Itemized line items

Quotes and invoices can use one of two line item styles:

• Detailed suits agencies, consultants and other scoped work. Each line has a title, a rich description and is priced as hours × rate, with variance and a profit margin. See Line items and pricing.
• Itemized suits contractors and trades. Each line is a short item with a quantity, a unit such as each, square foot or linear foot, your cost and a markup. It reads like a materials-and-labor estimate.

Both styles use the same quotes, invoices, templates and price book. The style changes how lines are entered and how they appear to your client.

Choose a style

Your team has a default style, set under Line Item Style on the Quotes tab of Team Settings. New quotes and invoices start with it. See Quote and invoice settings.

To switch a single quote or invoice, use the Detailed / Itemized switch in the header of the Line Items card. Your items stay as they are; only the columns and the client view change.

When you switch a quote or invoice to Itemized, its profit margin is set to 0%, because itemized documents price each item with its own markup instead. If you switch back to Detailed, the margin stays at 0% until you change Profit Margin.

Documents you’ve already created keep the style they were created with when you change the team default.

The itemized columns

Column	What to enter or read
Item	A short name, such as “Drywall, 1/2 in.”
Qty	How many units. Decimals are allowed, such as 16.5 hours.
Unit	What one quantity means. See Units.
Cost	Your cost for one unit. New items start at 0.
Markup	The percentage added on top of your cost for this item. New items start at the quote’s Default Markup.
Amount	Qty × Cost plus markup. Calculated for you.

If Show Line Item Tax Column is on in your tax settings, a Tax column appears before Amount.

When you edit an invoice that’s already been created, items show Rate in place of Cost and Markup.

The item menu (⋮) has Add note, Duplicate, Save to library, Move to section and Delete.

Units

Pick a unit from the list on each item. Type to search by the short form (“sq ft”) or the full name (“Square foot”), or choose No unit.

Unit	Shown as
Hour, Day, Week, Month, Year	hr, day, wk, mo, yr
Each, Lot, Job, Visit, Session, Seat, Page	ea, lot, job, visit, session, seat, page
Square foot, 1,000 square feet, Square yard, Acre	sq ft, 1k sq ft, sq yd, acre
Linear foot, Cubic yard	lf, cu yd
Sheet, Box, Bag	sheet, box, bag
Gallon, Pound, Ton, Mile	gal, lb, ton, mi

The list is fixed, so you can’t add your own units.

Common units for your industry

The Industry on your Business settings decides which units appear first, under Common, with the rest under More. It also sets the unit new itemized items start with. For example:

Industry	Common units	New items start with
Construction & Contracting, Home Services & Trades	ea, hr, lot, sq ft, lf, sheet, cu yd, day	ea
Landscaping & Gardening	visit, ea, hr, acre, 1k sq ft, sq ft, cu yd, bag, lot	ea
Cleaning Services	visit, hr, sq ft, ea, mo	visit
Web & Digital Agency, Marketing & Advertising, Business Consulting, Accounting & Finance, Legal Services, and industries without their own list	hr, day, mo, ea, job	hr

Cost and markup

Enter what the item costs you per unit in Cost, and the percentage you add on top in Markup. Don’t build markup into the cost.

For each item:

Amount = Qty × Cost × (1 + Markup ÷ 100)

Then, as with detailed quotes, the amounts add up to the subtotal and any discount comes off. There’s no profit margin on top.

Example

14 sheets of drywall at a cost of $16 a sheet, with a 20% markup:

Step	Calculation	Amount
Cost	14 × $16	$224.00
Amount	$224 × 1.20	$268.80

Your client sees 14 sheets at a rate of $19.20, for $268.80.

Default markup

Default Markup in the Line Items card header sets the markup new items start with on this document. Click Apply to All to copy it onto every item. Your team default is Default Markup (%) under Quote Defaults in settings. It’s the same setting as Default Variance (%) in the detailed style.

The quote summary shows Base Subtotal (your cost) and With Markup, followed by any discount and the total.

Item notes

An item can carry a one-line note, shown under the item name on the client’s copy, such as “Includes haul-away”.

1. Click the pencil at the end of the item’s name field (Add a note). You can also choose Add note from the item menu.
2. Type the note under the item.
3. Press Enter or click away to save it.

If you leave the note empty, it folds back into the pencil.

Fast entry

Itemized rows are built for keyboard entry:

• Press Enter in an item’s name, quantity, cost or markup field to save it and start a new item below, in the same section. The cursor moves to the new item’s name.
• Paste rows from a spreadsheet into an item’s name field. Each line becomes an item, with columns read in the order item, quantity, unit, cost. Units are matched by name or short form, including common spellings like “sf”, “lf”, “ac” and “msf”. If the item you pasted into was blank, the pasted rows replace it.
• Drag the handle on the left of a row to reorder items.

Sections

Sections group items under a heading such as “Demo”, “Kitchen” or “Phase 1”. Each section shows its subtotal. Sections work in both styles.

Create and organize sections

1. In the Line Items card, click Add section.
2. Type a name and press Enter. Click the name later to rename it.
3. Add items with Add item to section name under the section, or press Enter on an item in the section.

To move an existing item, choose a section under Move to section in its item menu, or New section… to start one. No section takes it out. You can also drag items between sections, drag a whole section by its handle, and collapse a section with the arrow beside its name.

The section menu (⋯) has Add item, Rename, Duplicate section, Ungroup (keep items), Save as template and Delete section. Deleting asks whether to Keep items or Delete section and items.

Show clients only section totals

Once a document has a section, a Client sees section totals only switch appears in the Line Items card header. Turn it on and your client sees one line per section, with its name and total, instead of each item. Items outside any section still appear in full.

The individual item prices aren’t sent to the client at all, so they can’t be found in the page.

Save a section as a template

1. In the section menu, choose Save as template.
2. Check the Template name. It starts as the section name.
3. Add a Category if you like.
4. Click Save template.

The template keeps each item’s name, note, quantity, unit, cost, markup and the section name. To reuse it, click Template on any quote or invoice. Saved sections are marked Section in the picker, with the item count and an estimate, such as “Section · 6 items · ~$1,253”. The estimate uses each item’s cost, quantity and markup.

The section is inserted as its own block. If the document already has a section with that name, the new one is numbered, such as “Demo 2”.

For more on templates, including setting a template’s Line item style, see Quote templates.

What clients see

On an itemized quote or invoice, the client’s document and PDF show Item, Qty, Unit, Rate and Amount, with section headings and subtotals if you use sections. Notes appear under the item name.

• Qty and Rate always show on itemized documents, whatever your Display Settings say. The Unit column appears when at least one item has a unit.
• The Rate is the amount divided by the quantity, so Qty × Rate always equals the amount. Your cost and markup are never shown.

Quotes in the detailed style now work the same way: when Rate is on, the client sees the line total divided by the quantity, not your base hourly rate.

Per-1,000 sq ft quantities

The 1k sq ft unit is priced per 1,000 square feet. Where quantity and unit are shown together, such as on detailed documents, PDFs and your own quote and invoice pages, Tillage folds the unit into the number: 12 of them show as “12k sq ft”, not “12 1k sq ft”. In a separate Unit column, the unit stays “1k sq ft”.

AI assistants

Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants connected through Tillage’s MCP server understand both styles, and can draft itemized quotes with sections, units, cost and markup. See Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants.

Related

• Line items and pricing
• Price book
• Client rates
• Quote templates
• Quote and invoice settings

To start from a sample, use a free estimate template or invoice template for your trade. The markup calculator shows what a markup does to your price.