Calculator
What is your current quoting actually costing you?
Two costs, and most shops have measured neither: the hours that go into building quotations by hand, and the margin lost on the ones that go out at the wrong number. Put your own figures in. The arithmetic is shown, so you can argue with it.
Estimating time
720 hours a year
40 quotations × 1.5 hours × 12 months, at ₹350 an hour — ₹2,52,000 a year
Margin lost to mispriced quotations
38 quotations a year
8% of 480, each losing 6% of a ₹60,000 job — ₹1,38,240 a year
What that comes to
₹3,90,240 a year
Quotation Twin would cost ₹4,800 a year at that volume (40 × 12 × ₹10) — about 81× less than the figure above.
It will not take either cost to zero. Somebody still specifies the job and checks the quotation; what changes is that the arithmetic is not rebuilt by hand each time and the rates cannot be stale in one place and current in another.
Where the numbers come from
The two you are most likely to get wrong are the last two, and they are worth a moment rather than a guess.
- Share that go out mispriced. Not the ones you caught. The ones you found out about afterwards — a rate that had moved, a gauge assumed rather than checked, a feature costed from the last job instead of this one.
- Margin lost when one is wrong. On a job you won at the wrong number, this is the share of the value that stopped being profit. Shops that have looked usually find it is bigger than they expected, because the error is in the material and the material is most of the job.
- Hours to build one. Count the whole thing: pulling last year's file, checking rates, the arithmetic, the typing, the formatting, and the revision after the customer changes a size.
The defaults above are a plausible small shop, not a survey. Your own numbers are the only ones worth acting on, which is why this page asks for them rather than telling you what they are.
See it price one of your real jobs
Send a quotation you have already produced. Fifteen minutes, no slides.