A new hotel wants a price by Friday
A boutique hotel with forty rooms, a restaurant and a small spa wants a quote for linen hire and laundering. The general manager gives you a rough occupancy, the number of covers, and says they use about the same towels as anywhere else. Your sales manager opens the costing spreadsheet, the one built years ago by someone who has since left.
The spreadsheet asks for pieces per week by item type. The sales manager estimates them from the room count and a feel for how similar hotels behave. The spa towels are a guess. Delivery frequency is whatever the hotel asked for. The price goes out on Friday.
Six months later, the account is busier than expected, the spa uses far more towels than anyone thought, and the contract price no longer covers the work. Nobody checked the assumptions against what actually happened.
Tenders make it harder. A hotel group asks for prices on six properties at once, each with different facilities, and gives you a fortnight. The spreadsheet gets copied six times, each copy drifts, and nobody can later say which version the final price came from.
The quote and the operation never meet
The quote is built in sales, from estimates. The actual volumes are recorded in operations, from counts. The two are rarely compared, so the same estimating mistakes repeat on every new contract.
- Volume estimates are based on instinct rather than similar accounts.
- The costing spreadsheet is fragile and understood by one person.
- Assumptions behind each quote are not written down.
- Actual volumes after the contract starts are not compared with the quote.
- Delivery frequency and distance are not always costed properly.
Contracts that lose money quietly
A contract priced on low estimates loses money every week until renewal, and at renewal you may not have the evidence to reprice it. One priced on high estimates loses the tender. Either way, the costing spreadsheet becomes a risk: when the one person who understands it is off, quotes wait or go out wrong.
How we build contract quoting on your own data
- We take usage history from your existing accounts, anonymised, and group it by type: city hotel, country hotel, restaurant, spa, care home, and so on.
- For a new quote, the sales manager enters the prospect's basics (rooms, occupancy, covers, facilities). The tool suggests volumes per item from similar accounts, which the manager can adjust.
- Your own costing rules are built in: processing cost per item type, delivery cost by distance and frequency, linen cost and expected life. You maintain these rules.
- Each quote records its assumptions: the volumes used, where they came from, and any adjustments.
- Once the contract is live, actual volumes are compared with the quoted assumptions monthly.
- Contracts drifting away from their assumptions are flagged for the account manager to review.
| Step | Today | With data-based quoting |
|---|---|---|
| Estimate volumes | Instinct | Suggested from similar accounts |
| Cost the work | Fragile spreadsheet | Your rules, maintained in one place |
| Record assumptions | In the sales manager's head | Saved with the quote |
| Check after go-live | Never | Monthly comparison and flags |
Your prices, margins and commercial terms stay entirely your decision. The tool gives you better estimates and shows when reality differs from them.
Quotes you can stand behind
The sales manager builds a quote in an afternoon, with volumes grounded in accounts like the prospect. When the contract goes live, the first few months show whether the assumptions held. If they did not, the account manager has the facts for a conversation at the agreed review point, rather than discovering the loss at renewal.
The costing rules are no longer locked in one person's spreadsheet.
Is your quoting like this?
- Contract volumes are estimated by feel.
- Your costing spreadsheet is understood by one person.
- Some contracts cost more to service than they bring in.
- Quoted volumes are never compared with actual volumes.
- Assumptions behind old quotes cannot be found.