You also decide what items on the price list can be discounted. For example, you might discount labor, but not material. When you edit any item, there’s an “Allow Discount” option. Or to make a lot of changes, click “Edit Multiple Items” and you can quickly update everything at once.

To set the discount for a dealer, go to the account detail page, click on the price list name and select Edit. To change the discount when editing a quote, click “View Price Details” and click on the underlined discount amount.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth at StonExpo! It’s so helpful for us to talk with that many fabricators at once. It gives us a much better idea of which features are most valuable for our customers. We use all that feedback to prioritize what to work on first. Discounting was near the top of the list, and we’re happy to say it’s now available.

Most countertop fabricators tell us creating quotes is one of the worst parts of their job. It takes too much time. And yet it’s critical to the business. Hand-drawn sketches are time-consuming to make and hard to read.

How do you know if a kitchen needs two slabs or three? It’s difficult to be sure unless you lay out the pieces on the slab. It’s even harder to show customers why they’re paying for an extra slab.

We built CounterGo to address these problems.

CounterGo is an online service that requires only an internet connection and a web browser to use. Just like Moraware JobTracker that you may be using already. And CounterGo integrates into JobTracker. So you won’t have to re-enter customer information between quotes and jobs.

CounterGo is currently available by invitation only. If you’d like to get on the list for early access, please contact us at 866-312-9273 or sales@moraware.com.

About Moraware
Moraware has been making software for countertop fabricators since 2002. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell countertop remnants with fabricators near you.

Contact Information
Harry Hollander
Moraware
866-312-9273 x802
harry@moraware.com
www.moraware.com

We’ll be hanging out at the Mandalay Bay casino Wednesday, January 25, for dinner and drinks. If you don’t get any better offers, join us.

6pm: House of Blues (near the sports book)
8pm: Orchid Lounge (near the entrance)

Here’s a map of the casino, if you need help. We’re looking forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

We’ll be officially announcing our new countertop estimating software, so please come by our booth to see a demo and find out more.

In addition to our own news, I’m looking forward to several of the education seminars. If you’re interested in online marketing, I really recommend Marty Gould’s courses. I wrote some notes from his marketing talk at a Stone Industry Education seminar in Denver.

I also like the Residential Countertop Fabricators Forum – it’s impressive how fabricators are willing to discuss their successes, and failures, in front of their peers and competitors.

Stone World magazine will be announcing their Fabricator of the Year. I’m hoping to see another Moraware JobTracker user get the honor.

And this year, StonExpo is also doing a daily cash prize giveaway. Looks pretty cool. Of course, cash has a way of disappearing quickly in Las Vegas.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at Mandalay Bay. Booth 1247.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell stone remnants with fabricators near you.

Well, you should never say never.

At StonExpo, in Las Vegas from January 24-26, we’ll be showing software for drawing and estimating countertops. And it integrates with Moraware JobTracker, too.

Why are we doing this now?

Over the last 9 years we’ve seen other countertop drawing programs come and go. All of them were slow or really difficult to use. But we kept hearing that making fast, professional quotes is critical to any countertop business. So, we built CounterGo.

What is it?

With CounterGo you draw a countertop, and the price is automatically calculated.

All in just a few minutes. Before the customer leaves your showroom.

You can turn a customer’s sketch into a professional drawing, quote, and slab layout.

When can I see it?

Join us at StonExpo, in Las Vegas from January 24-26. Or if you can’t make it, call us at 866-312-9273 or email sales@moraware.com

CounterGo is currently available by invitation only. If you want to be on the early access list, sign up here:

So, how does it work? What do you look for? Since we help hundreds of countertop shops with estimating, we’ve seen the whole range of pricing. Here’s a few to look for, and to look out for.

How nice is your car?

Some fabricators use the “parking lot test” to figure out the price of a countertop. They look at your car, and try to judge what you’re willing to spend. Since there’s tougher competition for kitchen remodels than ever before, this is increasing rare. But, it’s something to be on the lookout for.

“From $29/sq.ft”

In many cases, this is the ultimate bait & switch. Sure, it’s $29 per square foot if your only kitchen countertop is a perfect rectangle and you want a pre-fabricated bullnose edge profile.

But chances are that you have something more complex. So you’re no longer anywhere close to the stated price. Or, you want a color that doesn’t make you dizzy every time you look at it. Go with the expectation that your kitchen won’t fit into the bottom rung.

Incredibly complex formula

Some fabricators try to figure out their production costs, down to the penny. Then they add a profit margin and that becomes the price.

The only wrinkle in this incredibly complex formula is that it’s impossible to really know the exact cost of a job before it’s made. Overall, this system tries to be fair based on costs, but those costs are fickle.

The open book

It’s like getting a price list. Here’s the price of the material, here’s the price of fabrication per square foot, and here’s the price for radius corners, cutouts, etc. This approach is the scariest for granite fabricators.

Maybe competitors can undercut the price by a few bucks. And maybe, all of the information is too much for a homeowner to understand. After all, most people only buy a counter top once or twice in their lives. Finding an open book is great, but make sure you educate yourself on what it all means, too.

Reasonable, plus extras

Almost every one of our customers claims to hate competing on price, and would rather compete on service – “we’re the fastest”, most beautiful, friendliest, or cleanest.

So their pricing is a good reflection of what’s fair if you shop around. (probably within a few hundred dollars of what you’d find from the competition) But, they will sell you their unique proposition. This is great if you care about the extras they offer, but you’ll probably move along if you don’t.

That’s 5 of the secret countertop pricing methods we’ve seen. Have you heard of a better one? Tell us about it!

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell countertop remnants with fabricators near you.

TIPS & TRICKS

Learn a new trick! Here are answers to your top questions.

* Make a mailing list of your customers
http://www.moraware.com/help/x/-oAP
* Add holidays to your calendar
http://www.moraware.com/help/x/NYBj
* Roles: decide which users are allowed to…
http://www.moraware.com/help/x/eIAJ

ENTERPRISE TIPS & TRICKS

Want to learn more about quotes, purchasing, and inventory?

* Printing quotes without prices
http://www.moraware.com/help/x/EgA2
* View the details of your inventory
http://www.moraware.com/help/x/FYBj

GET MORE INFO

Be the first to know what Moraware is up to:
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/Moraware
BLOG: Read the latest. http://www.moraware.com/blog/
PHONE: And don’t forget you can call. 866-312-9273

REMNANTSWAP

RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you. There are now over 18,000 remnants on the site! If you want exposure for your slabs, this is the place to put them.

Here’s more info, including a 2-minute video.

HANG OUT

Come see us at a trade show!

* StonExpo - January 24-26, Las Vegas NV
* Park Industries Digital Stoneworking Expo – February 16, Austin TX

One easy way to create a mailing list is to export all of your contacts from Moraware JobTracker into a spreadsheet, and then send out direct mail or an email blast.

Here’s how to create the list and put it into Excel:

That video and many more are available on our help. You’ll find it at http://moraware.com/help.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop shops. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell countertop remnants with fabricators near you.

But hopefully, you’re going to take a break, too. You might be wondering how to add a holiday to your Moraware JobTracker calendar. Here’s how:

This help video and plenty of others are available at http://moraware.com/help

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell countertop remnants with fabricators near you.

Here’s a copy of the slides, but they only tell a small portion of the story. The rest is below…

Slides 1-7. Skip over these, it’s setting the stage for why I’m going to talk about software for countertop fabricators rather than technology in general.

Slide 8. When we’re going through our sales process, there are 3 steps we cover. What you need, what we do, and how to get started.

If you use our software, it’s going to be a great long-term relationship, like a marriage. So, we need to be smart about dating and make sure we’re mutually compatible.

Slide 9. The first step is for us to understand what you need. We rely on having happy customers and the only way people are happy is if they’re getting more value out of our software than they pay for.

Slide 10. When we first started selling our software, people would call up and ask for a demo, and we’d oblige. Believe me, I can demo our software all day long without taking a breath. But, it turned out that we had no idea if what we were showing was relevant.

Now, when we schedule demos with you, it’s really a trick – we want to have a conversation instead. And what’s really important are your answers to these 4 questions:

What are you doing today?
What works?
What doesn’t?
What’s the consequence of not changing?

The more specific we can get, the better idea we’ll have of how much we can help your business.

Slide 11. Skip it. I got audience participation in the seminar by asking questions, and giving away copies of Aaron Crowley’s book – Less Chaos, More Cash.

Slide 12. Typically, the problems in your shop boil down to 3 things.

• Wasting time –like searching for paperwork when a customer calls to find out what’s going on with their job.
• Making mistakes – like showing up at a house at the wrong time, or worse fabricating a countertop out of the wrong granite or with the wrong edge profile.
• Missing opportunities – what’s the cost of not following up with your sales leads?

Slide 13. The most important questions you can ask yourself when you’re looking at software, again. And if you haven’t tried to write down the consequence of not changing, do that – try to put it in terms of money or time.

Slides 14-16. Skip them again. If you want, imagine me telling some awesome jokes.

Slides 17-18. What we’ve discovered is that there are some big red flags when people are investigating our software.

• If you’ve never tried using free software to fix your problems, you’re probably not going to spend money on them.
• If you’re making big changes to the rest of your business, it’s better to wait on implementing job scheduling software.
• If your office manager or production manager don’t agree to use software, it’s better not to buy it.
• And the biggest single factor that determines success is – time. Uninterrupted time to think about the business and how you can apply software to make it better.

Slides 19-20. Skip these, too. It was fun to do the “quizzes”, and I think it forced everyone in the audience to pay attention, too.

Slide 21. The hidden cost of buying our software is your time. Because we feel so strongly about getting started on the right foot, we schedule 5 ½ hour calls with you for the first week. Our goal is that by the last call, you’re up & running on our scheduling, and pretty close to throwing away your whiteboard, spreadsheets, and some of your job folders.

…and that’s it. It was really fun to give the presentation, and I’m hoping that I get a chance to do it again at future stone industry events.

Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.