Setting up appraisal templates
Map detected items to your materials and pricing so AI estimates match how you quote.
Appraisal templates are what connect the AI's findings to real numbers. They tell VanMan how to turn the items detected during an appraisal into your materials and pricing, so the estimates it builds match the way your business quotes.
Where to find them
Go to Settings → Appraisal Templates to manage your templates. From here you create and maintain the templates that drive the item-to-material mapping and pricing used across your appraisals and estimates.
What templates do
When VanMan builds an estimate from an appraisal, it maps each detected item to a material and price using your templates. That means the quality of your templates directly shapes the quality of your quotes:
- Item-to-material mapping decides which of your materials a detected item corresponds to.
- Pricing determines what that item contributes to the estimate total.
With Automatic Basic Appraisal enabled, the AI also selects the best-fit template for a job automatically when you open the Appraisal tab, so keeping a good range of templates helps it choose well.
Go to Settings → Appraisal Templates.
Set how detected items map to your materials so estimates draw on the right products.
Apply the pricing you use for each mapping so generated estimates reflect your real quotes.
If estimates keep needing the same manual corrections, update the underlying appraisal template rather than fixing each quote. The change then applies to every future job.