The request comes in and you already know what the next twenty minutes look like
The email arrives at nine twenty, the customer asks for a price on something you have always sold, you open the quotes folder, look for the last one you did for somebody similar, open it, save it under a new name, change the header, change the quantities, check that the total at the bottom really has updated, notice that one line still had the previous customer's code, fix it, read it through, export to PDF, write two lines of covering text and send
Then you do it again in the afternoon, and three more times the day after
A quote is work nobody pays for
If you send ten and close one, those twenty minutes each have been spent nine times on something that will never become an invoice, and nobody pays you back for them, they don't land on any cost line, they get eaten out of the time of a person who would have used that time to ring back the customers who have gone quiet for three months
There's a second effect too, less visible, slowness, when the day is full the quote slips to tomorrow, and tomorrow to the day after, and in the meantime the customer has received somebody else's
The mechanical part and the part that counts
Inside those twenty minutes everything is mixed together, and it has to be pulled apart, because one part is your trade and one part is typing
The typing is fetching the customer data that is already in the business software, carrying over the codes and descriptions of items that are already on the price list, multiplying quantity by price, adding up, applying the rate, lining it all up inside the company template, generating the PDF, saving it where quotes belong
Your trade is something else, it's deciding whether that customer gets that price, it's knowing they ask for plenty but will end up taking few, it's sensing that on this tender you have to keep it tight and on that other one you don't
In the quote that is always the same, the long part is the typing and the short part is the one that counts
How it comes undone
A piece of data that already exists somewhere doesn't get retyped, it gets fetched
The customer record sits in the business software you use, the prices sit in the price list, the payment terms and the delivery times are written down somewhere, the document template with your logo and your terms you have already, the only thing missing is what the customer asked you for, and that you put in yourself, or it comes in an email or from a form on your site and gets read
The system opens the business software the way you would, fishes out the data, builds the document with the right lines, does the sums without getting them wrong, prepares the PDF and the email, and stops
It stops before sending, and that's the important part
You decide the price, always
An automation that negotiates with the customer doesn't exist, and whoever tells you it does is selling you a word
The discount is a commercial decision, it depends on who you have in front of you, on how much you need that job, on how it went last time, and those are all things that live in your head and not in a table, so the system prepares the sheet with the list prices and the rules you wrote yourself, and then puts it in front of you
You look, you touch the line you want to touch, and you send
Where the checks go, because a wrong quote comes back to you
A quote with a mistake in it is worse than a late quote, because either you find out and look bad, or you don't find out and you work below cost on it for a year
So the checks go in first, the item code has to exist for real on the price list, the price that ends up in the document has to be the one on the price list in force now and not the old one, the sum of the lines has to make the total, and if one of these doesn't add up the system doesn't guess, it stops and calls you
When it makes sense and when it doesn't
If you write two quotes a month, leave it alone, you'll never win back the time it takes to write the rules, and I'm telling you first
If instead you write plenty of them, all built on the same frame, with a price list that exists and rules you could explain out loud to a new person, then this is one of the best suited jobs there is, because it has volume, it repeats, and the delicate part stays in your hands anyway
On Work out the savings you can add up what it weighs over a year with your own numbers, and in the examples you'll find other office jobs with the same shape