What's New in Rotor Rate v1.13: Estimates, Invoices, and Multi-Site Jobs

This release is about the paperwork side of the job — the part you got into drones for right!? LOL. Estimates, invoices, multi-stop days, and waivers. Here's what changed.

Estimates that look like they came from your business

Your estimates now carry your company name, logo, and contact details, a written scope of work, itemized pricing, the dates involved, and your own terms — deposit, payment window, weather policy, revisions, usage rights, and what's not included.

You write that wording once in Settings, under Estimate defaults, and every estimate after that uses it. There's a Preview sample estimate button right there, so you can see the finished thing and tweak the language before a client ever sees it.

A few smaller things that were quietly annoying:

• Estimate numbers now go up by one on their own for better bookkeeping.
• Repeat clients can be pulled back in with their details already filled.
• You choose whether the client sees your benchmark and margin notes. Off by default.
• You can add notes to the client copy without touching your internal numbers.

The estimate becomes the invoice

When the mission is done, the invoice starts from the estimate you actually sent — same line items, same total, same terms, same client details, and the due date set from your payment window. If you gave a discount, the invoice honors it instead of quietly billing the full amount.

You can send or resend the invoice from the Invoices panel. No copying numbers between screens.

One client, several locations

This one came out of a real request: a client wanted a quote for several sites at once. Not separate jobs — one project, one estimate, one invoice.

So: turn on Multiple locations in the calculator, add each site with its own hours, acres, and notes, and Rotor Rate handles the rest.

• Best route order puts the stops in the shortest driving order.
• Suggest shoot days spreads them across a number of days (that you select) when they won't fit in one.
• Arrival times fill in automatically from the time you set for your first stop, accounting for time on site and drive time between stops. Add a lunch break if the day runs long, or type over any time yourself.
• Weather and airspace are checked for each site on the day it's actually scheduled.

The rolled-up hours, acres, and driving flow into one price, and every site shows up on the estimate and the invoice.

A discount that doesn't cost you anything

Bundling those sites into one trip saves real fuel and real windshield time (just like linking multiple missions before). You can now show that saving to the client as an efficiency credit — a genuine discount that comes out of the driving you avoided, not out of your rate. There's also a manual credit if you want to concede something in a negotiation, and it warns you before you go under your break-even. Of course we never recommend giving discounts, but occasionally you might want to in order to win a new client and this is a way to do so without hurting your bottom line.

Waivers and authorizations

Upload your FAA waiver PDFs in Settings. Rotor Rate reads the certificate number, the location, and the dates, then:

• Flags the waiver on your airspace check when you're working a site it covers.
• Reminds you 30 days before it expires, and tells you plainly once it has.
• Optionally shows it on the estimate, so the client can see you're cleared to fly the job.

There's also a half-hour 'further coordination' preset for the jobs that need facility phone calls or a waiver package through the Drone Zone, etc. A routine airspace authorization takes ninety seconds and shouldn't be billed like a project. The rest of it should.

Two fixes worth naming

Card-processing fees are now built into the fair rate. Before this, a job priced at your fair number came up a little short once the processor took its cut. That gap is closed — the fee is part of what the client covers, which is where it belongs.

And reopening a saved project puts you back on the same calculator view you built it in, instead of defaulting to the other one.

Also

The free trial is 60 days. Sixty. Not seven, not fourteen. Long enough to actually fly a season of work and decide for yourself.

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Everything here is live now. If something doesn't behave the way you'd expect, tell us — that's how most of this list got written.