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Estimates

Export to PDF

Breadcrumb kebab → Export. Wave generates a multi-section PDF — cover page, detailed line items, project totals, photos. PDF only (no ESX) and gated on paid plans.

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The PDF is what you hand the customer, the adjuster, or the carrier. Wave's export is built to look like a finished estimate, not a printout of a UI.

What's in the PDF reflects what an experienced estimator would have built for this job — residential vs. commercial, water category, scope. The line items, equipment, PPE, and documentation aren't transcriptions of your chat; they're outputs of Wave Intelligence reasoning about the specific loss.

How to export

  1. Open the breadcrumb kebab (top-right of the estimate). It has four actions: Lock, Export, Duplicate, Delete.
  2. Choose Export.
  3. The PDF generates and downloads. Under the hood, Wave hits GET /api/export/estimate/<id>/html-pdf.

Export stays active even when the estimate is locked — that's intentional, since the moment you've locked an estimate is exactly when you'd want a clean export.

Plan gating

PDF export requires a paid plan. Free disables Export. Pro and Ultra enable it. See Plans and limits.

You can still build and review the estimate on Free; you just can't generate the PDF.

PDF only

Wave exports PDF. No Xactimate ESX export, no CSV, no JSON. ESX export is not on the roadmap.

For the broader capability matrix, see What Wave does and doesn't do (yet).

What's in the PDF

The exported PDF has four sections, in order. Every page has a Page X of Y footer.

1. Cover page

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [Logo]  Company Name                        Estimate    │
│         Address, City, State ZIP                        │
│         Phone · Email                       Prepared:   │
│                                             May 16, 2026│
│                                                         │
│ PREPARED FOR                          Insurance: ...    │
│ Jordan Park                           Claim #: ...      │
│ 482 Sycamore Lane, Denver CO          Adjuster: ...     │
│                                       Adjuster Email:.. │
│                                                         │
│ ┌─ Estimate Summary ──────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │ General Charges                          $XXX.XX     │ │
│ │ Hall Bathroom                            $XXX.XX     │ │
│ │ Hallway                                  $XXX.XX     │ │
│ │ ──────────────────────────────────────────────────── │ │
│ │ Grand Total                              $X,XXX.XX   │ │
│ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│                                                         │
│ [Estimate Notes, if any, render here]                   │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  • Top-left — your company logo, company name, address, phone, email (from Company Info)
  • Top-right — "Estimate" heading and "Prepared: <date>"
  • PREPARED FOR block — customer name + property address
  • Claim block (right side) — Insurance, Claim #, Adjuster Name, Adjuster Email
  • Estimate Summary table — one row per section with subtotals, ending in a bold Grand Total
  • Estimate Notes — if you set any in the Notes block, they render directly under the Grand Total on the cover page. This is the only place those notes appear in the PDF.
  • Customer Policies — your standard policies from Company Info also render on the cover

2. Detailed Estimate pages

One table per section, each with columns: Description, Qty, Unit, Price, Total.

App terminology vs. PDF terminology. The right pane's General section renders on the PDF as "General Charges." Same content, different label — heads up if you're matching the PDF against the app.

Room sections show affected SF in the header — e.g., Hall Bathroom (48.0 SF).

Line-item notes (Add a note to a line item) render as a grey Note: … line beneath the description — e.g., Note: 1 air mover for 3 Days.

Each non-General section closes with two summary rows:

  • Affected SF: <n>
  • Room Total: $<x>

The General Charges section doesn't have an Affected SF — it's not tied to a room.

3. Project Totals block

After the last room, a final summary block:

  • Grand Total Room SF
  • Grand Total Affected SF
  • Overall Grand Total (bold)

This is the bottom-line number for the whole estimate.

4. Project Photos

A section titled Project Photos (X total photos). Each photo lands on its own row, captioned Photo N: <RoomName> — e.g., Photo 1: Hallway, Photo 2: Hallway, Photo 3: Hall Bathroom. Photos are ordered by the room order in the estimate.

PDF export and photo download are separate

Exporting a PDF includes the photos inline — captioned by room in the Project Photos section. It does not also drop the photos to your downloads folder as separate files.

If you need both — the PDF for the file, plus the photos as standalone images — run both operations. See Download photos for the selection-based photo download.

After exporting

A typical next step is to set the estimate's status to Completed, which moves it to the Completed tab in All Estimates.

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