How TradeGOAT Works

How TradeGOAT Works: Your Own Paperwork Goes In First

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

I already had a proposal when I started building TradeGOAT. I'd been sending it to customers for years, it said things the way I say them, and I wasn't about to trade it for a form somebody else designed. So the tool was built to start from mine.

That's the plainest way to explain how TradeGOAT works. You don't begin by building anything inside it. You begin by handing it what you already use, and it learns your company from that.

Your proposal becomes your template

You upload the proposal you already send, as a Word file or a PDF. TradeGOAT reads it and marks the spots that change from one job to the next — the customer's name, the address, the scope, the price — as variables. Everything else stays in your words and in your order, so it still looks like the proposal your customers are used to getting from you. If you bring it in as Word, you get an editable Word document back out.

Then you walk through it once. The document sits on the screen with each variable marked, and you can widen one or combine two that belong together, and you can take one away if it should have stayed plain text. When it reads right, you give it a name, tell it what kind of work it's for, and save it. From then on, a new proposal for that kind of work starts from it.

A finished template doesn't shift underneath you. If you want to rework it later, you make it into a new version, and the one you've already been sending stays exactly as it was.

Your payment terms come along with it

When you upload the proposal, TradeGOAT asks how you get paid on that kind of work, and your answer rides along with the template. When you build a proposal from it, the terms are already turned into dollars on that job.

On a $25,550 re-roof in our test company with terms of 30, 30, 25 and 15 percent, the schedule comes up as $7,665, $7,665, $6,388 and $3,833. Nobody typed those numbers. They came from the terms you gave it and the price on the job.

Your prices are your own

Settings → Pricing by service is where you tell it what each kind of work runs at your shop. You set the labor rate and whether you figure that work by the hour or by the day, and the bid prices off those numbers. You're starting from what you already charge, not from somebody's idea of an average.

Then it's just the work

After that, putting a proposal out looks the way it always has, only faster. You pick the template, fill in the variables for this customer, check the number, and send it. When they sign, the job is there and the price on it is locked.

None of the setup asks you to change how you write a proposal or how you get paid. It asks you to show it how you already do those things, once. You can see it for yourself at thetradegoat.com.