How Karven stacks
against what tradies use today.

Tradify is a great job + invoice + scheduling + Xero-syncing tool. It is not a calculator. You set up your line items by hand and you do the maths in your head (or in Excel before you get to the Tradify quote screen). Karven bakes the maths in: 16 boards × $180 from a 4500×2400 sectional door appears automatically because the engine knows Castellated horizontal cladding cuts that way. If your problem is 'I lose 20 minutes per quote doing maths'. that's us. If your problem is 'I need to track jobs, invoice, and sync to Xero'. that's Tradify, plus us for the quote step.

ServiceM8 wins on mobile UX. it's the best app in the segment for sparkies and plumbers in the field. Their quoting is still generic line items though. We're built for the moment a tradie is looking at a customer's garage door and needs a price by the time they get back to the ute, not for tracking the four-hour job once it's booked.

A Steel-Line garage door calculator on a vendor website is great for a customer to get a ballpark before they ring you. It's not a tool for a tradie to send a real quote. there's no save, no PDF, no customer accept link, and you're locked to that supplier's product range. Karven has Steel-Line, B&D, Merlin and Centurion in the same engine, plus your specific markups.

Excel is free and infinitely flexible. It also looks unprofessional on a customer's iPhone, breaks every time you mistype a row reference, and you spend Sunday rebuilding it because someone deleted a column. The Excel-to-PDF dance most tradies do. quote in sheets, copy-paste into a Word template, save as PDF, attach to email. takes 8-15 minutes per quote. Karven does the same path in 60 seconds with a one-click customer accept link at the end.