Best Manufacturing Quoting and Estimating Software of 2025

Additionally, its cloud infrastructure offers flexibility and access to your business data from anywhere. Engineer To Order (ETO), Make to Order (MTO), Government Contractor, Job Shop and Maintenance Repair and Overhaul manufacturing companies require ERP job costing software that provides project cost, job cost. Contract cost and job cost accounting that is up-to-date and available for every job, contract ,or project at any given time. An industry-specific type of configure, price, and quote systems (CPQ software), manufacturing quoting and estimating software helps your business get from quote to cash. Providing customers with an accurate quote is one of the biggest factors in whether a company decides to do business with you–and delays in putting together a quote can stop a deal from occurring altogether.

• Yes, manufacturing accounting software can manage job costing by tracking labor, materials, and overhead for individual jobs.
• It uses an AI-based forecasting tool to anticipate labor demand, based on factors such as sales, weather, or foot traffic.
• You only need to import your Cabinet Vision library into Jobman, and then you can change the pricing for individual items, so every following quote has the correct costs.
• Rather than employing traditional timesheets or time clocks, the modern workforce is embracing self-service attendance management via their own mobile devices.

Workforce Analytics & AI-Driven Optimization Tools (For Predictive Analytics & Workforce Efficiency Reports)

Jackie Jones has over three years of experience helping HR teams improve employee morale, reduce absenteeism, and create happier, more engaged workplaces. With a strong background in employee relations and attendance management, she brings practical strategies and insights that support frontline teams and the HR professionals who lead them. Whether you are an engineer, production manager, accountant or CEO, Genius ERP has the solutions you need to get the job done right. Quickly generate reports with any criteria you choose to include jobs, transactions, internal tracking numbers, date ranges and custom fields. Jobman pulls data from cabinet-making software like Cabinet Vision to synchronise pricing data across both systems. You only need to import your Cabinet Vision library into Jobman, and then you can change the pricing for individual items, so every following quote has the correct costs.

Connect and share with your team in real time

It’s geared for larger businesses, with advanced compliance features that support FLSA, ACA, tax compliance, and labor laws. In pursuit of a software package that meets our requirements, our team evaluated many alternatives. FirstBit provided an impressive solution for all our accounting, project, and administration needs.

Activity-Based Costing Steps

If material, labor, or machine costs rise above estimated costs, you can elect to trigger a notification to relevant team members. Job costing is a real-time summary and detail view for any item or job based on your specific labor, operation, and material costs. It helps manufacturers better understand exactly how much money each operation and job requires, so they know the exact cost for each job completed.

Industry-specific solutions

When considering workforce management software, there are many tools to choose from, and not all are likely to fit your specific use case. Different solutions serve different needs—from hourly workforce coordination to full HR management systems. You may elect to embrace a single all-in-one solution, or choose a mix of niche applications to meet your business’ unique requirements. As a small organization of fewer than 10 employees, Xero proves to be a cost-effective solution for our company’s requirements. Xero provides real-time insights, which overall help in making immediate actions with up-to-date financial data. The security and compliance standards ensure up-to-date accounting standards are used.

Assign the calculated activity rates to specific products or services based on their usage of the identified cost drivers. This enables you to assign and allocate costs to individual activities, which is the essence of ABC costing. Plus, our Gantt links dependencies to avoid cost overruns, filters for the critical path and can set a baseline to track costs and more in real time. TableauThis business intelligence solution helps you connect all of your data and use natural language queries to find the answers. WorkdayWorkday’s scheduling software is also an ideal fit for larger companies’ labor needs, with AI-powered tools that match worker preferences with business demands, and an open shift board for swapping schedules. Workday also uses predictive analytics to forecast future demand based on historical data, so that you can ensure you’re hiring and staffing sustainably to suit your needs today and in the future.

Once the activities are identified, they are grouped into cost pools, which are categories that group similar activities. For example, activities like machine maintenance, quality control and assembly might all fall under a production cost pool. Grouping activities into cost pools helps simplify the allocation process and makes it easier to assign costs systematically. The U.S. manufacturing sector is undergoing a profound transformation driven by digitalization, automation, and artificial intelligence. While large enterprises have accelerated their adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies, many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) struggle to keep pace due to cost constraints and workforce skill gaps. Rather than employing traditional timesheets or time clocks, the modern workforce is embracing self-service attendance management via their own mobile devices.

• You can monitor raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods, allowing your team to make informed purchasing and production decisions.
• Activity-based costing provides a more precise method for allocating overhead costs by linking expenses to specific activities.
• Additionally, it provides tools for financial management, giving you control over accounting processes.
• Acumatica Cloud ERP focuses on project accounting, inventory management, and financial tracking.
• Additionally, businesses run the risk of time theft due to employees clocking in for more hours than actually worked, or “buddy-punching” (clocking in for an absent colleague).

Production Tracking & Job Costing

The solution is equipped with labor law compliance and attendance tracking, ensuring that your employees are managing breaks and leave in compliance with industry regulations and labor laws. Deputy is offered at a higher price point, but may be a great option for mid-sized and enterprise brands. Overall, inaccurate job costing can have far-reaching consequences for manufacturers, affecting profitability, financial stability, competitiveness, customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance. This approach enables businesses to determine the profitability of each job and gain insights into which projects contribute the most to overall success.

It also has a built-in CRM and price management modules for optimizing sales processes. Companies can manage vendors and quotes and integrate an ERP to easily view existing quotes and sync data across multiple systems. Users can apply costing rules for weight, time, volume, and distance metrics. However, these specifications can take some time to set up and configure according to specific business requirements and products. By making smart decisions around workforce management technology, you’ll be able to reduce labor costs, improve efficiency, and manage compliance more easily.

All packages come with unlimited users, SKUs, and integrations, which is a plus if you have a higher user count compared to per-user pricing models. All-in-one construction management software built to help you finish quality projects. Managing workload helps to balance resource allocation across the project team. This free workload analyst template for Excel helps keep team members from being overallocated or underutilized, which prevents burnout and keeps projects on budget.

That percentage is based on an estimate that includes cost of rent, administrative fees, and depreciation of equipment. QuickBooks Online does many things well and deserves to dominate the SME financial management marketplace. Jobman does it for you by automatically applying the overhead and profit percentages to your internal cost. And because you have complete control over every aspect of quoting, you can even change the rates for each line item. You can combine predefined templates to compile a large quote quickly and easily.

We’re likely to see growth in adoption of mobile time-tracking and attendance tools, including geocaching tools equipped with GPS tracking to monitor logistics workers and workers who move between job sites. Cloud-based software tools make it easy to log in from anywhere, and offer greater flexibility when it comes to scaling and upgrading features. job costing software manufacturing Workday Adaptive PlanningThis Workday solution empowers your HR, finance, and ops teams to collaborate on workforce planning, with the ability to map out various scenarios to assess the cost impact of each. You can model, forecast, and budget your scenarios from a centralized dashboard, enabling you to shorten planning cycles and drive improvements in productivity. ADP Workforce Now This solution is a great fit for businesses that use ADP Payroll, though it also offers other payroll system integrations.

Compare estimated costs to actual costs

If this optional feature is used, the user may specify either a percentage value or a monetary amount overage to be allowed. The overrun percentage provides a fool proof job cost accounting method for keeping abreast of charges that exceed budget amounts. One of the most important reasons to integrate your manufacturing quoting and estimating software within your eCommerce operations is for a detailed, price-itemized bill of materials (BOM) displays. This provides a visual configuration and representation of what your customer is looking to accomplish. ECommerce software capabilities let manufacturers sell their goods and services online, including the ability to automatically update inventory, calculate taxes, and anything else necessary to fulfill orders.