The quote pile on the kitchen table
It is April. You have done nine site visits this week between running two crews, and each one ended with the homeowner asking when they will see a price. The notes are in a pocket book: a rough sketch of the back garden, a patio marked as roughly 6 by 4, a fall of about a brick towards the house, a side gate that looked too narrow for the dumper. The photos are on your phone, mixed in with progress shots from the job in Harrogate.
On Sunday night you sit down to price three of them. You work out the sub-base, check what sandstone is costing this month, guess at how many days the dig out will take, and write it up in Word. By the time the last one goes out, the customer has had two other quotes and has already booked someone.
It is not a writing problem
The obvious fix is to find more time for quoting. The real bottleneck is that the information needed to price a job is captured in a form only one person can read, and every quote is rebuilt from zero. The rates you actually charge for a square metre of porcelain on a full sub-base, or a linear metre of sleeper wall, are in your head or scattered across last year's quotes.
- Measurements are written as sketches, not as areas and lengths a system can use.
- Things that change the price, like access, levels and spoil removal, are remembered rather than recorded.
- Your build-up rates live in old quotes, so each one is priced slightly differently.
- Material prices from the merchant change and the quote template does not know.
- Only the owner or the designer can turn a visit into a price, so quotes queue behind them.
What the slow quotes are costing
Homeowners booking a garden makeover in spring usually ask for three prices and often go with the first sensible one. A quote that arrives a fortnight after the visit is competing against people who already have a start date pencilled in. There are quieter costs too. Rushed Sunday pricing leads to jobs that were underpriced on the dig out or the skip count, and you only find out when the crew is on day nine of a seven day job. And the owner's evenings disappear.
The survey-to-quote flow we build
- A survey app on your phone or tablet records each element of the garden as a line item: patio area, path length, wall height and length, turf area, planting beds, fencing runs. Photos attach to the item they relate to rather than sitting in the camera roll.
- Site conditions that affect the price are asked for every time: access width, whether a dumper or only barrows can get through, levels and falls, spoil to remove, existing features to break out.
- A pricing engine applies your own build-ups. You tell us how you price a square metre of patio, what goes into sub-base and bedding, and how many labour hours you allow, and the engine uses those numbers, not ours.
- Material costs are pulled from a price list you keep up to date, or from your merchant's price file where they supply one.
- The engine produces a draft quote in your branding, with a scope written from the line items, which the owner reviews, adjusts and sends.
- Sent quotes land in a list with their status, so follow-ups happen and you can see which elements you win and lose on.
| Step | How it works now | With the flow |
|---|---|---|
| Measuring | Sketch in a notebook | Line items with areas, lengths and photos |
| Site conditions | Remembered later | Asked for on every visit |
| Pricing | Rebuilt each time from memory | Your own build-up rates, applied the same way |
| Materials | Ring the merchant | Current price list feeds the quote |
| Writing up | Sunday evening in Word | Draft ready to check and send |
If you already use job software that holds quotes, such as Jobber or a similar tool, we feed the finished quote into it rather than building a second place for customers to live.
What quoting looks like afterwards
The visit ends with the survey complete. Back at the van, the draft is already priced, and the owner spends their time checking the judgement calls: is that wall really a two day job, does this customer want the premium slabs. Other people in the business can prepare quotes from someone else's survey, because the survey is readable. And when a crew finishes a job, you can compare the hours they took with what the quote allowed, which tightens the next price.
Does this sound like your spring?
- Customers ring to ask where their quote is.
- Only one or two people in the business can price a garden build.
- You price in the evenings or at weekends.
- Two similar jobs have been quoted at noticeably different prices.
- You have lost work because a competitor quoted first.