Quoting software
Quotes that do not wait for one person to find an evening.
Quoting software turns job details into a clear draft quote for review, so pricing stops waiting on one person’s evening. AGMM builds quoting systems around your own rates after a fixed £2,000, 14-day audit; the build is priced by proposal.
Or call 0161 543 7189
Two of the papers this work handles. Demonstration with sample documents. In the Audit we draw your real lines.
| Item | Qty | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pallet racking bay | 24 | £640 | £15,360 |
| Fitting, 2 crew | 3 days | £960 | £2,880 |
| Safety inspection | 1 | £420 | £420 |
| Delivery | 1 | £380 | £380 |
| Total with VAT | £22,848 | ||
Net £19,040. VAT £3,808. Working on page 2.
The problem
Revenue waits on a quote, and the quote waits on the one person who knows how to price it.
In a lot of businesses quoting is the bottleneck: the work is won or lost on how fast a good quote goes out, and the quote depends on one experienced person having time. Software will not replace that judgement. It can do everything around it.
The cost of a slow quote is invisible because it is a job you never hear about again. Nobody rings to say they went elsewhere because your price arrived on Thursday and somebody else priced it on Monday. So the delay never appears in a report, and the person it depends on is usually the same person who is too busy to fix it, which is how the bottleneck protects itself. There is a second cost underneath it. When pricing lives in one head, the business cannot grow past that head, cannot check a margin after the fact, and cannot defend a price to a customer six months later, because the working that produced it is gone.
Now picture yours
The same work, three ways.
Pick a line of work, press a stage, then step through the papers it handles. Each step shows the real document, and where a person stays in charge.
Sales From enquiry to a draft ready for review
New 600 square metre unit, handover 30 November. We need pallet racking, fitted and inspected.
Drawing attached.
- unit-layout.pdf
The job details, however they arrive.
The details you supply are read and the scope pulled out.
Rates, margins, minimums and the exceptions that matter, applied the same way every time.
A clear draft quote with the working shown.
The system produces a draft. A person reviews it, adjusts it and sends it. That order does not change.
Sent, and recorded with the basis it was priced on.
Sales Nothing goes quiet by accident
- Q-1187 Marsh DistributionSent today
- Q-1179 Ardent FoodsOpen 6 days
- Q-1171 Lyle and SonsOpen 15 days, no reply
Every open quote is tracked from the moment it goes.
Followed up on time, without anyone having to remember.
Answered from the job file and the basis of the price.
Changes priced on the same rules and reissued.
Logged as won, or parked with a reason.
Leadership Every price explainable later
What went out, at what price, on what basis.
The working is kept with the quote.
Find any quote and how it was reached.
A quote from three months ago can still be explained.
- As it runs now
Revenue waits on a quote, and the quote waits on the one person who knows how to price it. The rules live in a head or a spreadsheet only they understand.
- Organised
Your rates, margins, minimums and exceptions written down once. Every quote on one record, with the working kept, so a price from months ago can still be explained.
- Agentified
The draft is ready before the estimator sits down. A person reviews it, adjusts it and sends it, and the judgement stays theirs.
Signs you have it
You will recognise some of these.
- Quotes go out days after the enquiry, and you lose some of them to whoever was faster.
- Pricing lives in someone's head, or in a spreadsheet only they understand.
- Two people quoting the same job produce two different numbers.
- Nobody is certain which quotes are still open.
- A price agreed months ago cannot be explained now, because the working is gone.
What we build
What does the work include?
A draft quote from supplied job details
The system turns the details you give it into a clear draft, ready for a person to review, adjust and send.
Your pricing rules, written down once
Rates, margins, minimums and the exceptions that matter, applied consistently instead of remembered differently.
A record of what was quoted
What went out, at what price, on what basis, so a quote from three months ago can still be explained.
What it costs
What does it cost? The audit is £2,000; the build is proposed after it
- The AI Constraint Audit
- £2,00014 days, fixed
- The build
- By proposalPriced against what the audit found
- Ongoing support
- By proposalOnly if you want it
One price is published here: £2,000 for the AI Constraint Audit, fourteen days, three sixty-minute working sessions. The quoting build is proposed afterwards and priced in its own document, because what is being built is your pricing rules and nobody can see those from outside. A flat rate card is a different job from regional pricing with version history and a link to your accounts package. The audit fee is not credited against the build, so the recommendation is never funded by the thing it recommends.
What does the £2,000 cover before anything is built?
Four documents you keep whatever happens next: a business-wide constraint map, an AI opportunity map, an economic case for each option worth considering, and a ranked order for spending. On quoting, the number that matters is usually the delay: how long an enquiry waits before a price goes out, how many quotes are still open, and what share are lost to whoever answered first. Those are measured during the audit from your own records, not estimated from a sector average we would have to invent.
The whole ladder, including what a build costs and what we do not bill for, is on what it costs.
How long
How long does it take?
Fourteen days from the first session to the written recommendation. A quoting build runs in stages afterwards, and the first stage is almost always the rules rather than the screens, because a well-made quote document built on rules nobody has agreed is a rewrite waiting to happen.
- Day 1First working session
- Day 14Written recommendation, yours to keep
- ThenFirst stage of the build, in real use
- ThenNext stage, only once the first is working
Not in the price
What this does not include
A commercial rate book or price data
A custom build prices against your own rates. If you also want a commercial rate library, you license it directly from its publisher rather than through us, and we connect it.
Support and hosting, inside the build price
A quoting system is used every week and changes when your prices do. Hosting, monitoring and post-launch changes are quoted as running costs rather than folded into the build figure.
Data migration beyond what the audit scoped
Historic quotes, price lists and the spreadsheet only one person understands all have to be read before they can be moved. That reading is scoped in the audit and priced in the proposal.
A guarantee that you win more work
Quoting faster is not the same as quoting better, and we will not claim a win rate we cannot source. What we will do is agree with you, before anything is built, how long a quote takes today and how you will know whether that has changed.
What you can check
What can you check before you believe any of this?
The nearest thing you can inspect today is how we run our own business. One of our knowledge bases holds 4,535 notes and 5.9 million words, including the pricing and proposal work our own sales line depends on, and every system around it is drawn on Inside AGMM, department by department. It shows the standard we build to. It is not a case study about your pricing and we will not stretch it into one. What we cannot show you yet is a named quoting client with a published before and after.
People and machines
Where does a person stay in the loop?
The system produces a draft. A person reviews it, adjusts it and sends it. That order is deliberate and it does not change, because pricing carries commercial judgement that does not survive being turned into a rule: what the relationship is worth, how busy you are this month, whether the site access is going to be a problem. What software removes is the gathering, the lookups, the arithmetic and the formatting, which is the part that takes the evening. Any override is recorded with the reason, so the pricing rules improve from real decisions rather than drifting away from them unnoticed.
- Estimator checkQuotesThe system produces a draft. A person reviews it, adjusts it and sends it. That order does not change.
- Won or parkedOpen quotesLogged as won, or parked with a reason.
Proof it worked
How do we know it worked?
The measures are already in your records, which is the point. How many days from enquiry to price going out, how many quotes are open right now, and what share of the ones you lost were priced after somebody else had already quoted. You can count all three before anything changes and count them the same way afterwards. We do not measure quote volume, because sending more quotes faster is not the same as winning more work, and a supplier who leads with that number is measuring their own output rather than your result. If the delay has not moved, the constraint was capacity rather than process, and that is worth knowing before you spend anything further.
- Days from enquiry to a price going out
- Quotes still open right now
- Lost quotes priced after somebody else had quoted
Same definition both times. If the number has not moved, that is a finding, not a failure.
Known risks
What tends to go wrong on this kind of build?
Three, said plainly. The first is building the document before the rules: a handsome quote template sitting on rules nobody has agreed is a rewrite waiting to happen. The second is the exception that turns out not to be rare, where a rate everyone described as fixed is in fact negotiated on half the jobs. The third is ownership of the rules themselves. If changing a rate needs a developer, the system has replaced one bottleneck with another, so the rules are yours to edit from the first release.
Fit, stated plainly
What do we need from you?
- Your pricing rules as they really are, including the exceptions only one person remembers.
- A sample of recent quotes, won and lost, so the system is built against real jobs rather than tidy ones.
- Whoever prices work today, for long enough to be interviewed properly.
- A decision on who is allowed to override a price, and by how much.
Who this is not for
- A business shopping for off-the-shelf estimating software this week. Several good ones exist and you should buy one.
- Pricing that runs on judgement alone, with no rules anybody could write down.
- A quoting delay that is really a capacity problem, where the constraint is people rather than process.
- A specification already written that needs implementation hands rather than a diagnosis.
Questions
What do people ask before they start?
- Does it decide the price?
- No. It produces a draft from your rules and the job details, and a person reviews it before it goes anywhere. Pricing judgement stays with you; the typing, the lookups and the formatting do not.
- We already have a quoting template. Is that enough?
- Sometimes it is, and we will say so. A template helps with consistency but not with speed, because somebody still has to gather the details and do the sums. The question is whether the delay is costing you work.
- Can it work from our existing price list or spreadsheet?
- Yes. The first job is reading the rules your estimator already uses, writing them down in a form the system applies the same way every time, and testing them against a sample of your past quotes. Where the spreadsheet hides exceptions only one person remembers, finding those is the main work.
- What does quoting software cost to build?
- It depends on your pricing rules, because that is what is being built. A flat rate card is a different job from regional pricing with version history and a link to your accounts package. Our guide on what custom software costs sets out the six things that move the number. The fit call tests whether the audit is appropriate; the audit supplies the evidence for a custom proposal.
- Are we too small for this?
- The question is not headcount, it is whether quoting is the thing holding revenue up. If quotes go out late and you lose work to whoever was faster, the cost of the delay is already being paid. If quoting is comfortable and something else is the bottleneck, we would rather point you at that.
- What if our pricing changes?
- Rules are meant to be edited by you, not by us. If changing a rate needs a developer, the system has replaced one bottleneck with another.
- What is the difference between quoting, estimating and takeoff software?
- Takeoff measures quantities from a drawing. Estimating turns those quantities into a cost using rates. Quoting turns the cost into a document a customer reads and agrees to. Most products do one of the three well and describe themselves as doing all three, which is why comparing them on price alone is misleading.
- Should we just buy off-the-shelf estimating software instead?
- Often, yes, and we will say so. Standard estimating products are mature, they arrive with a rate book, and they cost far less than a build. They stop being the right answer when your pricing rules are the awkward part, because that is exactly what those products assume away.
Free to read first
Would you rather work it out yourself?
Everything below is free, with no account and no paywall. If it solves the problem without us, that is a good outcome.
Tell us where the business is getting stuck.
A short call to map the constraint and give you a clear next step. That might be software, automation, training or no build at all.
- Before day 1Fit callFree, 30 minutes
- Day 01Map the businessConstraints and weak points
- Day 07Price the opportunitiesWhat could save or earn
- Day 14Rank the investmentFour outputs you keep
Then the proposal. The fuller audit is always part of it.