Real quick. You walked the job, took 30 pictures, said "I'll get you something by Friday," and now it's Sunday night and you're staring at a blank screen trying to remember what you saw on Tuesday. So the write-up takes two hours, or it doesn't happen at all, and a job you already earned goes cold because you couldn't get the paperwork out.
Writing is the bottleneck. Not the knowing. You know exactly what needs to happen. Getting it out of your head and into a document somebody else can read is the part that eats your Sunday.
So stop writing from scratch. Dump the photos and your voice notes in, get a first draft back, and spend your time correcting instead of creating. Ten minutes instead of two hours.
What you need
- The photos on your phone
- Claude (this needs the version that reads images, which the free one does)
- Your own price list. This part matters, read the caveats.
Setup
- On site, do two things. Take your photos like normal. Then hold your phone up and talk for 60 seconds about what you're seeing. Use your phone's voice recorder or just record a voice memo. Say the messy version out loud, nobody's grading it.
- Get the photos onto whatever you're using Claude on. Phone works fine, the app takes photos directly.
- Start a new chat. Upload the photos. Paste the first prompt.
- Paste in a rough transcript of your voice note. On iPhone, the Voice Memos app transcribes automatically. Otherwise just type out what you said, badly, it doesn't matter.
- You get a draft scope back. Now you correct it. This is the part where you earn your money, not the typing.
- Run the second prompt to turn the corrected scope into something you can actually hand a customer.
Do this once first: paste your standard line items and how you word things into Claude and save it in a project, so every future draft comes back sounding like your paperwork instead of generic.
The prompts
Draft the scope:
I run a [YOUR BUSINESS TYPE] in [YOUR CITY]. I'm attaching photos from
a job I walked. Below the photos is a rough transcript of me talking
through what I saw, it's messy and unedited.
Write me a DRAFT scope of work. Structure it as:
1. WHAT I'M SEEING. Describe what's visible in each photo in plain
language. Group them by area or by system, whatever makes sense.
2. SCOPE OF WORK. The specific tasks, in the order they'd actually get
done. One line each. Write it the way it would go on a customer-
facing document.
3. THINGS I NEED TO CONFIRM. Anything you can't tell from a photo,
anything ambiguous, anything I should measure or verify before I
price this. Be aggressive here, I'd rather over-check.
4. QUESTIONS FOR THE CUSTOMER. What I should ask them before I finalize.
Hard rules:
- Do NOT put dollar amounts anywhere. Not a range, not an estimate,
nothing. I price my own work.
- Do NOT guess at quantities or measurements. If you can't see it, say
so and put it in section 3.
- If something in a photo looks like it might be a bigger problem than
what I described, flag it separately at the bottom.
- Plain language. This gets read by a customer, not by another tradesperson.
Here's my voice note:
[PASTE OR TYPE WHAT YOU SAID]Turn it into the customer document:
Take the scope above, with my corrections, and format it as a document
I can send to the customer.
- Short intro paragraph, 2 sentences, what we looked at and what we're
proposing
- The scope as a clean numbered list
- A short "what's not included" section, based on what's in the scope
- A line about what happens next and what I need from them
Leave a clearly marked blank spot where I fill in pricing and timeline
myself. No numbers anywhere.
Tone: [DESCRIBE HOW YOUR PAPERWORK SHOULD SOUND, example: straight and
plain, no fluff, no sales language]What to check before you trust it
This is a draft. It is not an estimate, it is not a bid, and it is absolutely not a number you send anybody. Read every line against what you actually saw with your own eyes. AI reads a photo. You read a job.
It will miss things that aren't in the frame. Access issues, what's behind a wall, what the last person did wrong, code stuff, whether the thing is even the right thing. None of that is in a picture.
It will occasionally describe something confidently and be flat wrong. That's the one that'll bite you. If a line in the draft surprises you, go look at the photo again before you keep it.
Never let it near your pricing. Your prices come from your costs, your market, and your margin. The whole point here is to kill the typing, not to outsource your judgment.
If you're in a licensed or regulated trade, whatever you send still has to meet your local requirements. A draft doesn't know your code.
Strip the customer's address, full name, and anything private out of the photos and text before you upload. Blur a house number if it's in the shot. Good habit, costs you nothing.
— Jordan