Back from six surveys with a clipboard full of notes
Your surveyor has done a full day of home visits. For each one there is a sheet of notes: lounge, three-seater sofa, two armchairs, TV unit, bookcase; loft full, mostly boxes; garage with a chest freezer and a workbench that may or may not be going. Then a line about the steep drive, the neighbour's shared access and the customer's request to keep the piano until last.
The next morning somebody types that into the quote template, works out the cubic feet from memory or a price book, adds packing, adds crew and vehicles, and emails a PDF. If the surveyor is also the person who types it up, the quotes go out at night. Either way the customer waits, and the customer has usually booked two other firms to survey the same week.
The handwriting is not the real issue
Firms often blame the delay on the surveyor's handwriting or on not having a tablet. The deeper problem is that the survey and the quote are two separate documents, built in two separate places, with the calculation done in someone's head in between.
- Volume is estimated item by item from experience, so two people get different totals for the same house.
- Packing materials, crew size and the number of vehicles are decided after the survey, not captured during it.
- Access details sit in free text and do not flow into the price.
- The quote template has its own rates, and they drift away from the price book.
Buying a tablet and typing the same free text into it moves the problem rather than fixing it.
What a slow, inconsistent quote costs you
Each day between survey and quote is a day the customer spends reading another firm's quote. Some of your work is lost purely because it arrived last, which is hard to see because nobody tells you why they chose elsewhere.
Inconsistency costs money too. A quote that under-counts the loft means an extra vehicle or an overrun on the day, paid for by you. One that over-counts loses the job to a cheaper competitor. And the office time spent typing is time not spent on the calls that come in while it happens.
How we turn the survey into a quote draft
- We build a survey form for phone or tablet, organised by room, with a picker for common items that each carry a standard volume your team sets.
- Unusual items, access notes and photos are captured on the same form, against the room or the property.
- The form totals the volume as the surveyor goes, and suggests vehicles and crew from the rules you give us.
- When the surveyor finishes, a quote draft is built from your price book: labour, vehicles, packing, materials, storage if needed and any access surcharges you use.
- The draft lands in a queue for an estimator, who can adjust anything and sends it from the same screen.
- Where your removals software has an API or import route, the job and the item list go straight into it, so nobody types them again.
| Stage | Today | After |
|---|---|---|
| Room list | Handwritten, retyped | Picked on the tablet |
| Volume | Estimated from memory | Totalled from item volumes |
| Access notes | Free text, easy to miss | Linked to the price |
| Quote | Built next morning | Draft ready when survey ends |
The estimator still decides the price. The system just gives them a complete, consistent starting point instead of a sheet of notes.
What changes in the office
Quotes can go out the same day, sometimes before the surveyor has reached the next address. The item list that priced the job is the same one the crew sees on move day, so the loft and the garage are not a surprise.
When a customer rings to add the shed contents, the estimator opens the survey, adds the items, and the price updates from the same rules instead of a guess.
Does this sound like your week?
- Surveys are written on paper and typed up later.
- Quotes go out a day or more after the home visit.
- Different surveyors produce very different volumes for similar houses.
- Crews find items on the day that were never on the quote.
- Your price book and your quote template disagree.