidence. Vague line items help no one.

Separate labor and materials when it makes sense. Some customers want to see the breakdown. Others don’t care and just want a total. Jobber lets you show or hide the line-item detail from the customer-facing view without changing how it’s stored internally. If you prefer to quote a flat job price, use one line item with a complete description and set the price accordingly.

Use your Products and Services library consistently. When you pull line items from your saved library instead of typing them fresh each time, your pricing stays consistent and your quote descriptions stay professional. It also speeds up quote creation significantly — a six-line quote that used to take fifteen minutes can be done in two once your library is built.

Include travel or service call fees as a line item if you charge them. Don’t bury them in labor. A clearly labeled service call fee on a quote is easy for a customer to understand and accept. A surprise charge on an invoice after the fact is a problem.

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Using Optional Add-Ons to Increase Average Job Value

This is the most underused feature in Jobber’s quoting system and one of the most financially meaningful.

When you add a line item to a quote, Jobber gives you the option to mark it as optional rather than required. Optional line items appear on the customer-facing quote with a checkbox. The customer can include them or leave them out before they approve. You never have to have an upsell conversation. The quote does it for you.

Here’s how that looks in practice. An HVAC contractor quoting an annual maintenance visit might include the standard tune-up as the base quote and add optional line items for a UV air purifier installation, a smart thermostat upgrade, and a duct sanitizing treatment. Some customers will add one. A few will add all three. Every one of those additions is revenue that required no additional sales call and no awkward conversation at the job site.

For this to work, the optional items need to be relevant to the job being quoted and described clearly enough that the customer can make a decision without calling you. Include a short sentence of explanation in each optional line item description — not a sales pitch, just what it is and why it’s relevant to their situation.

Contractors who add two to three relevant optional items to every quote typically see 10 to 20 percent of customers self-select at least one add-on. On a $600 base quote, a single $150 add-on from one in five customers represents $30 in additional revenue per quote sent. Multiply that across the volume of quotes you send in a season and it’s a real number.

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Sending the Quote and What the Customer Sees

When you send a Jobber quote, the customer receives an email or text with a link. That link opens the quote in the Client Hub, which is a branded customer portal that runs in any browser on any device without requiring the customer to create an account or download an app.

Inside the Client Hub, the customer sees the full quote with your logo, the job description, the line items, any attached photos, and the total. If you included optional add-ons, they can check or uncheck them and see the total update in real time. When they’re ready, they click Approve and it’s done. Jobber notifies you immediately.

The customer can also leave a message through the Client Hub if they have questions, which comes through to you as a notification. This replaces the back-and-forth phone calls that happen when a customer has a question about a quote and can’t reach you while you’re on a job.

For a full walkthrough of the Client Hub from the customer’s perspective, see our dedicated article on how Jobber’s Client Hub works. Understanding that experience helps you set it up in a way that presents your business well.

One thing worth knowing: Jobber lets you set up automated follow-up reminders for unanswered quotes. You can configure the system to send a follow-up email or text after a set number of days if a quote hasn’t been approved. This eliminates the manual task of tracking which quotes are still open and following up by hand. Set it once and it runs on its own.

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What Happens After the Customer Approves

This is where Jobber’s workflow pays off most visibly.

When a customer approves a quote, Jobber converts it to a job automatically. Everything on the quote — the client details, the job address, the line items, the notes — carries over to the job record with no re-entry. You assign a technician, pick a date and time from the scheduling calendar, and the job is booked. The customer receives an automatic booking confirmation.

When the job is marked complete, Jobber generates the invoice from the same job record with one click. The line items from the original quote are already there. You review, adjust if anything changed, and send it. The customer pays through the same Client Hub link.

That chain — quote to job to invoice to payment — happens in one system with no duplicate data entry at any step. For a contractor running ten jobs a week, that continuity saves several hours of administrative work, and it eliminates the category of errors that come from copying information between systems.

If you’re connecting Jobber to QuickBooks for accounting, the approved invoice syncs to QuickBooks automatically on the Connect plan and above. Our guide on connecting Jobber to QuickBooks Online covers that setup in detail, including the sync issues to watch for.

And if chasing payment after the job is a problem in your business, Jobber’s automated invoice follow-up handles that too. Read our guide on how to stop chasing unpaid invoices for how to configure it.

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Setting Up Quote Templates to Save Time

If you do the same types of jobs repeatedly, quote templates are where you get the time savings that make the subscription feel free.

In Jobber, you can save any quote as a template. The template stores the job title, all line items and pricing, the description text, default notes, and any standard optional add-ons you’ve set up. When you create a new quote from that template, all of it populates automatically. You adjust what’s specific to this job — the client, any site-specific notes, quantities that differ — and send.

A lawn care company might have templates for weekly mowing, seasonal cleanups, spring fertilization, and aeration. An HVAC contractor might have templates for an AC tune-up, a furnace inspection, a new system installation, and an emergency service call. A pressure washing company might have templates by surface type and square footage range.

Build your templates for your ten most common job types and most quote creation time disappears. The time investment to build them is about an hour total. The payback starts on the first quote you send from one.

A note on pricing in templates. Templates store the prices you enter at the time you build them. When your costs change — materials, fuel, labor — update your Products and Services library first, then rebuild or update your templates to reflect current pricing. A template with last year’s prices is worse than no template because it creates quotes you can’t profitably deliver.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can I create a Jobber quote from my phone on a job site?

Yes. The Jobber mobile app on iOS and Android supports full quote creation including client selection, line items, photo attachments, optional add-ons, and sending. Most contractors who use mobile quoting report sending the quote before they leave the customer’s driveway, which significantly improves close rates compared to following up later that day or the next morning.

What Jobber plan do I need to send quotes?

Quoting is available on all Jobber plans including the Core plan at $39/month. Optional add-ons and quote follow-up automation are available on the Connect plan and above. The 14-day free trial gives you access to the full Grow plan so you can test every quoting feature before choosing a plan tier. See our Jobber pricing breakdown for a full feature comparison by plan.

Does the customer need to create a Jobber account to approve a quote?

No. Customers approve quotes through the Client Hub, which opens in any browser on any device from the link in their email or text. There is no account creation required and no app to download. The experience is designed to be as frictionless as possible so that the approval step takes one tap rather than becoming a reason to delay.

Can I require a deposit when a quote is approved?

Yes, on the Connect plan and above. Jobber lets you request a deposit as part of the quote approval process. You can set a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the total. The customer pays the deposit when they approve, which confirms the booking and reduces no-shows for larger jobs. This feature alone is worth the plan upgrade for contractors doing significant installation or renovation work.

What happens to a quote if the customer requests changes?

You can edit a quote at any time before it’s approved. After editing, Jobber re-sends the updated version to the customer automatically. If a quote has already been approved and the scope changes mid-job, you handle that through a change order on the job record rather than editing the original approved quote. Jobber’s change order process is functional but more manual than some contractors would prefer — it’s one of the platform’s acknowledged limitations for jobs with frequent scope changes.