Leads 2 Build connects to your own SmartBuild account from Settings. Your jobs land in your Estimates list with the building's dimensions, roof, doors and windows, porches and material totals; each estimate is matched to the right customer by email and phone; and the customer gets a live estimate page with plain-English spec lines, your SmartBuild drawings and its 3D viewer link. Colours, the door and window list, material pricing and starting models are readable too, and pricing can be written back. SmartBuild keeps doing what it does — the building, the material list and the price — while the pipeline, the customer page, the contract, the schedule and the invoices run here, in a system made for one kind of building: post-frame.
Also called: SmartBuild · connect SmartBuild · SmartBuild CRM · post frame estimating software · existing estimating tool · pull my estimates in
Your SmartBuild login, connected from Settings
Every company connects its own SmartBuild account in Settings → Integrations, and updates it there when a password changes. A company that has not connected sees an empty list and a working dashboard — most of the platform has nothing to do with SmartBuild, so nothing else waits on it.
Connecting an estimating account used to be a developer's job, so a changed password meant a support ticket and a morning of estimates that would not load.
The office fixes its own connection the morning a password changes, instead of waiting on a support ticket while estimates refuse to load. A company that never connects sees an empty list and a working dashboard — nothing else waits on SmartBuild.
Matched to the right customer by email and phone
A synced estimate joins a contact by email and phone only — never by name. Two homeowners with the same surname, or a job named after the road, cannot pull an estimate onto the wrong person. A matched job wears the chain mark in your Estimates list; if neither identifier is there, the job waits for a human instead of being attached to a guess. The list itself refreshes from SmartBuild in the background and says when it last did.
An estimate attached to the wrong person is an estimate sent to the wrong person.
The rep opens a customer and finds that customer's estimate — never a neighbour's with the same last name. Names are the one field that is reliably ambiguous, so they are the one field never used to match.
A SmartBuild job, read into what the rest of the business needs
Width, length, eave height, roof style and slope, the contact and delivery address, the tax rate, door and window counts, garage doors, porches and attached buildings, and the material totals. An enclosed attached building counts as building square footage; an open porch counts as porch area — each classified by what it actually is. A door or window SmartBuild could not price still counts — read from its product code — so the opening counts the labour calculator and the send check rely on do not quietly lose it. The job's 3D viewer link sits at the top.
A porch that never makes it into the square footage is a porch nobody gets paid to build.
The crew gets paid for the porch and the garage doors get installed at the right price, because nothing fell out on the way in. Labour, square footage and the customer's spec all hang off these numbers, so they are read carefully once rather than retyped three times.
The customer reads a specification, not a code
Spec lines are turned into plain descriptions — dimensions, roofing, siding, support structure, foundation, openings — with post-frame and stud-frame versions detected from the job. The steel gauge is read from the panels actually ordered, and a product that could not be resolved is kept off the customer's copy and shown to you instead.
An internal code or an unresolved product printed on a proposal costs more trust than the part costs money.
The customer reads his building in plain words and signs with confidence, instead of phoning to ask what a product code means. Spec lines are written from what was actually ordered, and anything unresolved is shown to you, never to him.
Your drawings and the 3D viewer link, from the estimate
Try itOn the Outputs tab, filter SmartBuild's documents by who they are for — Client, Crew or Material Supplier — tick the ones you want and download them in one go, or attach them when you send the estimate so the customer finds them under Plans & Blueprints. The job's 3D viewer link comes through too, as a link the customer can open.
An integration that brings the numbers but leaves the drawings behind sends you back to the other tool on every quote.
The customer gets the quote and elevations, the crew gets the layouts, the yard gets the lists — without the rep sorting a stack of PDFs. The drawings are what a SmartBuild shop actually sends, so they belong beside the estimate, and the filter does the sorting by audience.
A $0 part stops the send until a manager looks
Try itWhen SmartBuild returns a product at $0 because it is missing from your SmartBuild price list, the estimate is short by that part — and a red banner on the estimate names the SKUs. A rep cannot send until it is cleared: one button, Ask an admin to clear it, emails the people who can, and if he presses Send anyway the refusal tells him exactly that. See pricing approvals.
A short estimate goes out unnoticed, or a sale waits days for a soffit piece to be added to a price list.
A rep never has to guess who to ask, or wonder whether anyone saw it. A short estimate should not leave without someone with authority looking — so the send is refused, and the one way forward is right there on the banner.
One version is live on the customer's link
Try itEach send of a SmartBuild estimate is a version. Versions lists them newest first with their customer totals, marks the one Live on the customer's link and the one First sent, and Make this the live version puts an earlier one back in front of the customer. Once the customer approves, the estimate is locked — you can still view and compare versions, but what they see does not change.
The customer says the price was lower in March, and the only record of what you sent is three PDFs all called final.
The rep can answer "what did you send me in March" in two clicks, mid-call. Exactly one version is ever on the customer's link, and approval locks it, so what they signed off on can't change under them without a deliberate re-negotiation.
The crew's drawings, in the project they are building
Once the job is a project, Building Plans in the project window lists the drawings a crew needs on site — assembly drawing, post layout, elevations, wall layout, cross-section, sheathing layout — generated from the SmartBuild job linked to the project, each downloaded as a PDF with a tap.
The crew lead calls the office from the site for the post layout, and the only copy is on the estimator's laptop.
The crew lead finds the post layout himself, on site, without calling the office. The drawings live with the job the crew is actually working, pulled from the same SmartBuild job the estimate came from, so they are never a revision behind.
Which tool starts a new estimate is a manager's call
Try itIf your account also has the 3D builder, an admin or sales manager chooses where new estimates are designed — SmartBuild or Leads 2 Build — in Settings or at the top of Estimates. Reps never see the switch, and the server refuses a change from anyone else. Switching deletes nothing: your SmartBuild jobs and your login stay exactly where they are, and going back to SmartBuild is always open.
One rep tries the new builder, clicks the switch, and the whole sales team opens Estimates the next morning in a tool they were never trained on.
The person responsible for the whole sales team makes the call that changes the whole team's day. The engine belongs to the account, not to one user, so a choice that moves everyone sits with an admin or sales manager — and nothing they switch away from is lost.
- 1Connect your SmartBuild login in Settings → Integrations. No developer and no support ticket — and a changed password is a form, not a release.
- 2Your SmartBuild jobs appear in Estimates, refreshed from SmartBuild in the background — the list says when it last updated — each read into dimensions, roof style and slope, doors and windows, porches and attached buildings, and material totals.
- 3Each estimate is matched to a contact by email and phone, never by name — if neither is there, it waits for a person.
- 4The customer opens a live estimate page with readable spec lines, the drawings you attach and the 3D viewer link.
- 5A product that comes back at $0 because it is missing from your SmartBuild price list is flagged, and the estimate cannot be sent until an admin or sales manager clears it — Send tells each of them which button is theirs.
- 6Every sync writes a dated snapshot of the job, so what you quoted survives whatever happens to the job later.
- 7If your account also has the 3D builder, only an admin or sales manager can switch where new estimates start — and switching deletes nothing.
SmartBuild is the estimating engine many post-frame shops already run on, and their quotes, jobs and customers live inside it. Asking a shop to choose between the tool it knows and the one it is evaluating is asking it to stop quoting for a month. So the connection brings SmartBuild's work into the rest of the business instead: the lead that became the estimate, the page the customer reads, the contract, the build and the invoice. An integration is only useful if it is careful with what it reads — a product missing from the price book that arrives at $0, an internal code that would print on a proposal, a porch that has to count toward the square footage. Those are handled here, before a customer sees them. And when SmartBuild is slow the connection retries and then times out rather than hanging, so the rest of the day does not stop for it.
- Choosing between the estimating tool the shop already runs and the rest of the business
- Retyping a SmartBuild job into a CRM, a contract and an invoice
- Missing prices and internal codes reaching a customer's proposal
- Losing the record of what was quoted when a job changes later
Each shop connects its own SmartBuild login
Every company connects its own SmartBuild login in Settings → Integrations, and changes it there when a password changes. A company with no connection gets an empty screen and a working dashboard — not an error — because most of the platform has nothing to do with SmartBuild.
SmartBuild job details, parsed
Everything the rest of the platform needs off a SmartBuild job: width, length, ceiling and eave height, roof style and slope, project and company name, contact, phone, email, delivery address and tax rate, the viewer link, door and window counts, garage-door count, attached structures and their areas, and material cost and price totals.
Porches and attached buildings counted correctly
Each attached structure is read with its side, depth, run, corner wrap and square footage. Open ones sum into porch area. Enclosed ones sum into building square footage. An attached building carries its own porches, and those are counted too.
Customer-readable spec rows from a SmartBuild job
A specification the customer reads like a specification. Post-frame gets posts spaced along the eave wall. Stud-frame gets dimensional studs at a fixed spacing and a perimeter footing row. Which one you get is detected from the job itself.
Never print 'undefined' to a customer
When a code is missing from the price list, SmartBuild does not drop the row — it returns the literal word undefined with the code beside it, priced at zero. Those rows are kept off anything a customer reads, and the missing price surfaces to the builder instead, where it can be fixed.
Steel gauge read from the panels actually ordered
The panels on the order are the truth. The gauge printed on a proposal is read from them, with the dominant one winning and wainscot left out of the wall reading, because wainscot is commonly a different gauge.
SmartBuild drawings and documents
The drawings and documents a SmartBuild shop actually sends a customer, reachable from the platform's own estimate and customer page. Pick which sheets you want, generate them, and download the file. The job's 3D viewer link comes through as a shareable link.
SmartBuild colours, doors, pricing and starting models
Full catalogue access: colours with their manufacturer codes, doors and windows with size and style, material pricing with cost, price and unit, starting model templates with their images, and per-job panel and cupola options. Pricing can be written back, not just read.
A connection that keeps working when SmartBuild is slow
Project lists, estimates, job data, pricing, colours, doors and windows, starting models and drawings all come through one connection that signs in with your account. A dropped session signs itself back in once, a failed reply is retried after a short pause, and anything still hanging after thirty seconds ends as an error you can see rather than a spinner. With nothing connected, lists come back empty and changes say plainly that there is no connection.
