Teams that sell work rather than shelf products — fabrication, installation, projects, field service, made-to-order manufacturing — live and die by the estimate. In native Odoo, a quotation line carries a unit price and an optional cost field on the product, and the reporting gives you a single blended margin. What it does not give you is a structured breakdown of why a job costs what it costs: how much is raw material, how much is labour hours at a given rate, and how much is overhead or contingency. Estimators end up rebuilding that math in spreadsheets outside the ERP, quoting from gut feel, and discovering the real margin only after the job is delivered. The cost intelligence never lives in Odoo, so it can never be reused, audited, or reported on.

Sales Job Cost Estimation is a build-to-order module we design for exactly that gap. We add a costing structure that hangs off the quotation (sale.order) and its lines: a dedicated estimate model — typically sale.job.cost.estimate and sale.job.cost.line — where each line is typed as material, labour, or overhead, carries a quantity, a unit cost, and an optional markup, and rolls up into a computed job-cost total. Odoo's @api.depends compute engine keeps the estimated cost, the suggested sell price, and the projected margin percentage recalculating in real time as the estimator edits, so the quotation total and the margin figure are always two sides of the same underlying build-up rather than a hand-typed number.

Technically, we build this the way a maintainable Odoo module should be built. New models are declared in models/ with proper models.Model inheritance, monetary fields tied to the order currency, and store=True computes where reporting needs to aggregate them. Material lines can optionally pull standard_price from product.product; labour lines can reference an employee or work-centre rate; overhead can be a fixed amount or a percentage of the material-plus-labour subtotal. Access is governed by ir.model.access.csv plus record rules so estimators, sales managers, and read-only reviewers each see the right slice, and the estimate is exposed through backend form and list views (XML, with OWL components where the interaction warrants it) plus a QWeb cost-breakdown report you can attach to the quotation PDF or keep internal. Everything is reachable over the XML-RPC/JSON-RPC API for integration with external estimating tools, and we build against your exact release — Odoo 17.0, 18.0, or 19.0 — respecting Community versus Enterprise differences in what base models and widgets are available.

Because this is build-to-order, nothing ships until we agree on scope. We start with a short scoping call to map your cost categories, rate sources, markup rules, and approval flow, then produce a fixed quotation and build against it on a staging environment. Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope, followed by UAT on staging, installation on your production instance, documentation, a training session, and a post-go-live support window. Pricing starts from $999 (indicative, single-company base scope); multi-company rollout, deeper localization of tax and rate handling, integrations with external estimating or costing systems, and larger data-migration volume increase the quoted scope. You receive a firm fixed quote after the scoping call — never a surprise.