PRICING AND QUOTING
The quote is the moment you win or lose the work. Most firms produce it in a spreadsheet, at night, from memory. Here is what goes wrong with that, what you can buy off the shelf instead, and the narrow set of cases where building something is actually worth it.
Almost every pricing spreadsheet in construction started the same way. One estimator built a working file for one job. It was useful, so it got reused. Then it got a materials tab, then a labour tab, then a margin cell that only makes sense if you know why it is 1.18.
Years later it holds the supplier prices, the waste allowances, the labour rates, the rules of thumb that took a career to learn, and it is how the firm decides what to charge. It is not a spreadsheet any more. It is the pricing system, and nobody ever decided to build one.
This is not a failure of organisation. It is the most rational thing that could have happened: at no point was there a day when stopping to build something properly was more important than getting Thursday's quote out. That is true in every firm we have worked with, and it is worth saying before anybody feels daft about it.
The test that matters. If the person who built the spreadsheet is on holiday for a fortnight, can somebody else produce a quote you would be happy to send? If the answer is no, the risk is not theoretical, it is a diary entry.
None of these are unusual, and none of them are anybody's fault.
Others can fill it in. Very few can tell you whether the number that came out is right, which is a different skill and the one that matters.
It was emailed to a colleague once. Both copies have been edited since. Neither is wrong exactly, and they no longer agree.
Updating one file is ten minutes. Updating every copy on every laptop, and knowing you got them all, is the part that does not happen.
Both are experienced, both are reasonable, and the difference is judgement applied in the gaps. The customer sees inconsistency.
The quotes exist, as PDFs, in email. There is no way to ask what your average margin was on conservatories, which is a question worth being able to answer.
The slowest quote in a competitive job is often the one that loses, whatever its quality. Speed is part of the product.
In rough order of cost and disruption. Most firms reading this should stop at the second one.
Put it somewhere shared rather than on a laptop, so there is one copy. Move the prices into their own tab so updating them is one job. Lock the formula cells. Write a page explaining the assumptions.
Verdict: does more for most firms than anything else on this list, and costs a wet afternoon.
There are established packages built for exactly this. In the UK, HBXL's EstimatorXpress is aimed squarely at builders pricing domestic work, and Buildertrend is a broader construction management platform with estimating inside it. Your trade body may also publish pricing templates worth having.
Verdict: if your work is reasonably standard, buy one of these rather than build anything. It will be cheaper and better than what we would write you.
If you already have a system holding your products or your customers, the pricing rules can sometimes live there rather than in a new application. Less to learn and one less place for data to sit.
Verdict: worth asking about before anybody proposes something new.
A tool that knows your products, your rules and your margins, produces the quote in the shape your customers expect, and records what was quoted against what was ordered.
Verdict: right when the section below describes you, and hard to justify when it does not.
We would rather say this at the top of the page than at the bottom of a proposal. If you price fairly standard work with fairly standard materials, an off-the-shelf estimating package will do the job for a monthly fee, and no bespoke system we could write would be worth the difference.
Building is worth it when the thing that makes your pricing yours is the thing the packages cannot do. That is a real situation and it is narrower than most people selling software will tell you.
Four situations, and you probably know within a sentence whether they describe you.
Your products are configurable and priced by dimension. Made to order, priced per configuration, where the number depends on a drawing rather than a line in a catalogue. This is the case the packages handle worst.
The quote has to be produced in front of the customer. If the job is won or lost in somebody's front room or on site, a tool that produces the price there and then is worth more than a better price produced on Thursday.
The output has to flow into something else. A quote that becomes a works order, a cutting list, a CRM record and an invoice without anybody retyping it is where most of the saving actually is, and it is usually the part nobody counts.
The rules are genuinely yours. Waste allowances, access rates, the way you handle a customer supplying their own materials. Thirty years of knowing what a job really costs, currently living in one person's head and one spreadsheet.
Rather than describe this in the abstract, here is the real one.
DekBoard's business development managers were drawing decking layouts in third-party tools that never quite fitted what they did, then pricing them in spreadsheets. Both were slow, both could carry errors, and with no central record it was hard to keep track of what had been quoted, ordered and delivered.
We built a CAD designer that runs in a browser. You draw the deck, and the pricing rules we built in produce the quote automatically, then it goes out as a PDF and the record lands in their CRM. Specification to live was twelve weeks, at a fixed price agreed before anything started.
Joe Stringer, Head of Sales at DekBoard: "DekMate has revolutionised the way our BDMs work, with a simple decking designer, automated quotations, standardised quotes and automatically created packages for the Ops team."
We price the job, not the day, and you see the price before anything starts. As a rough shape, using our current rate of £15 a token:
Whatever the size, the number is agreed in writing first and it does not move afterwards. If our estimate is wrong, that is ours to carry rather than an amended invoice.
Usually yes, and it is the best starting point there is. It already contains the rules, the rates and the exceptions, which is the part that normally takes weeks to extract from people. We read it rather than ask you to write a specification.
It can, and if quoting happens on site that should be decided at the start rather than added later. Designing for a tablet from the beginning costs very little; retrofitting it costs a lot.
You update them yourself, in one place, without us. A pricing tool that needs a developer every time a supplier puts a price up has recreated the original problem with an invoice attached.
No, and we would usually advise against it. The pricing piece can sit alongside your accounts package and your CRM and pass data to them. Replacing several working systems at once is how projects get into trouble.
Then that is what the written assessment will say, and you will not have spent anything with us to find out. We would rather be the people who told you that than the people who sold you a system you did not need.
Send us the spreadsheet, or describe how it works now. You get a straight answer on whether this is worth building, with a real price if it is, and nothing happens until you say so.
Get a price