Quote_v7_FINAL_revised.xlsx
The operations director built the quoting spreadsheet years ago. It has tabs for labour rates, frequencies, floor types and consumables, and a few formulas nobody else dares touch. When a new tender comes in, they copy the last similar quote, change the numbers, and paste the result into a Word template.
When they are on holiday, quotes wait. When someone else tries, they overwrite a formula and the price comes out wrong. Six months later, the client asks why the renewal price differs from the original quote, and nobody can find which version was sent or what assumptions it used.
Why the spreadsheet becomes a trap
We have written separately about building a consistent quoting method from area, frequency and access. This piece is about a different problem: the method might be sound, but it lives in a fragile file.
Spreadsheets are a good place to design a pricing model and a poor place to run one. Every quote is a copy, so improvements to the logic do not reach old copies and mistakes in old copies spread when they are reused. Rates are typed in rather than pulled from a single table, so a wage rise has to be remembered in every file.
Nothing links the spreadsheet to what happens next. The quote document is created by hand, the sent version is an email attachment, and whether the client accepted it lives in someone's inbox. The spreadsheet does not know it won or lost.
What that fragility costs
| Risk | What happens |
|---|---|
| Key-person dependence | Quotes stall when the one person who understands the file is away |
| Silent errors | A broken formula underprices a contract for its whole term |
| Stale rates | Old labour or consumable costs copied into new quotes |
| No history | Cannot show a client or auditor how a price was reached |
| Slow turnaround | Tenders answered late because quoting is a bottleneck |
An underpriced contract is the expensive one. It does not show up as a loss on day one. It shows up as a site that never quite makes money, year after year, until someone rebuilds the numbers and realises it was wrong from the start.
How we turn it into a quoting tool
- We sit with the person who built the spreadsheet and document the logic properly: inputs, rates, calculations, overrides and the judgement calls they make without thinking.
- Rates and standard assumptions go into a single maintained table with effective dates, so a change applies to every new quote and old quotes keep the rates they were built on.
- A survey form, usable on a phone or tablet during the site visit, captures areas, room types, floor finishes, frequencies and access constraints directly into the quote.
- The calculation runs the same way every time and shows its working. Overrides are allowed but recorded with a reason.
- The quote document is generated from your template, with your wording, and saved against the prospect with a version number.
- Sent quotes are tracked through to won, lost or expired, and linked to your CRM, for example HubSpot, where you use one.
The pricing model is yours. We make it run reliably, and we point out any places where the spreadsheet was doing something odd, but we do not decide your margins.
After the spreadsheet
More than one person can produce a quote, because the logic is in the tool rather than in someone's memory. A rate change is made once. Every quote sent can be found, with the inputs and the version, so a renewal starts from what was actually agreed.
Over time you also get something the spreadsheet never gave you: a view of which quotes win, at what price and for which kind of site. That is useful when deciding where to compete.
Does this describe your quoting?
- One person owns the quoting spreadsheet and nobody else touches it
- New quotes start by copying an old one
- Rates are typed into each file rather than held in one place
- You cannot quickly find what was quoted to a client two years ago
- Quotes are pasted from a spreadsheet into Word by hand