Quoting software, or a quoting tool of your own.

How your quotes get built now

You visit the site, measure up, take photos and write notes. Back at the office, often that evening, you open the spreadsheet that holds your prices and rules, work out the materials, cuts and labour, then type the result into Xero or your job system to send. If the person who knows the spreadsheet is away, quotes wait. By the time the customer hears from you, days after the site visit, a competitor who quoted on the spot may already have the job.

What off-the-shelf quoting does well

The software on the market does more than most people use. Every Xero plan sends quotes, so if you already use Xero you already have a quoting tool; its cheapest plan caps invoices at 20, not quotes. Tradify starts at $48 per user per month and adds jobs, scheduling and invoicing for trades. ServiceM8 charges by jobs rather than users, from a free plan for one person and 30 jobs, through $29 a month for 50 jobs, to $349 for 1,500 or more, and its prices include GST. Buildxact, made for builders and renovators, starts at $199 a month and does digital takeoffs from plans, with AI estimating in its higher plans. Prices exclude GST unless we say otherwise. Between them you get templates, price books, kits and labour build-ups, margins on each line, photos, quoting from a phone on site, online acceptance and the link from quote to job to invoice.

Which one suits you depends on the work. If you send a few quotes a month and already run Xero, start there. If you run a trade with jobs and a team in vans, Tradify or ServiceM8 suits you, and ServiceM8's per-job pricing favours a team with fewer, larger jobs. If you build from plans, Buildxact's takeoffs save the measuring. Check too whether a product exists for your trade in particular, because some industries have quoting software built around their products. If your quote is labour plus materials from a price list, one of these will do the job, and you should use it.

Where generic quoting stops

These products handle price books, kits and assemblies well, and Buildxact goes further with recipes and takeoffs. The gap opens when your price is the result of rules particular to your products, the way a manufacturer prices a product made to order. A window's price depends on its size, the frame, the glass and how it opens, each with its own rules about what can go with what. A fabricator's quote depends on cut lists and offcuts. An insulation quote depends on reading a building brief and applying your rates to each part of it. You can sometimes get part of the way with formulas or a spreadsheet tied to your job system, and that's worth trying first. You've reached the limit when a quote still takes an evening, when only one person can produce one, and when the same mistakes keep coming back.

What a quoting tool of your own does

You're standing in the customer's lounge. You measure the window, take a photo and choose the frame and glass on your phone. The tool applies your rules and your price book and produces the quote. You check it, send it, and the customer has it before you leave, so the quote that used to take an evening takes minutes. The same idea works from the other end when your work starts with documents: the tool reads each building brief as it arrives in the inbox, applies your rates, and drafts the quote for you to check. Either way, the tool does the arithmetic, you sign off every quote, and the price stays with the person who knows the job.

A tool of your own sits alongside the software you already rent rather than replacing it: the accepted quote goes to Xero as the invoice, and your job system keeps the scheduling. Prices change often, so you update the price book yourself in the tool; when a rule changes, such as a new product range, that's a small change we quote before doing.

What each costs, and when it pays

Renting is cheap. If one person quotes, Tradify's Lite plan is $48 a month, about $1,700 over 3 years. Buildxact runs from $199 to $599 a month. A quoting app of your own starts from $6,000 and takes 4 to 8 weeks to build, a quoting agent that drafts from your inbox starts from $3,000 and takes 2 to 4 weeks, and one that joins several systems costs more, priced after the first conversation. You own it outright, with no per-user fee, and you pay for hosting, support and the occasional change, which we state in the quote. Because it usually sits beside your job system rather than replacing it, the build is an added cost.

What matters most is the time each quote takes and the jobs you lose while you work it out. Count the quotes you send in a week, the hours each one takes now, and the jobs that went elsewhere because your quote was late. Say you send 8 quotes a week at 3 hours each: moving to 15 minutes a quote frees about 22 hours a week, before you count a single job won by quoting on the spot. If the software you already rent can get you to 15 minutes, staying with it costs far less, and we'll tell you so. If the price lives in a spreadsheet only one person understands, it's worth putting your own numbers through that sum.