Free Building Quote Template for New Zealand Builders

Price the whole job, not just the obvious bits

Every builder knows the quote that looked right on paper and lost money on site. Skip bins, merchant price rises, a subbie who took two days longer than planned. This free building quote template gives Kiwi builders a repeatable way to price residential work, so every estimate starts from the same solid structure instead of last month's spreadsheet.

Build up your quote line by line: labour at your charge-out rates, materials at current merchant pricing, subcontractors, PC sums and provisional allowances. Apply margin and wastage across the job, then send the client a tidy PDF quote with your branding on it, or export to CSV or straight into NextMinute.

What you can do with this building quote template

• Estimate residential building work with the same structure every time
• Build up labour from crew hours and charge-out rates
• Cover materials, subbies, PC sums, provisional allowances, margin and wastage
• Print a professional PDF quote with your logo
• Export to CSV to keep on file or reuse on the next job
• Push the quote into NextMinute and track actual costs against the estimate as the job runs

What a solid building quote includes

Before a quote leaves your inbox, check it covers:

• Labour: built up from the scope, not guessed, with supervision time included
• Materials: current merchant rates with wastage applied, because timber offcuts aren't free
• Subcontractors: sparkies, plumbers, and anyone else you're coordinating
• PC sums and provisional allowances: clearly stated, so selections the client hasn't made yet don't become your problem
• Margin: applied across the whole job, not just the materials
• GST: shown at 15% so the client sees the real number
• Exclusions, validity and payment terms: what's not covered, how long the price stands, and when you get paid

The template carries each of these as line items so nothing slips through.

Where Kiwi builders lose margin when quoting

The pattern is familiar: labour hours estimated from memory, wastage left off the timber order, allowances that were never pinned down, and variations that got nodded through on site but never priced. A consistent template sorts the first three. The last one needs job tracking, which is where software earns its keep.

When to move from template to quoting software

A free template is all you need to get consistent, professional quotes out the door. Once you're running several jobs and a crew, quoting software picks up the rest: supplier price lists kept current, quotes that become jobs in one click, and back-costing that shows what each job actually made. The template exports directly into NextMinute, so nothing gets re-typed.

Turn the accepted quote into a live job

When the client says yes, export the quote into NextMinute and it becomes a live job. Schedule the crew, capture time and costs as they happen, price variations properly, and invoice from real numbers instead of guesswork.