Estimates: a faster start to every deal
We're shipping a dedicated flow for creating estimates, so quoting a customer feels less like data entry and more like the first step of a deal.
Every invoice starts as a guess. Before there's a PO, before there's a signed SOW, there's a number you wrote down for a customer and asked them to agree to. For a long time, our product treated that number as an afterthought — a draft invoice with the word "estimate" written on it. That was fine when estimates were rare. It stopped being fine the moment customers told us they were sending more quotes than invoices.
So we built a first-class estimate object, and a first-class way to create one.
Why a dedicated create flow
The new flow lets you start an estimate for either a business or an individual customer from the Estimates page Create a New Estimate. That sounds small, and mechanically it is. But the reason it matters is that an estimate has a different shape than an invoice. It has a validity window. It has a status that isn't "paid" or "unpaid" — it's "accepted" or "declined." It often goes through revisions before anyone agrees to anything. Trying to model all of that on top of a draft invoice meant every estimate carried fields it didn't need and was missing fields it did.
Giving estimates their own create entry point is the first visible piece of a larger separation: estimates are their own thing now, with their own lifecycle, and they convert into invoices when the deal closes — not before.
What this unlocks
The immediate win is speed. You open the Estimates page, click New Estimate, and you're in Create a New Estimate. No filtering a list of invoices by status. No remembering which draft was the quote and which was the real bill.
The less obvious win is what happens next. Because estimates are now their own records, we can build the things customers have been asking for — accept/decline tracking, expiration reminders, one-click conversion to an invoice with the line items preserved — without overloading invoice semantics. Each of those is a separate post, but none of them were possible until estimates had a front door of their own.
What's next
This launch is deliberately small: a clean way to start an estimate. Over the next few releases we'll be filling in the rest of the lifecycle — sharing estimates with customers, tracking responses, and turning an accepted estimate into an invoice without re-keying a single line. If you want the click-by-click, the help-center article covers it. If you want to know where this is going, keep an eye on this blog.