Most owners of engineering and technical firms know quoting is slow. Fewer know what it costs. If you want to automate quotes, the aim isn’t to have software make up a price. It’s to stop skilled people spending hours rebuilding the same document from scratch, and to stop prices going out that are already out of date. This guide shows how to put a £ figure on your quoting, which parts to automate first with the tools you probably already pay for (Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Microsoft 365), where AI helps and where it doesn’t, and a checklist you can start this week.
Why quoting costs more than it looks
In a firm of 10 to 50 staff, quotes are usually written by the people you can least spare: a senior engineer, an estimator, or the owner. A typical quote involves finding a similar old job, copying it, updating supplier prices, rewriting the scope, checking the labour hours, formatting it, getting someone to sign it off and emailing it. Then nobody follows it up.
That process leaks money in three ways:
- Time. Hours of expensive staff time per quote, much of it copying and formatting.
- Missed items. When each quote is rebuilt by hand, things get left out: a commissioning day, travel, a test certificate, access equipment. You find out when the job is done and the margin is gone.
- Stale prices. Copying an old quote copies old prices. If supplier costs or your labour rates have gone up since, you’re quoting last year’s numbers.
The second and third are usually worth more than the first, and they’re the ones a good automated process fixes as a side effect.
A worked example: what quoting costs a 25-person firm
Take a made-up company, Example Access Control Systems Ltd: 25 staff, designing and installing door entry and access control systems for commercial buildings. Every figure below is an assumption for illustration; swap in your own.
- 30 quotes a month, so 360 a year.
- Each takes about 3.5 hours of an estimator’s time from survey notes to sent email.
- The estimator’s full cost to the business (salary, employer NI, pension, overheads) is £45 an hour.
- It wins 30% of quotes, so 108 jobs a year.
Time today: 360 quotes × 3.5 hours = 1,260 hours. At £45 an hour, that’s £56,700 a year.
Time after automating: with a price list, templates per job type and a standard scope library, assume each quote drops to 1.5 hours. 360 × 1.5 = 540 hours, or £24,300. The difference is 720 hours and £32,400 a year, about 19 weeks of one person’s time at 37.5 hours a week.
Missed items: assume one in five won jobs leaves out something that should have been priced, worth £400 on average. 108 × 20% ≈ 22 jobs × £400 = £8,800 a year of profit given away.
Stale prices: assume 15% of won jobs are quoted on supplier prices that have since gone up, costing £300 a job on average. 108 × 15% ≈ 16 jobs × £300 = £4,800 a year.
Total: £32,400 + £8,800 + £4,800 = £46,000 a year. Take off an assumed £1,200 a year for software subscriptions (check your own providers’ prices) and about 40 hours of set-up at £45 (£1,800), and the first-year figure is about £43,000.
One honest caveat. The £32,400 of time only turns into money if the hours go somewhere useful: billable work, more quotes, or not hiring a second estimator. If the time simply disappears, the real gain is the £13,600 from missed items and stale prices. That alone usually pays for the work.
How to automate quotes: a step-by-step method
The order matters. Firms that start with software usually end up automating a messy process. Fix the inputs first, then let the tools do the repetitive part.
1. Measure your last 20 quotes
For each one, note the date of the enquiry or survey, the date the quote was sent, roughly how long it took to write, who wrote it, whether it was won, and, for won jobs, whether anything had to be added or absorbed later. Twenty quotes is enough to see the pattern. It also gives you a “before” figure to check the change against.
2. Standardise what comes in
Most quoting time is lost going back for information: the site address, access hours, the number of doors, the customer’s PO process. Build one enquiry or site survey form (Microsoft Forms, a HubSpot form, or a form in your job management software) with every field the estimator needs. Make the key fields compulsory. When the form is submitted, a flow tool such as Power Automate, Zapier or Make can create the deal in your CRM and a task for the estimator, so nothing sits in someone’s inbox.
3. Build one price list and own it
Put labour rates, standard items and supplier prices in one place: the products and services list in Xero or QuickBooks, or a single controlled spreadsheet. Each line needs a cost, a sell price and a “last checked” date. Give one person the job of updating it on a fixed date each month or quarter. Your labour rates should come from a proper calculation, not habit; our guide on how to calculate a charge-out rate shows how.
4. Create templates for your common job types
Most firms find that four to six job types cover most of their quotes. For each, build a template with the standard lines already in it, including the ones people forget (travel, commissioning, certificates, project management time). Add a library of standard scope wording, assumptions and exclusions, so the estimator picks paragraphs rather than writing them. Clear assumptions are also your best defence against unpaid extra work, as we explain in scope creep on engineering projects. Put your payment terms and any deposit or stage payments into the template too, so they’re agreed before the customer says yes. Have a solicitor check standard terms before you rely on them.
5. Build the quote where the invoice will be raised
If the quote lives in the same system as the invoice, the accepted price flows straight through and nobody re-keys it. Both main UK accounting packages support this:
- Xero lets you use a quote template or copy a previous quote, set an expiry date, and lets customers accept or decline online. You get an email when they respond, and accepted quotes can be turned into invoices. Quotes are tracked through Draft, Sent, Declined, Accepted and Invoiced (Xero UK).
- QuickBooks Online calls quotes “estimates” and has a Convert to invoice action on each estimate (QuickBooks UK help). It also has a separate progress invoicing feature for billing in stages.
- HubSpot plus Xero: if your sales pipeline is in HubSpot, Zapier has a ready-made template that creates a draft quote in Xero when a deal moves stage, and finds or creates the customer contact (Zapier). A draft is the right output: a person still checks it before it goes.
6. Add a margin check and a sign-off rule
Automation makes quotes faster, which also means a wrong price goes out faster. Set two simple rules: every quote shows its expected margin before it’s sent, and anything below your minimum margin or above a set value needs a second person to approve it. This takes a few minutes and protects the rest of the work. Then check the quoted margin against the actual result on finished jobs, as set out in our guide to checking job margins.
7. Automate the follow-up
Many quotes are never chased. Set an expiry date on every quote, and have your CRM or flow tool create a follow-up task three working days after sending and another a few days before expiry. The task should go to the person who knows the customer, with the quote attached. The software reminds; a person makes the call.
Where AI helps with quoting, and where it doesn’t
AI tools are useful for the writing and checking parts of a quote. They’re not a pricing engine.
Good uses:
- Turning rough survey notes or a long enquiry email into a clean scope, using your standard wording library as the starting point.
- Summarising a customer’s tender documents or specification into a list of what’s required, so the estimator doesn’t miss a clause.
- Checking a finished quote against your checklist: “Does this quote include travel, commissioning, certificates, payment terms and an expiry date?”
- Drafting the covering email and the follow-up message.
Poor uses:
- Inventing prices, quantities or labour hours. These must come from your price list and your estimator’s judgement.
- Sending anything to a customer without a person reading it first.
- Pasting customer drawings, prices or personal details into a free consumer AI tool. Use a business-licensed tool (for example the one included in your Microsoft 365 plan, if you have it), check its data terms, and agree as a firm what can and can’t go into it.
This is the same pattern we see across admin work. When we automated accounting and reporting for a charity, admin time fell by about 85%, but the automation handled the repetitive steps and people kept the decisions. Quoting works the same way. Our AI and automation page explains how we approach this for firms of 10 to 50 staff.
Checklist: what to do this week
- Pull your last 20 quotes and record time taken, days to send, win or loss, and anything added or absorbed later.
- Work out your own figure: quotes a year × hours each × hourly cost, plus missed items and stale prices on won jobs.
- List your four to six most common job types.
- Write down the items most often left out of quotes. These go into every template.
- Pick one owner for the price list and set a date for the first update.
- Turn on quote expiry dates and online acceptance in Xero, or set up estimates and Convert to invoice in QuickBooks.
- Set a minimum margin and a value above which a second person signs off.
Common mistakes
- Buying quoting software first. A new tool on top of no price list and no templates just produces wrong quotes more neatly.
- Templates with no owner. A price list nobody updates goes stale within months, and every quote built from it inherits the error.
- Automating the send. A quote should never go to a customer without a person checking it. Automate the draft, not the decision.
- Leaving terms off the quote. Payment terms, deposits and exclusions agreed at quote stage save arguments later. Adding them at invoice stage is too late.
- Measuring speed only. A faster quote that’s underpriced is worse than a slow one. Track margin on won jobs, not just turnaround time.
- Keeping the old way running alongside. If some estimators still copy old Word documents, the price list and templates never become the single source.
Find out what your quoting is costing you
Quoting is one of several places small firms lose money without seeing it. Our free leak calculator gives you a rough £ figure for cash and pricing leaks in about two minutes. If you’d like help putting a number on your quoting process and automating it with the tools you already have, book a free 30-minute call or see our profit improvement consulting packages.
