Estimate Policy

A walk up estimate that costs nothing has to be produced in a few minutes in a parking lot, and it is worth roughly what it costs. It misses everything behind the panel, which is where most of the scope on a commercial unit actually lives.

A scheduled estimate books real time. A systems estimate is $150 and an in depth diagnostic is one hour at $285, and both are credited as a line item against an authorized repair. If you proceed with the work, the estimate effectively costs nothing. If you do not, you have paid for an hour of qualified assessment and you keep the documentation.

The commercial argument is stronger than the philosophical one. A number produced properly can be taken to a budget owner. A number produced in a parking lot gets revised, and the revision is the conversation nobody wants to have three weeks later.

A written scope with line items at the posted rates, a labor hour band, the materials calculation, and the turnaround tier the job falls into. Where something cannot be established without teardown, the scope says so explicitly rather than burying the risk inside a confident looking number.

On carrier billed work, the documentation is prepared in the format an adjuster expects, with photographs and manufacturer procedure references attached at first submission. That is what turns a three round supplement conversation into a single one.

There are two different things here and conflating them causes confusion. Sending photographs and getting a written price band back costs nothing and is genuinely useful for budgeting. That is what the quote request form produces.

A formal estimate, meaning a scheduled assessment with the unit on site, is the charged one. The band tells you roughly what a repair will cost. The estimate tells you what this specific unit will cost, and only one of those can be produced without the unit present.

Carrier appraisers are welcome on site by appointment. Where a carrier wants its own assessment before authorizing, that gets scheduled alongside the teardown so the unit is not sitting through two separate visits.

Where an appraiser and the shop disagree on scope, the disagreement gets documented with photographs and manufacturer procedure references rather than argued informally. That is the mechanism that resolves it, and it works better when the documentation was prepared at first submission.