IT service organizations often face roadblocks while creating accurate project cost and timeline estimates. Even minor inaccuracies can lead to budget overruns, missed deadlines, and poor client experience.
Accurate quoting requires considering resource rates, availability, discounts, bid options, and target margins, while staying aligned with company policies. But with data scattered across spreadsheets and disconnected sources, the process becomes slow, error-prone, and difficult to manage.
Certinia Services Estimator (formerly Services CPQ) solves this challenge by acting as a single source of truth. It streamlines the estimation process by consolidating all critical data into one place.
The Professional Services Estimator, integrated with Certinia PS Cloud, gives you complete visibility and control over the quoting process, enabling faster, more accurate estimates that align with business goals and enhance client confidence.
Certinia Services Estimator (formerly Services CPQ) is the perfect solution to help services organizations create accurate project estimates directly from Salesforce opportunities. Seamless integration of services estimation solution with Certinia PS Cloud empowers sales teams to deliver smart, fast quotes that drive client confidence and accelerate project kickoff.
Once approved, estimates are automatically converted into fully scoped projects in Certinia PS Cloud, ensuring a smooth transition from quote to execution, all within a single source of truth.
The Professional Services Estimator further streamlines the bidding process with built-in pricing templates for discounts, project scope, and target margins. This enables the sales team to generate precise estimates aligned with real-time service delivery needs.
Certinia Services Estimator Workspace
Key Highlights of Certinia Services Estimator
- Seamlessly convert estimates into projects with intelligent quoting
- Identify and close resource planning gaps before the bid
- Maintain visibility into project margins, roles, rates, and expenses
- Accelerate project estimation, from days to minutes.
Main features of Professional Services Estimator
Certinia Services Estimator makes it easier for services teams to create reliable, consistent, and fast project estimates.
Here’s how it helps:
Create Estimates
Easily build detailed estimates based on real-time data, including resource roles, rates, availability, and effort hours. You can also create an estimate from an existing template, and tailor each estimate to meet project requirements and business objectives.
Build Accurate Estimates in Minutes
Manage Estimate Templates
Save time and stay consistent with reusable templates. These templates help standardize pricing models, discount structures, and scopes, reducing the risk of manual errors. Reusable templates are helpful where there are repeatable estimates with the same or similar details.
Services Estimator Templates
Push Estimates to Opportunities
Connect your estimates including role and resource requests directly to Salesforce opportunities. This keeps your sales and delivery teams aligned by adding relevant data on the estimate in forecasting and utilization calculation. This shortens the quote-to-project timeline by syncing key information between systems.
Push Estimates to Opportunities
Create a Project from an Estimate
Once an estimate is approved, you can turn it into a fully scoped project in Certinia PS Cloud with just a few clicks. All the details, resources, timelines, milestones and costs carry over automatically, helping teams move forward without delays. You can also create multiple projects with multiple estimated products.
Manage projects in One Place
Integrate with Other Estimating Tools
Certinia Services Estimator can easily integrate with other estimation tools like Salesforce CPQ using a connector. This easy integration allows seamless data transfer as needed, without disrupting the existing workflows.
Scope Estimates
Define the full scope of work with guided scoping that helps create consistent, accurate estimates by responding directly to project requirements. AI-driven prompt templates ensure standardized responses, reducing variability, and improving estimation accuracy.
5 Key Benefits of Certinia Services Estimator
Certinia Professional Services Estimator brings together all the data and tools needed to create precise, policy-aligned project estimates, directly linked to Salesforce opportunities. By offering a single source of truth for the entire quoting lifecycle, it helps services organizations improve accuracy, speed of project delivery, and client satisfaction.
Here are the benefits:
- Creates Accurate and Competitive Estimates
Service businesses often struggle to create accurate estimates because the information they need is scattered across different systems and spreadsheets. But getting estimates right is critical, as it ensures projects profitability and operational efficiency.
Certinia Services Estimator has built-in pricing templates and real-time access to resource rates, margins, and scope details. Using these, your team can build accurate, competitive quotes with confidence. That kind of precision boosts profits, fosters client trust, and helps you win more deals.
- Improves Speed and Efficiency of Project Delivery
The Professional Services Estimator has a template library that enables creation of estimates automatically. These personalized templates also eliminate the need for creating estimates from scratch for different practice groups and territories.
By automating manual steps and eliminating the need to gather information from disconnected spreadsheets, estimates that longer time can now be created in minutes. This speeds up the sales cycle and allows teams to move swiftly from proposal to execution.
- Aligns Resource Availability to Project Demand
Matching resource capacity with demand is essential to successful service delivery. Without clear visibility into resource availability and skills, teams risk overbooking resources, missed deadlines, or delayed project kickoffs.
Certinia Services Estimator gives teams clear visibility into current resource availability, making it easier to assign the right people to the right projects, without overcommitting. It brings together key details like roles, bill rates, and costs to support smarter, data-driven estimating decisions. Once the estimate is created, resource demand is automatically populated within the opportunity, giving full visibility into capacity and demand.
- Bridges the Gap Between Product and Services Estimation
Certinia Services Estimator brings together products and services quoting into a unified process. Because it’s built natively on Salesforce, services estimates can flow seamlessly into opportunities or Salesforce CPQ, eliminating the need for separate estimation processes.
Key data like roles, bill rates, and costs from Certinia PS Cloud are automatically applied within Salesforce CPQ, ensuring consistency and accuracy across sales and delivery. This tight integration enables a more streamlined quoting experience and ensures both products and services are estimated with complete visibility and accuracy.
- Accelerates Project Approval and Ensures Compliance
Getting a project estimate approved is more than just a sign-off! It is about making sure the proposal aligns with business goals, pricing rules, and margin targets. Certinia Services Estimator brings structure and visibility to this process, ensuring estimates are reviewed and approved by the right stakeholders and compliant with business rules.
Everyone involved gets a clear view of the scope, costs, and assumptions, keeping approvals on track. By eliminating manual quoting and disconnected workflows, the services estimation solution free up executives and sales leaders to focus on higher-value decisions.
Gain A Smarter Approach to Project Estimation
Certinia Services Estimator helps services organizations create fast, accurate, and consistent project estimates, all from a single platform. It brings together essential data like resource availability, bill rates, and scope details to eliminate manual work and reduce errors. By streamlining the estimation and approval process, Certinia Professional Services Estimator boosts project profitability, speeds up approvals, and supports better decision-making from quote to delivery.
One of its biggest advantages is how it seamlessly connects product and service quoting. With native integration to Salesforce CPQ, it ensures that both services and product estimates are aligned, removing duplication, improving visibility, and keeping sales and delivery teams in sync.
If you are looking to simplify and speed up your project estimation process on Certinia PS Cloud, AblyPro can help!
As a trusted Certinia partner, we specialize in setting up and optimizing Certinia Services Estimator to fit the way your business works. Whether you’re building estimates from scratch or looking to streamline complex pricing and resource models with pre-built templates, we bring the right mix of experience and hands-on support to make implementation smooth and effective.
Let’s discuss how we can maximize PS Cloud and support your project success. Connect with us!
Author
AVP, AblyPro
Murali is the AVP – Certinia at AblyPro with 12+ years of experience in handling complex Certinia and Salesforce applications, implementations, configurations, and customizations. At AblyPro, he has been the pillar of all the Certinia PSA and ERP project deliverables, ranging from design to implementation, project management, and resource management. With years of practical knowledge and expertise in this industry, Murali supports the sales team in strategizing customer solutions to meet the actual business needs of the clients. Murali is a dynamic and experienced professional with multiple Certinia and Salesforce certifications, helping businesses to technically strive in this ever-changing landscape.
