How to Automate The EDGE by Estimating Edge

The EDGE prices a wall type once and repeats it across the job

Commercial drywall is priced by wall type. A plan set has a partition schedule, and every line on it is a recipe: this stud at these centres, this many layers of this board each side, this insulation, this fire rating, this height. The estimator's job is to find every run of each type across every floor and turn it into board, studs, track, screws, compound, tape and hours.

The EDGE is the software that trade uses to do it. Estimating Edge has been building it since the 1980s, and Foundation Software bought the company in January 2022, so it now appears as EDGE by FoundationSoft and ties into FOUNDATION accounting behind it. It covers ten trades, drywall among them, alongside acoustical, EIFS, fireproofing, flooring, painting and roofing.

For a drywall sub, everything downstream traces back to the takeoff: the order, the crew loading, the billing schedule and the argument about the change order.

Getting paid takes longer than hanging the board

Board goes up quickly. Billing for it does not, and a commercial job is billed every month.

Somebody walks the job or calls the foreman, decides that level three is sixty per cent taped, and turns that into a percentage against each line of the schedule of values. That becomes a pay application, which goes into whichever billing portal the general contractor picked, along with the lien waivers, the certified payroll if the job is public, and the updated insurance certificate. Retainage sits behind all of it, and the money lands somewhere between thirty and ninety days later.

The bidding side has its own drag. Invitations arrive by email from contractors you may never work for, each with a plan room account attached. Addenda appear on those plan rooms without an email. And once the job is live, the hours the crew books go into a time app that has never heard of the estimate they are being measured against.

The EDGE by Estimating Edge

Pay applications drafted, not assembled Percent complete per phase gathered against the values the job was billed on, so the monthly draw starts as a document to check rather than an afternoon of typing.

Addenda matched to the bids they change Revisions posted to a general contractor's plan room found and tied to the open estimate they affect, before the number goes out priced off an old sheet.

Estimated hours against booked hours What the takeoff allowed for hang, tape and finish set beside the hours the field actually booked, while the job is still running and something can change.

Smart Labor prices the ladder, not the pay application

The EDGE is strong at the part it owns, and a drywall estimator should be using all of it before looking anywhere else.

Conditions is the reason the trade uses it: set the properties for one wall type, then duplicate and alter it for every other type in the specification, and the takeoff stops being a thousand separate decisions. Smart Labor varies the labor rate against parameters you set, so a higher wall carries the time spent moving ladders and hoisting board rather than the same rate as a four foot partition. Proposal Writer builds the bid in a Word template you designed, pulling the final numbers and a long list of job data into it. EDGE On Site carries the job into the field, with analytics and reporting across the estimates behind it.

All of that reasons from your own estimate and your own accounting. The contractor's billing portal, the plan room where the addendum was posted, the supplier's price on a board type this month and the app where the crew clocks in are four companies' websites, each with its own login.

A drywall bid can keep score against the job it became

The estimate is the most useful document in the company, and it usually gets filed the day the job is awarded.

It does not have to be. Field hours read out of the time app each week and set against what the takeoff allowed for hang, tape and finish by phase, so a job burning its finish hours in week two is a conversation in week two. Percent complete gathered per phase and written into a draft pay application against the schedule of values, with the lien waiver and the certificate attached, so the monthly draw is a document to check rather than a day to spend.

On the front end, plan rooms watched for revisions and each addendum tied to the open estimate it changes, so nothing goes out priced off a superseded sheet. Invitations read out of the inbox and logged against the bid calendar with their due dates.

And the supplier. Board, corner bead and compound priced against what the estimate assumed, so a type that moved since the bid surfaces while the order is still being placed rather than after it lands on site.

A pay application should not cost an estimator a day

An estimator who spends Tuesday assembling a pay application did not bid anything on Tuesday.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the billing portal, the plan room, the time app or the supplier account, reads what your office manager reads, and returns one list: this month's percentages, the addenda that landed, the phases running hot, the prices that moved.

None of it needs an integration first, which is the point when the contractor picked the portal and you are the one who has to use it. It runs on your schedule, restricted to the sites you allow, and a pay application or a bid is drafted and waits for a person.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.