Carpentry is the project trade of the building world: a roof structure, an extension or adding a storey runs over months, ties up six-figure sums, and moves from planning through cutting the timber in the hall to installation with a crane. At these scales, “paperwork” becomes a financial risk, and clean project management becomes a competitive advantage.
Big quotes need stages, not gut feeling
Quoting for an added storey means: timber list, timber-cutting, transport, crane, installation, roofing and flashing work, possibly subcontractors. The quote breaks this into stages, and the payment schedule hangs off those stages: advance payments at order placement, at material order, after the frame is raised, the rest after handover. That’s standard in timber construction and protects both sides; the timber is paid for long before the ridge is up.
For your price base: cost hall hours and installation hours separately. The hall means machinery, crane rail, rent; installation means weather, travel, working at height. A blended rate from the hourly rate calculator is the starting point, and job costing from real projects sharpens it from there.
Cutting timber in the hall, hours on the project
As with a joinery: workshop hours belong on the job, not on “hall, general.” Only then does job costing show whether cutting the timber really took four days as planned, and whether the next similar quote is accurate. On site, the team logs time by clocking in and out (a legal duty anyway), and time-and-materials work and extra requests from the client go straight into the project instead of onto a scrap of timber.
Documentation: doubly important in timber construction
Frame-raising photos, moisture readings, a handover report with the site management: timber construction lives with a material that moves. If a complaint about cracks or settling comes in two years later, documentation decides the warranty question. And given the sums involved in timber construction, the deadline for the statutory building contractor’s lien after the end of each site belongs on your calendar, especially when a general contractor sits in between.
Does it pay off?
For a carpentry business, the switch pays off differently than for a service trade: less through many small invoices, more through cash flow and risk. Timely advance invoices instead of one big invoice at the end save overdraft interest; a single successfully claimed variation item or a debt secured in time pays for the software for years. What MeisterOffice looks like for timber construction businesses is shown on the carpentry page.