Recommendations written, quotes sent, nothing booked
Your risk assessments and monitoring visits produce recommendations: remove a dead leg, replace a failed TMV, clean and disinfect a tank, insulate pipework, fit a new sentinel outlet. Some are urgent in the client's eyes, many are not. Each one should become a quote.
Quotes are written in Word or your accounts package, emailed to the site contact, and filed. A few get accepted straight away. Most sit. The site contact forwards it to someone in procurement, who needs three quotes, or a purchase order number, or next year's budget. Nobody at your end knows which state it is in.
Six months later, the same recommendation appears on the next risk assessment review, and the engineer asks why the dead leg is still there.
Why remedial quotes fall through the cracks
- The quote is disconnected from the finding, so nobody tracks the finding once the quote is sent.
- Site contacts can approve small work but not larger items, and the handover to procurement is invisible to you.
- Follow-up depends on whoever wrote the quote remembering to chase.
- Quotes for one client are spread across several people's sent items.
- There is no view of open quotes by client for the account manager to raise at review meetings.
Most of this is not a sales problem. It is a record-keeping problem that looks like one.
What a pile of open quotes costs
Remedial work is often the more profitable side of a water treatment business, and quotes that are never chased are revenue that quietly goes to whoever follows up. There is also a professional cost: if a client later asks what you told them about a recommendation, you need to show what you quoted, when, and what happened next.
Internally, engineers lose confidence in reporting findings if nothing ever seems to come of them, and estimators rewrite quotes that already exist because they cannot find the original.
Quotes that start from the finding
- Findings from risk assessments and visits are recorded as items against the site, with photos, location and the engineer's description.
- The estimator turns one or several findings into a quote using your price lists and labour rates, and the quote stays linked to those findings.
- The quote goes to the client from the system, with a simple accept or query link, and a record of who received it.
- Follow-up reminders are set per client type: a site contact might get a nudge after a short gap, a procurement team a different cadence. Each reminder is a draft for the account manager, not an automatic chaser.
- When a quote is accepted, it becomes a job with the findings attached, so the engineer knows exactly what was quoted.
- When declined or left, the finding stays open against the site and appears on the next review.
| View | Shows | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| Open quotes by client | Value, age, last contact | Account manager |
| Findings without quotes | Recommendations not yet priced | Estimator |
| Accepted, not scheduled | Won work awaiting booking | Planner |
| Open findings by site | What remains outstanding | Client review meetings |
Accepted quotes can raise a deposit or order in Xero, Sage or QuickBooks through their APIs, so accounts are not retyping the same figures.
A quarterly review that has something to say
Before a client meeting, the account manager prints or shares a list of every open finding and quote for that client's sites, with dates. The conversation moves from 'we sent you something about that' to a clear list of what is outstanding and what it would cost.
Estimators stop rewriting quotes, because the last one for that site is attached to the finding. Planners see won work as soon as it is accepted.
Recognise any of these?
- You could not say today how many remedial quotes are open, or their value.
- The same recommendation appears on consecutive risk assessment reviews.
- Quote follow-up depends on one person's memory.
- Accepted quotes take a while to become booked jobs.
- Clients ask for a summary of outstanding works and it takes a day to compile.