Extra-work requests into draft proposals, priced only from your rates.

Extra work is anything outside the maintenance or cleaning contract: enhancements, repairs, one-time cleans, storm cleanup. Today an account manager reads the crew's notes or walks the site, measures, looks up each price and writes it up the way the customer expects. In a busy week, proposals wait, and some never go out.

In the proof of concept, AI works from copies of requests your team already quoted. For each one it drafts the proposal: scope in your usual words, quantities taken from the notes and photos, and every price pulled from your own unit rates, with the source of each line shown. Your reviewer, the account manager who knows your pricing best, compares each draft with the proposal your team actually sent.

Some requests come from the customer, some from your crew. An irrigation technician on a wet check runs each zone on its own and logs broken heads, leaks and dry spots, and some companies send each finding as its own repair item, so the property manager can approve them one by one. Before anything gets a price, the draft reads the contract. A city landscape maintenance contract, for one, may list adjusting, raising and replacing sprinkler parts as part of the base work, and quoting covered work as extra costs the customer's trust.

Quantities need units, and the units differ by task. Bulk mulch is priced by the cubic yard, and a cubic yard spread one inch deep covers 324 square feet, so a 3-inch top-dress over a measured bed has to be converted before any rate applies. Seasonal color is counted in flats or pots. Tree work proposals often follow the ANSI A300 pruning standard, which asks for the objective first, such as clearance over a walkway, and measurable limits such as the largest branch to be cut. A line that just says trim trees invites questions, so the draft writes scope the way your past proposals did.

Janitorial extras run on production rates. A one-time clean is estimated in labor hours: square feet divided by a production rate, the method behind ISSA's published cleaning times, though your own rates from past jobs are the ones that count. A post-construction clean is often quoted in phases, commonly a rough clean, a final clean and a touch-up before move-in. Companies name those phases differently, some say rough, light and final, so the draft keeps your names and prices each phase on its own line.

Portal customers and your software both set the shape. In ServiceChannel a proposal is built from labor, materials, travel, freight and other charges, and a client can load a negotiated price list so items are picked from agreed rates. Its guidance says a revised proposal is the original amount plus or minus the change, and if two proposals on one work order are approved, the NTE becomes the total of the one approved last, not the sum of both. Aspire builds estimates from production kits and templates carrying management-approved margins by branch, division and service type, and a won bid becomes a work ticket. The draft follows whichever your team uses.

Your account manager's checklist. Is every price traced to a rate on your sheet or a past proposal? Is any of it already covered by the contract? Are quantities taken from a measurement, note or photo, never guessed? Does the proposal carry the customer's reference number where they want one? And is every item with no rate left blank instead of filled in?

If your reviewer says yes, new extra-work requests get drafted the same way for about 30 days.

No proposal goes to a customer until an account manager has checked and sent it. Your team still prices anything off the sheet, walks the sites that need it and submits portal proposals, while the reviewer keeps comparing drafts with what the account managers would have written.

For those 30 days the work stays on proposals for extra work and nothing else.