
The ultimate project management platform for interior design, FF&E, kitchen, bathroom and fit-out professionals.
End-to-end control. From first estimate to final invoice.
A Legacy Reimagined
Æstima is a ground-up rewrite of an estimating and project management system that has quietly powered some of the most prestigious interior design practices in the United Kingdom. Built on modern cloud infrastructure, it brings the same industry-proven workflow - with the speed, security and flexibility demanded by today's studios - to a beautiful new platform.
See It
Estimate, specification, purchase orders and invoices on one spine, so the figures at the bottom of a job are the same figures you quoted at the top.
Screens from a demonstration company: the names, projects and figures are invented. The photographs are public-domain works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection.
Everything You Need
Set the grid up your way: show only the columns you need, in the order you want, with a live budget dashboard.
Read lessRead more→The line-items grid carries a deep set of columns for every kind of work, FF&E, loose furniture, bathrooms, kitchens. You choose which of them to show and drag them into the order you want, so you only ever look at the fields that matter for the job in hand.
Save a column arrangement as a named preset and share it with the team, so each person opens the grid the way they work, an Estimated view, a Procurement view and so on. A live dashboard at the foot of every estimate moves as you type: client budget, contingency, committed cost, invoiced, received and outstanding, all recalculated on the spot.
Present any estimate in a different currency for viewing or printing, without touching a single stored figure. Pick a currency, fetch today's rate in one click or type your own, and it's locked to that estimate so a quote already sent to a client never re-prices itself later.
Working from a foreign supplier quote? Type the cost straight in with its currency - €45, $55, AUD37 - and it converts to your base currency automatically, with the rate and original figure kept on record against that line.
Number your schedule the way you work. Use codes as catalogue numbers that can repeat, or as project codes that are unique within a project: type PLU and Aestima fills in the next free number, PLU-03, and never lets the same code be used twice in the job.
Raise and track supplier orders straight from estimate lines, with request-for-quote PDFs.
Read lessRead more→Turn estimate line items into purchase orders without re-keying anything. Each PO tracks what was ordered, from whom, and where it has got to, with delivery confirmations, correspondence and product specifications attached to the order itself.
Not priced yet? Send a Request for Quote: a fillable PDF of the items with the cost columns left blank for the supplier to price and send back. Import the returned PDF and Aestima reads the prices straight back in, from the form boxes, or by AI if it was printed and scanned, and proposes each one as the line’s estimated cost for you to review and apply. No re-keying, and nothing changes until you confirm.
One-click invoices and credit notes that mirror the quote exactly, with staged payments.
Read lessRead more→Generate professional invoices and credit notes from an estimate in a click. Line-level VAT, GST or sales tax matches the estimate precisely, so what you quoted is what you bill.
Tick invoices paid as the money lands, recording the true received date, or run staged deposit, progress and balance payments. How received-to-date is worked out follows your way of working, set per company.
A live product catalogue with supplier pricing, fed by a paste-a-link reader or bulk import.
Read lessRead more→Keep a living catalogue of the products you specify, with supplier-linked pricing, held per company and shared across a company group the way contacts are.
Add an item by pasting a product web link and letting Aestima read the page to fill in title, code, supplier, price, dimensions and lead time for you to check. Or import a whole supplier price list from a spreadsheet in one pass, matching the columns and linking every item to its supplier. Save a line from an estimate into the catalogue in a click, so the next job can reuse it. The same reader works straight onto an estimate: paste a supplier's product link into a line and it fills in the name, supplier's code, maker, finishes, sizes, price and pictures for you to review, and where a site will not be read, a screenshot of the page does the same job.
Start typing a description, item title or product code on any line and a dropdown offers matching items from your catalogue, and from your own past estimates, grouped and dated so you can tell which is which. Pick one and it fills in the description, cost, retail, category, supplier and lead time for you. Either source can be switched off in Settings if you would rather not see it.
Attach as many images and files as you like to any record, file them in folders, and find them anywhere.
Read lessRead more→Every record holds as many images and files as it needs, from a single photo to a whole gallery, with no cap of one. One line item can carry product shots, fabric swatches and a maker’s mark, alongside its drawings, warranties, supplier quotes and contracts; and the same is true of an estimate, a purchase order, a contact or a price-list item. Organise them into your own named, collapsible folders, nested as deep as you like, so a long list stays easy to move through.
Everything you have ever attached also gathers in one searchable Digital Assets archive. Search it by file name, by the line or estimate a file sits on, by the project name, or by file type, so asking for the spreadsheets on a project, or a single filename, lands you on the right file in seconds.
Give every item the photographs it deserves, several per line, with a one-page visual passport.
Read lessRead more→A single thumbnail rarely sells a piece. Every line item can carry several images, a front, a detail, a fabric, a maker’s mark, with one set as the lead.
Those images power an Item Passport: a clean, one-page view of a single item with its photographs and specification together. Passports flow into client spec sheets and into the end-of-job Inventory pack, so the visual work you have already done is reused, never redone.
A page per item for whoever is asking - client, supplier or site - built from the estimate you already have.
Read lessRead more→A spec sheet is one page describing one item: your branding, the photograph, and the specification in a labelled block. Aestima produces them for the lines you are looking at, in the order you are looking at them - filter to a room, or tick the rows you want, and the pack follows.
Choose who it is for and the document changes to suit. The client copy carries the detail and your price and nothing about your supplier. The supplier copy carries the product code, quantities and finishes and nothing about your price. The end-of-job Inventory and Install Pack adds a branded contents page and hands the client a photographed record of everything supplied.
Branded estimates, POs and invoices, printed your way, and Aestima can rebuild your existing PDF.
Read lessRead more→Produce branded estimates, purchase orders and invoices as polished PDFs, with multiple templates per document type so the right layout is always a click away.
Print the same estimate several ways. Choose whether it is organised by your main group, rooms or sections, or by the supplemental group: whichever you pick becomes the top-level heading and the other nests beneath it, with subtotals at each level. Then tick exactly which groups to include, so one estimate can go out as the full document or be sliced into separate client-facing parts.
Attached to your existing paperwork? Import a PDF and Aestima rebuilds it faithfully, same page size, fonts, logo and footer, then you point the parts that change at your live data. No code, no design software.
Prices with VAT at the end or including VAT is a choice of template, made each time you print. A line with several pictures can print them all side by side. Schedules take a title, status, revision and date for each issue, so one estimate goes out as a plumbing schedule today and a lighting schedule tomorrow. Your address, VAT number and payment details are entered once and printed on every invoice.
Management reports built fresh from your data, filtered and totalled live, saved as PDF.
Read lessRead more→A suite of management reports built fresh every time you open them: profit and loss, cashflow and outstanding money, supplier spend, profit by category, time, and supplier workload by trade.
Filter and sort on screen as you type and the totals recalculate live. Every figure is a link through to the records behind it, and you can print or save the exact view you are looking at as a PDF.
Log time per project against configurable rates, and feed it into costing and billing.
Read lessRead more→Record studio time against the project it belongs to, split into categories, site visit, design, admin, travel and so on, at hourly rates you set.
Log it by hand on the estimate, or pull it straight from your Google Calendar. A company-wide view shows time across every project, and the totals feed cost reporting and, where you bill for it, client invoicing, so the hours a job really took are never invisible.
Clients, suppliers and contractors with project history, shareable across sister companies.
Read lessRead more→Full management of the people you work with, clients, suppliers and contractors, each with project history, correspondence categories and relationship tracking.
Sister companies can share a single client base across a multi-company group, so a contact entered once is available to every company that should see it, while strict isolation stays the default for everyone else.
Message your team in-app, with mentions that turn into live links to any record.
Read lessRead more→Quick back-and-forth that does not belong on a record, one to one or in a group, all kept inside your own company.
The clever part is the links: mention a PO, invoice, credit note, estimate, contact or line item and it becomes a link straight to that record. Name a report, a price-list item or a filename and it links too; describe what you want, like the spreadsheets for a given project, and it opens Digital Assets already filtered. Share files and images, and edit or delete your own messages.
Because it’s a real database, there’s no file to lock: a whole team can work the same project at once.
Read lessRead more→There is no file to lock, so a project is never one person’s at a time. A whole team can work the same estimate together, in the same group, the same room, even the same line, and each of you sees the others’ changes appear live with no refresh. A big job never has to be carved into separate parts just so two people can touch it.
If two of you edit the very same field at once it stays simple and predictable: the last to leave the field wins. The same live system drives chat, the typing indicator and the unread badge, so the app feels shared, the way a studio actually works.
Keep many records open at once in tabs along the top, like a desktop app in the browser.
Read lessRead more→Open as many estimates, contacts, POs, invoices, reports and searches as you need, each as its own tab along the top of the window, and switch between them in a click. Line up a contact and every one of their estimates, or an estimate beside the invoice it produced, and move between them without losing your place in any of them.
Tabs remember where you were between sessions, and links, including the ones in chat, can open straight into a new tab. It is the multi-document feel of a native application, in the browser, on any device.
A week-by-week project timeline built from the dates you already hold, not drawn by hand.
Read lessRead more→A priced list tells you what a job costs. It does not tell you when anything turns up, and that is the question a site meeting actually asks. The project timeline answers it: one row per supplier, room or category, one column per week, and a bar showing when goods are on order and when they are due.
Nothing is drawn and nothing is retyped. The rows are built from the order and delivery dates already recorded against your lines and their purchase orders, so a supplier moving a date moves the bar. That is the part a spreadsheet cannot do, and the reason a timeline kept this way does not quietly go stale.
Bars are colour-coded by state, with a legend: delivered, in transit, on order, still to be sourced. Lines with no usable dates are listed as unscheduled with a count rather than hidden, because quietly dropping them is how a schedule lies about what is planned. It prints A3 landscape, so it merges into whatever programme the main contractor issues.
Sub-second navigation and a native feel, in the browser, on any device.
Read lessRead more→Aestima is built to feel instant: sub-second navigation, route pre-warming, and optimistic updates that show your change immediately rather than waiting on a round trip.
The result is a native-application feel in the browser, whether you are at a desk or on a phone on site.
Every change and action logged and searchable, for complete accountability.
Read lessRead more→Aestima keeps a searchable record of what changed, when, and by whom, across projects, documents and team members.
When a figure or a status is questioned, the history is right there, so accountability is built in rather than reconstructed after the fact.
Row-level isolation keeps each company’s data private, enforced at the database.
Read lessRead more→Row Level Security enforces complete data isolation between tenants at the database, not just in the interface. Your data, documents and financials are yours, and are never visible to another organisation.
Grouping sister companies so they share contacts and records is available on self-hosted Aestima servers, where one organisation owns the whole installation. On cloud hosting, isolation is absolute: grouping is not offered, and a multi-office organisation runs as separate, fully independent tenants instead - same per-tenant pricing, switching is a simple log out and log in.
Revise an estimate without losing the thread, and always know which version the client has.
Read lessRead more→When a client asks for changes you do not start again, you revise. You set a revision marker (A, B, C and so on) that prints on the document, so a conversation about the estimate you sent last week can never go wrong.
Behind that, an immutable revision history keeps every earlier version, which you can view or restore, so you can see how the job evolved rather than losing where it started.
Carry the costs the client never sees behind each line, and keep your real margin honest.
Read lessRead more→Real jobs have costs a client should never see itemised: carriage, samples, a maker’s extra. Aestima lets a visible line carry hidden cost lines behind it, so the price the client reads stays clean while the true cost is still counted.
Your margin is then worked out on what the job actually costs you, not a tidied-up version of it. Cost pills keep the link back to the purchase orders behind a line, so nothing is double-counted or quietly lost.
Flag what still needs sourcing, and never let an unbought item slip through a job.
Read lessRead more→Mark any line still to be sourced and you can pull the outstanding items out at any time. On the estimate itself, a TBS toggle next to the group filter shows just the lines still to source, within one room or across the whole job, so what you have promised but not yet bought is never buried in a long estimate.
And a cross-project To Be Sourced report gathers them from every estimate at once. It is the safety net that stops the late panic of finding, near delivery, that something was never ordered. Work the list down as you place the orders.
Search every line across every estimate at once: have we used this before, and what did we charge?
Read lessRead more→Most of the time you look at line items inside one estimate. All Lines turns that around: one searchable list of every line across every project, so you can answer questions a single estimate cannot, like which jobs ever used this fabric, or where a supplier’s sofa appeared.
Search the description or supplier, sort by date, and your own pricing history is right there to draw on. Pull the results out to a spreadsheet for cross-project analysis.
Every list in Aestima works the same way: a filter box that takes several words at once and matches each against a different column, plus a find mode with real operators when you need to be precise - greater than, empty, not empty, between two dates. So "which contacts have no email address" or "which jobs came in over ten thousand" is one search, not an export and a spreadsheet.
Move through every record, line and image, and preview full-screen, without touching the mouse.
Read lessRead more→Built for the people who live in the app all day. Rotate through records with Cmd and the up or down arrows, step through the lines of an estimate with plain up and down, and press Return to open the highlighted line in full detail. The mouse barely gets a look in.
Inside a line, an image highlights in blue and Space gives you a full-screen Quick Look, exactly like the Finder. The left and right arrows, on screen or on the keyboard, step you to the previous or next line without leaving the detail view, and in Quick Look they cycle through every image attached to that line. Esc walks back out a level at a time, then closes the detail, and Cmd-G drops you back to the list.
The same keyboard-first thinking runs through search: Cmd-F to find on specific fields, Cmd-J to clear back to everything. Almost everything has a shortcut, so a fast user can run a whole estimate without reaching for the mouse.
Take almost anything out as CSV or Excel, laid out exactly as you have it on screen.
Read lessRead more→Move data in and out without fuss. The Import tool offers the right importer for wherever you are, the price-list importer from the price list, the contact importers from contacts and so on, with a column-matching step and a preview before anything is created.
Export is where it shows off. Send almost anything to CSV or Excel, and an estimate comes out exactly as you have arranged it: only the columns you have chosen to show, in the order you dragged them into, never a fixed dump of every field. Sort and group by main group or supplemental group, and include or exclude whichever groups you like, so the file holds precisely the cut you want.
It carries the current found set, your search results, or the whole list if nothing is filtered. Between the importers and that much control on the way out, moving data through Aestima is genuinely effortless.
AI that saves you the typing: it reads product pages, reads returned supplier quotes, and rebuilds your PDF paperwork.
Read lessRead more→Aestima uses AI where it removes real donkey-work rather than for show. Paste a product web link and it reads the page to fill in a catalogue item, title, code, supplier, price, dimensions and lead time, for you to check rather than type from scratch.
Send a supplier a quote request and, when they send it back, AI reads their returned prices straight into your lines for review. Import a PDF of your existing paperwork and it rebuilds the layout into a live, editable template. The in-app Help assistant, which answers your questions from the live guide, is covered under Help & Guidance.
Report a bug or suggest a feature from any page, and get a reply back inside the app.
Read lessRead more→Hit a snag or have an idea? Report it from any page, a bug, a feature request or just a comment, and attach a screenshot, a PDF or a short video to show exactly what you mean.
Each report becomes a two-way conversation with the developer, with replies coming back to you in the same panel. The app is built by someone who answers, not a faceless queue.
Call things what your studio calls them: Estimate, Schedule, Quote or Proposal, your words.
Read lessRead more→Not every studio calls it an estimate. Some say schedule, some quote, some design proposal. An administrator can set the words the app uses, per company, so the screens and the printed documents read in your own vocabulary rather than imposing ours.
It is a small thing that makes the app feel built for your practice rather than adapted to it.
Your logo, your colour and your brand on screen and on every document you hand over.
Read lessRead more→Make it yours. Set your logo and brand colour and they carry through the app and onto what your clients see: estimates, purchase orders, invoices and the photographed install pack, all set in your colour rather than a generic template.
Even the list views can be tuned to your house style, so the people working in it all day are looking at something that feels like your studio.
Track what you quoted against what it really cost, line by line, and copy between the two.
Read lessRead more→Every line carries two sets of figures: the Estimated, what you quoted, and the Actual, what really happened once you bought and delivered. Seeing them side by side is how you learn whether a job made the money you thought it would.
Seed one side from the other in a click: copy your estimate into the actuals to start tracking, or pull the actuals back to reset the estimate, across one line, a selection, or the whole estimate. Description, quantity, unit cost and unit retail copy across, and totals and markup recompute so you never carry a stale number.
It guards committed money: copying into the actual side never touches a line already on a purchase order or invoiced, and it tells you which lines it left alone and why.
Turn an estimate into a full FF&E specification, with phases, client-only views and a printable schedule.
Read lessRead more→FF&E mode is not a separate place, it is your estimate with its specification columns switched on: the exact fabric on a sofa, the floor a console table sits on, how far along its procurement is. Toggle the fields on when a project firms up and you need to capture and communicate that detail.
An A, B and C phase system groups items by stage and colours each row, so the picture is clear at a glance. A client flag hides the lines a client should never see, budget placeholders, rejected options, trade-only notes, so the same estimate serves both you and them.
When the specification is ready, print a clean FF&E schedule for the client to read.
A searchable guide, a tooltip on almost every control, and an assistant that answers in plain English.
Read lessRead more→Nobody should have to guess their way around. A full, searchable guide lives inside the app, written for someone who has never seen it before, and almost every button, tick-box and column carries a hover tooltip that explains what it does and when to use it.
On top of that sits an AI Help assistant: ask a question in plain English and it answers from that same live guide and points you to the right screen. Because it reads the real manual, its knowledge stays current rather than drifting out of date.
And on top of that again, a direct line to the developers: send a support request from inside the app and it lands with Aestima support immediately, with replies coming back to you in the same thread. If the guide and the assistant have not answered your question, a person will.
Switching over? Import your existing estimates and they arrive as real estimates here, contacts and all.
Read lessRead more→Moving estimating tools should not mean re-typing years of work. Import an existing estimate from your current system and Aestima rebuilds it as a proper estimate here, every line intact, and brings the client, the addresses and the suppliers in at the same time, each matched to an existing contact or created fresh, so you do not end up with duplicates.
Once they are in, they are real database records: searchable, linkable, and open to your whole team. So switching over is a matter of importing your jobs, not re-keying them.
Run Aestima fully hosted in the cloud, or self-hosted on your own server with your data physically at home.
Read lessRead more→Most companies choose the cloud: nothing to install, updates arrive by themselves, and your team works from anywhere on any device.
Companies that want complete physical ownership of their data can self-host Aestima on their own server instead - the same app, on hardware you control, behind your own walls. We install and configure self-hosted setups with you, charged at a day rate. Sister-company grouping is available on self-hosted installations.
Aestima grows around the studios that use it. If it does not do something you need, tell us.
Read lessRead more→Aestima is built close to its users, and many of its best features began as a request from a working studio. If your practice needs something the app does not do - a report, a workflow, a print form, a shortcut - ask for it, straight from inside the app.
Useful, well-shaped ideas have a good chance of being built in. Requests go directly to the developers, and you will hear back either way.
Quote a client abroad in their own currency, on screen and in print, without ever touching your real figures.
Read lessRead more→Every cost and retail figure in Aestima is stored in your studio's own currency, always. But any single estimate can be PRESENTED in a different one for a client abroad: pick a currency from your company's own list, then either fetch today's exchange rate in one click or type your own. The grid, the totals and the printed PDF all convert together, so the client never sees a figure that doesn't add up against another.
The rate locks to that estimate the moment it's set, rather than being re-fetched every time someone opens the page - a quote already sent stays exactly as sent, whatever exchange rates do afterwards. Looking it up again is one click too, and if the estimate already has a rate, Aestima asks first, since the client may already have seen figures worked out at the old one.
While a converted currency is on screen, the figures are look-but-don't-touch: nobody can type a number in while viewing euros and have it silently saved as pounds. Switch back to your base currency and every cell is editable again, instantly.
Leave the tooltips off and still get an answer: point at anything and press the i key.
Read lessRead more→Every control in Aestima can explain itself, but nobody wants explanations hovering at them all day once they know the software. So the help does not have to be on or off: leave it off, point at whatever you are unsure of, press i, and the explanation for that one thing appears.
It shows once and goes when you move away. There is nothing to switch back off afterwards, and nothing to discover you have left on. It stays quiet while you are typing, so it can never eat a keystroke.
The explanations say what a control DOES rather than repeating its label, and where a figure is calculated they give the sum. The Markup search, for instance, tells you it is looking at sell minus cost divided by COST, worked out from the totals rather than read from a column - and that this is markup, not margin.
One dropdown above the grid: everything, only items with pictures, or only those without.
Read lessRead more→A spec is not finished until the client can see what they are buying, and the awkward part is finding which lines still have nothing attached. The Pictures filter sits above the line items and splits the job three ways, with a count beside each: all of them, the ones with photographs, and the ones without.
"No pictures" is the one that earns its place. It is the list of items still needing a photograph - and because it narrows the found set, everything downstream follows it. Print exactly that list, take it with you, and go and photograph what is on it.
It combines with the group selector and the search box rather than replacing them, so you can ask for the unphotographed items in one room, or from one supplier, without losing your place.
But if you have got this far, you really ought to be signing up and using it for yourself.
Read lessRead more→That is thirty-seven reasons, which is about thirty more than most people read. So rather than write a thirty-eighth, the honest thing to say is this: the quickest way to know whether Aestima fits your studio is to get your hands on it.
Tell us about your practice and we will set you up. No demo treadmill, no slideshow, just your own jobs in the real thing.
Designed For
?And, really, anyone who runs projects, large or small, and needs to estimate them, invoice them and purchase against them to keep their clients happy.
Pricing
Volume pricing over 10 seats, and annual billing gives you two months free. No setup fees, no per-document charges, and no VAT to add.
Work out your price
or £3,500 / year, with two months free. No VAT to add.
10 seats, each charged at its band's rate. Your price only rises as you add people, it never jumps.
1 to 10 users
Solo designers and small studios.
11 to 25 users
Growing practices.
26 to 50 users
Larger firms and groups.
Over 50 seats is bespoke. Tell us your team size and we'll price it.
Questions
Both. Most practices take the fully managed cloud: nothing to install, updates arrive by themselves, and the team works from anywhere. Practices that want physical ownership of their data run the same application on their own server instead, and one of our customers does exactly that today. It is the same app with the same features either way. We install and configure self-hosted setups with you, charged at a day rate.
Yes. A self-hosted installation puts the application and its database on hardware you own, behind your own network, with nobody else holding a copy. If where the data sits matters to you contractually, say so when you get in touch and we will put the specifics in writing rather than leaving you to infer them.
It is estimating, FF&E specification, purchasing and invoicing software for interior design and FF&E practices. You price a project line by line, group it by room, carry the costs the client never sees behind each line, raise purchase orders to suppliers, invoice from the same lines, attach photographs and documents to anything, and produce branded estimates, spec sheets and schedules as PDFs.
Yes - the estimate is the spine, and everything else grows out of it. The same records carry through to purchase orders, invoices and credit notes, a product catalogue with supplier pricing, a week-by-week project timeline, timesheets, management reports, a full audit trail and the client portal. Nothing is retyped between stages, so what you priced is what you order, what you order is what you invoice, and the figures cannot drift apart.
Yes. It is a real multi-user database rather than a file, so there is nothing to lock and nothing to pass around. Two people can work the same estimate at once and each sees what the other changes.
Yes. Existing estimates import as real estimates with every line intact, and the client, addresses and suppliers come in as contacts, matched against what you already have rather than duplicated. The aim is that switching does not mean re-keying a back catalogue.
A web browser, and that is the whole list. It runs the same on a Mac, a PC, an iPad or an Android tablet, so a practice with a mix of machines is simply a practice with a mix of machines. There is nothing to install, nothing to keep updated, and no per-machine licence - a new starter needs an account rather than a laptop and a seat.
Per user, per month: £35 for 1 to 10 users, £29 for 11 to 25, and £25 for 26 to 50. No VAT is added, so those are the figures you pay. Over 50 seats is by agreement. Pricing is marginal, so each seat is charged at the rate for its own band and there is no cliff when you cross a threshold. Self-hosted installation and configuration is charged separately at a day rate.
Yes, and you can have either or both. We can put you straight into a fully worked demo practice - a complete interior design company we built for the purpose, with invented clients, projects and suppliers - so you can open real estimates, raise a purchase order, print a spec sheet and read the built-in manual without touching anything of your own. Or we set up a free trial holding your practice's own work. Both are arranged personally rather than through a signup form, which means the account arrives configured the way you work and there is somebody to ask.
Yes. Aestima has a client portal: you pick one estimate and share a read-only web page of it, so a client can follow the project without you emailing a new PDF every time something moves. They see the items, quantities and your selling prices, and nothing else - no costs, no margin, no supplier names, and no other job of yours. You choose which estimate and which client, you can see when they have opened it, you can collect their approvals line by line, and you can withdraw the link whenever you like.
Get Started
Æstima is available to professional practices by invitation. Tell us about your business and we'll be in touch.