A luxury custom home builder was running estimates in a spreadsheet, client selections in PowerPoint, and everything else in Teams threads. We built one operations app that holds every job, from first estimate to final finish.
Hours the office and field team no longer spend hunting, re-typing and copy-pasting.
Roughly half a full-time role, redirected to building homes.
Pricing built from ~27 past jobs, so every estimate starts from real numbers.
Custom homes run on thousands of decisions, and this builder had them scattered across three places. Every week, people lost hours tracking down the latest version of something.
Specs, documents and schedules lived in chat threads. Site supervisors scrolled back through conversations to find what they needed before they could start the day.
Each client's finishes were a deck with one slide per room. Choosing white oak for every bedroom meant copying it slide by slide, and there was no easy way to reuse a past project.
A detailed square-foot estimating model worked, but it lived in one file. There was no version history, no approval step and no clean way to keep the historical averages current.
Approved numbers had to be keyed into Sage by hand, with no guarantee the latest version was the one that made it in.
Teams threads as the job record, the estimating spreadsheet, PowerPoint selection books and manual Sage data entry.
$30,000 to $35,000 for the full build: estimating, selections, supervisor portal, accounting export and notifications.
Supervisors open one app in the morning and everything for their job is already there.
| BeforeTeams · Spreadsheet · PowerPoint | AfterBuilt by Black Atlas | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding job info | Scroll back through Teams threads | One page per job with every document and update |
| Client selections | One PowerPoint slide per room, copied by hand | Room-based selections with bulk apply and reusable templates |
| Estimates | One spreadsheet, no versions or approvals | Versioned estimates with approvals and an audit trail |
| Field updates | Texts and chat messages | Daily logs with photos and weather on the job record |
| Accounting | Re-typed into Sage | One-step export from the approved estimate |
| Admin time | Hours a day of hunting and re-entry | 20+ hours a week back |
Client name withheld at their request. Time savings as reported by the client after launch.
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