Priced the way Carpentry work is billed
A framing / wall build and a door install don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Carpentry the way the work is really billed: off a flat-rate priced menu (price each, e.g. $350), with an hourly line available. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Carpentry jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Carpentry work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Deck build or repair, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $2,700 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Carpentry price
Two Carpentry jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Custom vs repair — a built-in or a deck is a project price; a door hang or trim fix can run on the hourly line.
- Material — hardwood, cabinet-grade ply, and trim species aren't the same, and the finish work shows the difference.
- Site conditions — an out-of-square old house means scribing and fitting, which is the slow, skilled part of the job.
What a Carpentry job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Carpentry is no exception. SideWRK captures the work type — trim, doors, built-ins, stairs, framing, deck and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the work type — trim, doors, built-ins, stairs, framing, deck
- the finish grade — paint-grade, stain-grade, primed
- a structural and permit flag
- a pre-1978 lead note for trim removal
Example note on a job: "Stain-grade trim supplied by customer — install and finish only."
How to price a Carpentry job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Carpentry job and tap a suggestion like "Framing / wall build" or "Deck build or repair" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it off a flat-rate priced menu
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, off a flat-rate priced menu (price each, e.g. $350), with an hourly line available. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Carpentry ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Stain-grade trim supplied by customer — install and finish only." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Carpentry-specific records: the work type — trim, doors, built-ins, stairs, framing, deck, and the finish grade — paint-grade, stain-grade, primed.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Carpentry estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Carpentry work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: usually none for finish and trim — but framing, structural, stair, and deck work over the minor-work limit need a licensed contractor and a permit, plus EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes.
Carpentry pricing — common questions
How do I price a Carpentry job in SideWRK?
You bill off a flat-rate priced menu (price each, e.g. $350), with an hourly line available. Add the work — Framing / wall build, Deck build or repair, Room addition / build-out — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Carpentry job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like deck build or repair runs about $4,500 in the app — roughly $2,700 of that is your labor and about $1,800 is parts at your cost. Common Carpentry work ranges from about $350 to $4,500. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Carpentry job?
The records Carpentry work actually needs: the work type — trim, doors, built-ins, stairs, framing, deck; the finish grade — paint-grade, stain-grade, primed; a structural and permit flag. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Carpentry work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: usually none for finish and trim — but framing, structural, stair, and deck work over the minor-work limit need a licensed contractor and a permit, plus EPA lead-safe work on pre-1978 homes. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Carpentry?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Carpentry has a problem most trades don't. A homeowner can tell whether the drain runs or the furnace blows warm. They cannot tell a good carpenter from a cheap one until the crown is up and the miters either close or they don't — and by then they've already picked somebody. So on the first few jobs the estimate isn't paperwork on the way to the work. It's most of the evidence you have.
- Put the last one on it. Photos attached to a job appear on the page the customer approves from, in a grid they can tap open. Early on that carries more weight than the number does — the shelving you built in your own garage, the stair treads from a friend's place, the outside corner where the return actually closed. Nobody is buying trim. They're buying the belief that you can cut it.
- The price has an end date, and you don't type it. An estimate the customer opens carries a line saying prices are good through a date two weeks out from the day you wrote it, and after that it really does expire — open it on day fifteen and the approve button is gone, replaced by a note telling them to come back for a fresh number. In a trade where a bundle of casing can move between the quote and the delivery, having said so up front is what lets you re-quote without it landing like a bait and switch.
- Take the deposit at yes, not at the lumberyard. On any estimate you set a deposit — waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent — and once you've switched card payments on, the ask appears on the approval page the moment they approve, payable by card or Apple Pay right there. That is the whole distance between fronting a room's worth of material on your own card and buying it with theirs. It's set per estimate, so a $350 door hang doesn't need one and a build-out does.
- The project-sized ticket gets a monthly number beside it. On card totals between $150 and $30,000 the approval page shows a pay-over-time line — a $3,800 room build-out reads as around $343 a month for twelve, through Affirm or Klarna, with their exact terms and approval shown on their end. They carry it; you're paid in full. Carpentry is where that earns its keep, because most of what you quote is a project rather than a repair.
- Then go settle the number itself. Hourly against flat, where materials belong, and what a fourteen-hour trim job actually nets once you've "covered" the stock — that argument is what to charge for carpentry work in 2026, worked in dollars from end to end. It is the pricing deep-dive for this trade. Read it once properly, because the number you land on there is the one every estimate below inherits.
Repeat business — the same house, the next room
There's no route in this trade. Nobody needs their crown swept twice a year, and SideWRK doesn't offer carpentry a recurring plan for exactly that reason — 15 of the 42 trades carry one and this isn't among them. What carpentry has instead is a house that isn't finished. The dining room leads to the hall, the hall leads to the closet build-out, and two years on it's the deck. The work comes back on its own schedule. The only question is whether your file is still open when it does.
- The house stays on the record, not in your head. A job site saves under the customer carrying its label, its address, the work type, the finish grade and your answer to the permit question. The next job at that address picks it off a dropdown instead of starting from a blank form. That pays eighteen months later, when "the plaster place where the walls were out an inch" is something you read rather than something you try to remember in the truck.
- Your own numbers, saved as one tap. Tick Save as one of my services on a work line and that line joins a starred row of chips above the menu, each showing what you charge for it. Every carpenter ends up with a personal standard — a room of paint-grade crown, a pre-hung hung against a slab — and this is where those settle instead of getting re-argued at somebody's kitchen table every time.
- The review gets asked for on the days you forget. Once a job wraps the app sends the request itself, then a single reminder a few days on, and never again after that. One ask, one nudge, and the ceiling is the whole point of it. Treat it as the backstop, though — the version that actually gets written is the one you ask for out loud in the finished room, and there is a right way to do that.
- Where the second job really comes from. For most carpenters it walks in through the first customer, and that has real arithmetic behind it — a referred job set against a bought lead, the wording that works at the walkthrough, and the other trades on the same remodel who could be sending you work. Getting carpentry referrals without feeling salesy is the deep-dive, and it is the other half of holding your price.
How carpentry work bills
There is no clock in a carpentry work line. Where an hourly trade shows Hours and Rate, this one shows Qty and Price each ($), with the priced menu sitting underneath. Tap a line and it fills the description, drops its price into the rate box and puts a 1 in the quantity. Change the quantity and it multiplies — three doors is 3 × $350 on a single row, settled by tapping twice instead of by arithmetic done standing in a hallway.
The $65 above isn't what that menu runs on. In Shop the field is labelled as the default labor rate used only for custom time-based lines: the hourly row you reach for when a wall genuinely can't be quoted until it's open. The other eleven menu lines carry their own prices, and the whole menu — including the repair-scale rows the summary table further up doesn't list — is laid out in the carpentry pricing guide, next to the case for keeping materials off your rate entirely.
Underneath it the job carries two rows only you can see: parts at cost, −$540, and estimated profit, $3,845. The materials line has two boxes rather than one — Price, which the customer reads, and Your cost, which they never do — so a handling markup lives in the gap between them and the profit figure stays honest either way. Nothing here was a guess. Four taps and a multiply.
Those five rows go on in one sitting. Save & add another commits a line and clears the form with the sheet still open, so a five-line trim estimate is one pass instead of five, and the running total prints above the buttons while you work. When the quantity is the part you don't know yet — linear feet of crown, square feet of deck frame — the carpentry calculator opens inside the job with your rate already handed to it and drops its priced lines onto the same estimate. Adding work covers the form itself.
Multiplying jobs
A carpenter's week ends with sawdust and three unanswered quotes. The work you can do is rarely the constraint; the constraint is the four estimates sitting on four kitchen counters while you're up a ladder with your phone in the truck. These are the parts the app handles without being asked:
- It tells you the second they open it. Loading the estimate fires a push to your phone — or an email instead, if you have no push registered. One or the other, never a pair. It won't repeat inside six hours on the same job, and it goes quiet entirely on anything already approved or declined. For a build-out somebody has been sitting on for a week, that ping is the cue to ring them while the number is still on the screen in front of them.
- The unanswered one keeps its own diary. An estimate that gets no reply is emailed again at three days, then once more at seven. Two, and then it lets go. Most of the silence isn't a no — it's a quote that slid under a school form and a water bill. The whole thing is a switch in Shop that you turn off if you'd rather do the chasing yourself.
- The extras ride the approval instead of the driveway. Mark a line optional and the customer ticks or skips it when they approve, with the total moving as they do — the closet cased while you're in there, the second built-in, the stair skirt nobody had decided about. And once they've approved, adding work past that total flags the job for re-authorization rather than quietly changing the number, which on a trade full of "while you're here" is the difference between a change order and an argument.
- Money still owed asks for itself. Once the work is wrapped and a balance is sitting there, a reminder goes at three days, at seven, and at fourteen. Three of them, and that is the end of it — no fourth, no escalation. Each one carries a link that settles by card or Apple Pay. A payment request you send yourself is a different thing entirely: the customer settles it into an app you already use, straight to you, and the app names that app’s own rules for taking money for work as you save the handle. And card money you need before Monday can be pushed onto your debit card in about 30 minutes for 1%.
- Truck stock that counts itself down. The carpentry list is already built as quick-add chips — finish nails, construction adhesive, wood glue, wood filler, paintable caulk, shims — each opening the inventory form named, with a sane reorder point in the box. Pull one onto a job from stock and it decrements, and tells you when that was the last one. Nobody has ever enjoyed finding out at 7am.
- The finished piece does the arguing. Pair a before and an after into the gallery on your public page — the wall that was blank and the built-in that's in it now. Carpentry is one of the few trades where a stranger can judge the work from a photograph, which is exactly why the photograph is worth taking.
All of it is running on a sample business in the live carpentry demo — free, no signup.
Price it now
Pick the work, set the size, and see the split between labor and material before you say a number out loud. The same free calculator the carpentry page runs, right here:
Its full-page home, if you want to bookmark it or hand somebody the link, is on the carpentry page. Opened from inside a job it becomes a takeoff instead, and its lines land on the estimate you're already writing.
The paper worth keeping
The records list further up says what the app captures on a carpentry job. This is what reaches the customer's copy, what doesn't, and where the app stops — which on a trade that runs from a door hang to a load-bearing wall is worth knowing before you lean on it.
- Three notices print themselves on every estimate and invoice. That finish and trim is often small unlicensed-scale work, while framing, structural, load-bearing, stair and deck work — and any project over your state's minor-work limit — generally needs a licensed contractor and often a building permit, and that SideWRK does not verify your license. That a pre-1978 property can put disturbing painted surfaces under the federal EPA lead-safe renovation practices, and to confirm that before you start. And that the app records the work and nothing more — it makes no determination about any of it. Note what isn't in there: a dollar figure. The limit is your state's number, it moves, and printing a stale one would be worse than printing none.
- Your license line, if you carry one. The box in Shop reads "Contractor / business license # (optional)" and tells you plainly to leave it blank if you aren't a licensed contractor. Fill it in and it prints under your business name on every document from then on. The app never checks it — it just puts what you typed where a customer comparing three bids will see it.
- Whose material it was, on the line itself. A part can be marked new, used or customer-supplied, and anything other than new prints its tag beside the item — a customer-supplied row reads "(Cust-supplied)" on the estimate and the invoice. On a trade where the homeowner buys the stain-grade stock half the time, that tag is most of the distance between install-and-finish-only and a warranty conversation you didn't want.
- What the app does not do here. Carpentry doesn't get the permit-and-inspection card that electrical, plumbing, roofing and HVAC get, and nothing watches a job total against a state limit and warns you. The "Needs a permit / structural?" answer on the job site is a note to yourself — it stays in your file and doesn't print on the customer's copy. That's the honest shape of it: the app keeps the question somewhere you'll see it before the saw comes out. Deciding is yours, and so is checking where your state draws the line.
- April, mostly assembled already. Because you invoiced through the app all year, know your numbers already holds the income, the material costs and the expenses broken out by category, with a CSV and a one-page printout at the end of it. The half that saves a carpenter real time is the receipts: photograph the one from the lumberyard and the amount, the vendor and the date read themselves off it. In this trade those arrive as thermal paper in a door pocket, and by March half of them are blank.
- The fuller record, in one place. Which photos to take and when, the disclosure line that ends most disputes before they form, and the typed-name approval that goes on the document with the date and the amount beside it — that's set out at length in the carpentry pricing guide, on the jobs where it matters most. The paper trail walks through license lines and records across every trade.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice — it helps you keep the records; the rules stay your state's, and meeting them stays yours.