Priced the way Fence Builder work is billed
A new fence install and a post replacement don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Fence Builder the way the work is really billed: per linear foot — about $35 a linear foot — with gates, posts, and staining billed flat or per post. 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 Fence Builder jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Fence Builder 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.
New fence install, 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 $1,600 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Fence Builder price
Two Fence Builder 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:
- Material — cedar, vinyl, and chain-link don't cost the same per foot, and your price should make that obvious.
- Terrain — a sloped or rocky line means more posts and more digging for every foot of run.
- Gates and end posts — each gate and corner is its own flat line on top of the linear-foot run.
What a Fence Builder job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Fence Builder is no exception. SideWRK captures the 811 utility-locate ticket status before you auger post holes and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the 811 utility-locate ticket status before you auger post holes
- how the property line was confirmed — owner-pointed or surveyed
- fence type and height
- pool-barrier, setback, and encroachment disclosures
Example note on a job: "Line set per customer markings — not a surveyed property line."
How to price a Fence Builder job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Fence Builder job and tap a suggestion like "New fence install" or "Fence repair" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per linear foot
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per linear foot — about $35 a linear foot — with gates, posts, and staining billed flat or per post. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Fence Builder ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Line set per customer markings — not a surveyed property line." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Fence Builder-specific records: the 811 utility-locate ticket status before you auger post holes, and how the property line was confirmed — owner-pointed or surveyed.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Fence Builder 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 Fence Builder work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a fencing contractor license (C-13 in California), an 811 locate before augering, and local zoning on setbacks, height, and pool-barrier code (48-inch, self-latching gates). The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Fence Builder pricing — common questions
How do I price a Fence Builder job in SideWRK?
You bill per linear foot — about $35 a linear foot — with gates, posts, and staining billed flat or per post. Add the work — New fence install, Fence repair, Gate install / repair — 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 Fence Builder job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like new fence install runs about $3,200 in the app — roughly $1,600 of that is your labor and about $1,600 is parts at your cost. Common Fence Builder work ranges from about $250 to $3,200. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Fence Builder job?
The records Fence Builder work actually needs: the 811 utility-locate ticket status before you auger post holes; how the property line was confirmed — owner-pointed or surveyed; fence type and height. 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 Fence Builder work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a fencing contractor license (C-13 in California), an 811 locate before augering, and local zoning on setbacks, height, and pool-barrier code (48-inch, self-latching gates). SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Fence Builder?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. Every trade is included, and you switch between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Fence is a bid trade. You're usually the second or third truck to walk that back line, and the homeowner is holding two other numbers by the time yours lands. What decides it is rarely the price alone. It's whose quote showed up first and read like it came from a business instead of from a guy with a tape measure.
- The bid goes out from the yard. Tap the work, put the footage in the Linear feet box, add the gate as its own line, send. The customer opens it on their phone, reads what each piece costs, and types their name to approve — that typed name prints on the document as the signature. No trip home to write it up, no "I'll email you tonight" that turns into Thursday.
- The deposit rides on the yes. Set it per estimate — waived, 10, 25, 33, or 50 percent — and the customer can pay it by card on the same screen where they approve. Fence spends money before it earns any; this is where that money comes from instead of your card.
- A bid has a shelf life. An estimate stops accepting an approval after 14 days. Lumber moves. A quote somebody sat on since spring isn't a promise you're stuck honoring.
- The ones you lose are still worth something. Mark an estimate lost and tap a reason — price, timing, ghosted, other. You will lose bids in this trade; that's the trade. Losing them without ever seeing which reason keeps coming back up is the expensive version.
How the number itself gets built is the next chapter: how fence bills, worked to a total you can check.
Repeat business — the fence that doesn't call you back
There's no service plan here. SideWRK runs recurring plans for the trades that genuinely come back on a cycle, and fence isn't one of them — a fence you built right is finished for years. What comes back is smaller and slower, and it only comes back to you if something remembered.
- The coat. Wood grays, and the reseal is the one fence job with a clock on it. Sell the Stain, Not Just the Fence makes that whole argument: when to pitch it, which unit to quote it in, what each wood buys you, and what the prep walk turns up while you're back there. Read it before your next handover. This page won't repeat it.
- "Do this again." On a job marked done, paid, or lost, one button copies the whole ticket — every line, its price, your cost on it, the notes, gates and all — into a fresh job. Next spring's second run is last spring's estimate with new footage typed into it, not a blank form at 9pm. It works on the bids you didn't get, too: the fence you quoted in March and lost is one tap from being this September's quote.
- The fence is the advertisement. Pair a before and an after out of the job's own photos into the gallery on your public page. The neighbor who watched you work three days is already a lead. A page with their neighbor's fence on it is how they check you out before they dial.
- The ask happens without you. After a job wraps, the app emails the customer a review request on its own, then one reminder a few days later. That's the whole ask — one request, one nudge, and it stops there.
How fence bills
Two boxes, and neither says hours. Add work to a fence job and the form asks for Linear feet and Rate ($/linear ft), hinting 150 and 35. The seven common jobs sit above as tap-chips, but unlike the flat-menu trades they only fill in the description — the numbers stay yours to put in. Your rate box arrives pre-filled at $35, and Shop labels that field exactly what it does: a default rate per linear foot that auto-prices work from length.
The seven jobs a fence trade quotes, at the numbers SideWRK loads before you touch anything. Two priced by the foot, two by the piece, three flat. Every one of them is a field you can overwrite.
Three numbers on this page need untangling before you quote off one of them. The summary table near the top prices New fence install at $3,200, Post replacement at $250, and Fence stain / seal at $900 — and not one of those is a unit price. They are whole reference tickets. The $3,200 is about 91 feet of finished fence. The $250 is five posts at $50 apiece. The $900 is 180 feet of coating at $5 a foot, which is also why the line up the page filing stain in with the flat work is the short version of it — the coat prices by the foot, same as the run does. Read the $3,200 as a rate and that same 91-foot backyard quotes at $291,200. Nobody does that twice. Once is plenty.
For the record, 91 × $35 is $3,185, not $3,200. The table carries the researched job number; the app's own demo prices that install at 91 feet times a clean $35. Close enough that neither is wrong, far enough apart that you should know which one you're looking at.
Half the ticket is bought, not earned. The app carries a labor share of 0.5 on fence, which puts about $1,600 of that $3,200 install into posts, panels, concrete, and hardware before your first dollar. An even split, right down the middle. That ratio describes a new build, not every line on every job, and the app never applies it to your work: each line carries its own Your cost beside its price, so what you clear is measured, not assumed. What the ratio tells you is where the risk sits. A fence quote rides closer to the lumber price than a labor-heavy trade's does, and a foot you underpriced cannot be made back on labor later. There isn't enough labor in it to hide in.
A fence ticket runs on two units and a stack of flat lines. The run and the coat price by the foot. The gate and the posts price by the piece. Repair, deck stain, and tear-out are flat, and not one of them grows when the fence does. Quote the whole yard off the per-foot rate and you have handed the gate and the tear-out over for nothing:
Three lines, one of them priced by the foot. Stretch the yard to 170 feet and only the first number moves — the gate and the tear-out don't care how long the fence is. That's $1,200 of a $6,450 ticket, close to a fifth of the job, sitting in lines a blended per-foot rate swallows whole. Each gets its own row on the estimate, so the customer sees what they're buying and you see what you're being paid for.
Where the $35 comes from, and when it's wrong for your yard. Thirty-five dollars is what the market pays, loaded into the app so nobody's first quote starts from zero. What it is not is a costing of your job. Build the same 150-foot yard from the bottom up and you find out whether this one is a $35 yard, and the four steps go in the same order every time: materials, labor, overhead, margin.
Call it $5,600 — a hair over $37 a foot. Add the gate at $400 and the bid is $6,000. Every figure here is a slot for one of yours: $13 a foot is cedar at one lumberyard on one day, and 24 man-hours is two of you for a day and a half on a line with roots in it. A clean run in soft dirt goes faster than that. In the trade you'll hear 25–35% for markup and margin and 20–30% for overhead — rules of thumb, not our data, and the only ones that count are the ones your own year produces.
Now put the two side by side. The app's default rate quotes that run at $5,250. Costed from the ground up, the same run is a $5,600 job — about $37 a foot, $350 more than the default would have handed you, and every dollar of the gap has a reason you could point at in the yard. That is the whole argument for costing a job instead of borrowing a rate: a borrowed per-foot number is an underbid by design. Every hard thing about your specific site subtracts from your pay, and nothing on that list ever adds to it.
One thing the markup step does not do is quietly become your profit. The customer-facing Price and your private Your cost are two different boxes on the same line, so a 25% markup shows up as margin you can see rather than a bigger-looking number with your real earnings buried inside it. That's the point of putting materials on at what you actually paid.
What the per-foot rate does not absorb. The drivers list further up names what moves the number — material, terrain, gates and end posts. These four are a different problem: they sit outside the rate entirely. Thirty-five dollars a foot is a rate for building fence, not a rate for the ground, the shape of the yard, or the county. Each one comes out of your day if it isn't settled before you start:
- The footage is yours to measure, not theirs to tell you. "It's about two hundred feet" is how a 200-foot job becomes 230 feet of material nobody priced. Walk it with a tape or trace it off the satellite, then put that number in the box. The Linear feet field is the peg the whole estimate hangs on.
- The ground sets the labor, and you can't see it from the driveway. Rock, roots, caliche, a high water table: any of them turns a ten-minute auger hole into a fight with a digging bar. Probe a few post locations before you quote rather than after. A rate built for dirt doesn't survive a run of granite.
- Gates and corners break the per-foot math on purpose. A gate isn't hardware bolted onto the run — it's a heavier post, deeper concrete, frame lumber, and its own build-and-hang time. Corners do the same thing quietly: a straight-line post count assumes one continuous run, and every corner in the yard demands a post where the spacing wasn't going to put one. Price both by the piece. The app's own takeoff already behaves this way — put a gate in it and it stops handing the estimate a clean footage-times-rate line and hands over the priced total instead, because gate labor was never inside the per-foot number.
- Permits and property lines get found before the bid, or paid for after it. Where a fence may stand is a local question and where the boundary runs is a survey question. Both are covered in the paper worth keeping. Neither is a surprise you should be absorbing.
And when the ground argues, get the yes again before you keep digging. Add work past what the customer approved and the job raises a caution naming both figures — this total against the total they authorized — and points at Log authorization, which records who approved it, how (in person, phone, or text), and for how much. Photograph the rock, price it, get the answer, carry on. A change order sent from the yard reads like a pro handling a normal part of the job. A text saying "gonna need more" reads like padding the bill.
The fence app is built for that sequence: tap the work, put the footage in, every piece lands as its own priced line on one ticket, and the yard goes out as a single estimate — one approval, one invoice, one payment.
Multiplying jobs
A bid trade lives on follow-through, and follow-through is the thing that falls off the truck by Thursday. The app runs the boring half:
- You know the second they open it. When the customer opens the estimate you get a push notification — or an email if push isn't set up on that phone, one or the other and never both. Knowing they read it at eight at night changes what you say at nine.
- The quiet bid gets a nudge. An estimate nobody answered gets a plain follow-up email at 3 days and again at 7. Two, then it stops. It's a toggle you own. Most people who meant to say yes just lost the thread under a school schedule.
- Let them keep or drop the coat themselves. Mark a line optional and the customer checks or unchecks it on the approval page, with the total moving as they do. The stain line is the obvious candidate: base fence, optional finish, their call, no phone call needed. See how optional lines work.
- The unpaid invoice chases itself. Money still owed on a wrapped job gets an email at 3, 7, and 14 days with a pay link — three, then it stops, and only where the customer left you an email address. That link settles by card or Apple Pay. If you'd rather be paid against a handle of your own, that's the separate payment request you build and send yourself.
Price it now
Length, height, style, post spacing, gate count, what you charge to hang a gate, and your own rate per foot. What comes back is a materials takeoff — line posts at your spacing plus the end post, then another post for every gate; rails by height, two under five feet and three up to seven; pickets by picket width and gap; concrete at two 80-pound bags a line post and three a gate post; screws by the pound — with the labor and the charge underneath it. The same free calculator the fence page runs, right here:
Inside a job the same calculator opens with a bar across the bottom carrying three buttons. Add to this estimate carries the priced work onto the ticket. Measure opens the satellite so you can trace the run off the map instead of trusting "it's about two hundred feet." Pick sheet turns the takeoff into a check-off list for the supply run. Out here it stays a calculator; the bar is the in-app half.
Two things to carry with you either way. The post count assumes one continuous run, so add a post for each corner the yard actually has — a corner forces a post where even spacing wasn't going to put one. And the gate here is not the $400 gate line from the menu: the takeoff builds a gate up from its parts, a hardware kit and frame lumber plus whatever you set gate labor at, which lands well under a priced $400 job. Neither is wrong. One is a takeoff of what a gate costs you, the other is what a gate sells for. Knowing which one you're reading is the difference between the two examples above.
The paper worth keeping
The records list up the page says what a fence job captures; the rules box says what's hanging over it. Here's why each one earns its keep — starting with the item that isn't paperwork at all, and is the only thing on this page that can end a job worse than unpaid.
- Call 811 before the auger touches dirt. Before digging or auguring any post hole, the law requires a free 811 "Call/Click Before You Dig" utility locate — usually a few business days before you dig — so gas, electric, water, and communication lines get marked. A post hole through a gas or electric line is dangerous, and it can bring fines, repair liability, and criminal charges. The locate costs nothing. The job site record keeps its status as its own field — Not yet, Ticket requested, Marked / cleared — and the notice prints on the estimate and the invoice, where the customer reads it too. SideWRK records the work; it does not place the ticket. That call stays yours to make.
- Where the line runs, in writing. The job site asks how the boundary was confirmed: owner-pointed, survey on file, survey recommended, not sure. The example note printed further up this page is the version of that sentence you'd actually type, and it takes five seconds. Build over a line and it stops being a fence job and starts being an encroachment argument. A sentence written down before the posts went in is what you have when the neighbor comes out.
- Height, setback, and placement are local questions. Fence height, setback, and placement are set by local zoning, and plenty of jurisdictions require a permit above a certain height. The specifics move from city to city, so a figure you learned on the last job is a guess on this one. Fence jobs get the permit card: status, permit number, issuing authority, rough-in and final inspections, and the permit fee added as its own pass-through line at what you paid, no markup. The permit number prints on the estimate and invoice (more on permits).
- A pool fence is a different animal. A fence enclosing a pool or spa is a life-safety barrier under strict code rules — a minimum height, limits on the gaps at the bottom and between pickets, and self-closing, self-latching gates. The exact numbers are set where you're working, and HOA rules sit on top of them rather than instead of them. Confirm before you build. The disclosure prints on the document either way.
- The license line, and the thousand-dollar mark. Take a fence estimate to $1,000 with no license number on file and the app raises a caution: that most states require a contractor license at or above that point, and that splitting one project across two estimates or invoices doesn't get you under it. Most installs clear that on the first line. Past $500 it also flags that home-improvement work generally needs a written contract, and says plainly that SideWRK doesn't provide one — use your own. Where your state actually draws those lines stays yours to confirm.
- April, already done. Numbered invoices, payments, material receipts — log the lumberyard run and clip its receipt photo to the row — all of it rolls into a year-end wrap-up: rows, category totals, CSVs, and a printable summary a preparer can actually work from. The shoebox, retired.
SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice. It keeps the records; the rules stay your state's and your city's, and meeting them stays yours.