Room-Est guide

What's new

Internal walls now drag and drop, with automatic three-way junctions and pricing.
Web Designer (preview) lets you test exactly what customers see.
Built-in protection against spam enquiries.
Customer designs survive a refresh, and clear after submitting.

What Room-Est is

Room-Est designs, prices, quotes and manages garden rooms in one place. You build a room in 3D, it prices itself from your own supplier costs and markups, and that same design becomes a quote, an order and a job without being retyped.

It is built for dealers who sell installed rooms: the price you show a customer is your installed retail price, worked out from parts, labour and your margin, not a guess.

Getting started

Sign up and get your address. Your account comes with its own web address, for example yourname.room-est.app, where your customers can design a room.
Fill in your company details - trading name, address, VAT number, bank details, contact details. These appear on your quotes and emails, so do this first.
Set your numbering. Quote and job numbers use a short prefix you choose, so they match how you already work.
Load your costs. Your supplier prices, your parts list and your markups. Everything downstream - quotes, margins, job costs - is calculated from these, so it is worth an hour of care at the start.

How pricing works

Pricing runs in one direction: supplier cost, then your markup, then VAT, then what the customer sees.

Suppliers hold the costs and the markups. Markups live on the supplier record, not scattered around the system, so changing a supplier's markup updates everything that comes from them.
Parts are the components you actually buy, with codes and current costs.
Room prices are the anchors: a standard room size has a retail price, and the designer shows that price live as the specification changes.
Extras (roof options, steps, decks, canopies, flyovers) price from their own grids, so a projection or a part-width canopy prices correctly rather than by rule of thumb.
If a size has no price, the designer says "contact sales" rather than inventing a number. Those enquiries still arrive in your pipeline and you price them by hand.

Every price on screen can be shown to customers or hidden behind a "request a quote" button - your choice, switched in your settings.

Designing a room

Size and shape, from standard presets or a custom size.
Style - the front elevation pattern your supplier offers.
Roof, extras and finishes: flyovers, canopies, steps, decking, wall and frame colours.
Windows and doors, dragged from the module gallery onto the wall panels. A module takes the slot it fits; a wider one absorbs the panels around it and the wall re-flows, so you are never stuck because something "doesn't fit".
Internal walls: drag a Wall or Door + Panel tile onto a slot. Slots are the faint floor tiles between the structural positions set by the external joiners, and they only appear where a module can legally land, so you cannot build something that cannot be manufactured. One slot holds one module and nothing else happens: no wall is built unless you drop it there. Consecutive filled slots read as one continuous wall, but each slot stays selectable - tap one to flip it, invert its faces or delete it. On a touch screen, tap the tile then tap the slot.
Three-way junctions, joiners, U-channels and eaves beam splits are added for you as you design, and priced. You never count joiners.
Show dimensions and Show panel sizes turn on measurement labels when you want them, for checking or for showing a customer.

Quoting

A design becomes a quote, with your numbering, your logo and your terms.
Quote versions let you revise without losing what you sent before.
Send it by email from your own mailbox, so the customer sees you and replies come back to you.
The customer can accept online. Stage payments, deposits and balances are recorded against the order.

Orders and jobs

An accepted quote becomes an order, keeping its own number and its design.
Jobs track the work: dates, status, supplier orders, and your margin against the quote, so you can see profit per job rather than at year end.
The bill of quantities comes out of the design itself, so what you order matches what you quoted.

Your online designer, and what customers see

Your web address gives customers a simplified version of the designer, made for people who have never designed anything:

They choose a size, style, roof option and finishes from picture cards.
They pick windows and doors from the styles you have chosen to offer online. You control that catalogue - add a style, retire one, change what is shown - from your own module settings.
They can see retail prices, or be invited to request a quote instead, whichever you have switched on.
Their enquiry arrives in your Sales Pipeline with the design attached, tagged as coming from the web designer, ready to price or call.

Bot and spam protection comes built in. Enquiries from automated software rather than a real person are filtered out before they reach your pipeline, and someone repeatedly hammering the form is slowed down automatically. Your customers never have to prove they are human with a puzzle or a tick box, so you do not lose genuine enquiries to friction.

Only your enquiries arrive in your pipeline. Every enquiry is matched to your business by your own web address, never by anything the customer's browser claims, so nobody else's enquiries can land with you and yours cannot land with anyone else. The same is true of your prices, your catalogue and your customers.

Customers do not lose their work. A half-finished design is waiting for them if their phone sleeps or they close the tab, and it clears itself once they send their enquiry.

Your data

Each business sees only its own customers, quotes, orders, designs and prices.
Your team can be given different levels of access, so office staff and managers see what they need and nothing more.
Emails go out through your own mailbox from your own address.
Nothing is shared between businesses, including the online designer's catalogue and pricing.

Learning more

What's new - additions and changes, newest first, so you can see what has improved since you last looked.
Support - how to reach us, and what to have ready: your account name and, if it is about a design, the design's name or link.