Three AV quotes and none of them match
A client wants a two-day conference for a few hundred delegates with a plenary room, four breakouts and a drinks reception. You send the same brief to three AV companies. One quote comes back as a single PDF with a package price for the plenary and a vague line for breakouts. Another is a detailed spreadsheet listing every lectern microphone and cable run. The third is in the body of an email, with crew and transport as a separate attachment that arrives the next morning.
Someone on your team now builds a comparison spreadsheet by hand. They retype the lines, guess which items are inside the package price, and email the suppliers to ask whether rigging, overnight crew and the second day's operator are included. The same thing happens with staging, with the caterer for the offsite dinner, and with the coach company. By the time the comparison is ready, the client is asking why the proposal has not gone out.
Why the comparison never gets easier
Your brief is the same for every supplier, but their quotes are not built from your brief. They are built from their own price lists and their own habits.
- Each supplier groups costs its own way: by room, by day, by kit category, or as one package.
- Exclusions are written in small print, or not written at all and only discovered at the invoice.
- Crew, transport, VAT and overtime rules sit in different places on every quote.
- Quotes are revised by email, and the version in the comparison is not always the latest one.
- There is no shared set of cost headings between your quotes and your event budget, so every comparison is mapped from scratch.
The real gap is that nobody has decided what a line item is at your company. Until that exists, every quote is compared by memory.
What choosing on the wrong numbers does
The cheapest-looking quote often wins, then the extras arrive: the second operator, the rigging, the late finish. Your margin on the event quietly shrinks, or you go back to the client for more money after the proposal was signed, which damages the relationship more than the money itself.
There is also the staff time. A producer who should be walking the venue and talking to the client spends afternoons copying numbers from PDFs, and the same supplier questions get asked on every event because the answers were never stored.
How we build the quote intake
- We agree a set of cost headings with you that matches how you budget and how you present costs to clients, for example AV by room and day, staging, catering by meal, transport, crew and extras.
- Suppliers either fill a short online return that follows your headings, or send their normal quote, which goes into a shared inbox.
- Quotes sent as PDFs or spreadsheets are read by an extraction step, using a language model such as OpenAI or Anthropic Claude, that proposes where each line belongs under your headings.
- A person on your team checks each mapping on one screen, with the original quote alongside, before anything is used.
- The comparison view puts suppliers side by side per heading, and shows blanks where a supplier has not priced something you asked for.
- Questions to suppliers are recorded against the quote, with the answer, so the next event can reuse what you learned about each supplier.
- The chosen quote flows into the event budget as committed cost, so the budget and the comparison never disagree.
| Heading | Supplier A | Supplier B | What the sheet shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plenary AV, day one | In package | Itemised | Package lines are split out for checking |
| Breakout rooms | One line | Per room | Flag: A does not state room count |
| Crew overtime | Not stated | Stated | Blank shown as a question to ask |
| Transport and parking | Separate email | Included | Linked to the right quote version |
The extraction step proposes and a person confirms. Nothing reaches the budget until someone has looked at it against the source.
A normal quoting round afterwards
The producer sends the brief from the event record, and each request carries your headings. As quotes come back, they appear on the event with their mapping proposed. Your team spends its time on the blanks and the oddities rather than on copying. When the client asks why you chose the more expensive staging company, the answer is on the screen: the cheaper one had not priced the second build day.
Over time you also build a history of how each supplier quotes, what they usually leave out, and how their invoices compared with their quotes, which is useful when you decide who to ask next time.
Does this sound like your office?
- Supplier quotes are retyped into a comparison spreadsheet for every event.
- You have been caught by an extra that was never on the quote.
- The same questions go to the same suppliers on every job.
- Nobody is sure which quote version the proposal was built from.
- Your quote comparison and your event budget use different headings.