Your best quote has been sitting in the inbox for two days and still is not out

Quoting is the most expensive bottleneck nobody measures

In most companies the calculation depends on one person and one spreadsheet that has been growing for ten years. As long as that person has time, it works. When they are ill, on holiday or buried in peak season, enquiries sit for two to five days. By then a competitor has answered.

The bitter part: roughly 80 per cent of that work is identical every time. Pull out quantities and key figures, fetch prices, assemble text blocks, build the PDF, write the email. Exactly that part can be modelled. The remaining 20 per cent, the professional judgement, stays with you.

Four steps, and you only do the last one

1. Create the job. Select or import the customer, click the positions, enter quantities. At the higher tier this also works from a voice note or straight from the enquiry email, with the system mapping what was said to your positions for you to check.
2. Calculation runs. Your pricing logic from one base figure: factors, volume tiers, discount rules, approval limits. If the base changes, every quote follows automatically. Nothing is guessed, every figure can be traced.
3. The quote appears. A finished PDF in your layout, with positions, totals, payment terms and the text blocks that belong to this type of job.
4. You approve. Draft on your phone or desktop, correct, send. Prices below your approval limit and special terms need a second pair of eyes, and the log stays attached to the job.

What two hours per quote cost you in a year

Put in your own numbers, that is the whole formula: quotes per month × hours per quote × your internal hourly rate × 12. At 20 quotes a month, two hours each and an internal rate of 65 €, that is around 31,000 € a year spent on work no customer pays for. If checking takes 20 minutes per quote afterwards, roughly 5,200 € remain.

The second lever is usually underestimated: the jobs you lose today because you answer too late. In most businesses a single extra job per quarter carries the whole project.

From 5,000 € project value the rule is: prototype first, fixed price second. Within one week your first real quote is produced from your own data. If it looks good, we confirm the price. If it does not, it ends there.

When this is not for you

• If every quote you write is unique with no recurring structure. Then you would be automating chaos.
• If you write fewer than roughly five quotes a month. The effort outweighs the benefit and I will say so in the first call.
• If nobody in the company can fully explain the pricing logic. Then the first step is writing it down, not automating it.
• If you expect quotes to go out without any control afterwards. We deliberately do not build that.
• And the most important one: if you are a single-trade business with standard catalogue positions, off-the-shelf trade software will serve you from around 30 € a month, which is cheaper than working with me. My case is pricing logic that does not fit into standard software.