Estimates API: the one gap in our Invoices API workflow

We are a commercial AV and lighting integrator and we run our business on Square:
payments, invoicing, catalog. We built our proposal tooling directly on the
Invoices API and it has held up well.

We processed over a million dollars through Square in the last twelve months and
are on track for one to two million. We want to put more through it, not less,
which is why I am posting this.

Every job we sell starts as an estimate. The client gets a proposal, revises it,
approves it, and only then does it become an invoice. The invoice half we
automated. The estimate half we cannot, because the API has no estimate stage, so
every proposal gets keyed into the Dashboard by hand.

That is the ceiling on how many jobs we can quote in a week, which makes it the
ceiling on how much we can sell. Every proposal we cannot generate is a job we do
not quote, and revenue that never reaches Square either.

I saw the note on the existing thread that this is more complicated than flipping
a feature flag, and I take that at face value. I am not asking for a date. I would
just like to know whether estimates in the API are on the roadmap at all, so we
can plan around the answer.

Welcome to the Developer Forum!

Thanks for sharing the context. The workflow and impact are clear, and I understand why re-keying estimates in Dashboard is a blocker.

As of today, I don’t have a timeline I can share for Estimates API support unfortunately. The closest workaround is to model the proposal/estimate in your own system using the Orders API for the structured details including line items, taxes, discounts, catalog references, etc. then create the Square invoice through the Invoices API once the customer approves. That can help avoid re-keying the invoice data and handle it in a programmatic way, but it is not a full replacement for a true Estimates API: it won’t create a native Square Estimate in Dashboard or provide estimate-specific status tracking.

We’ll pass this feedback along to the product team again. I appreciate the detail here. It’s definitely a helpful example of where an Estimates API would unlock more invoice volume through Square.