Small Business Digital
The Quoting Process That Costs Tradespeople Hours Every Week
1 June 2025
Ask most sole traders and small trades businesses how long they spend on quoting and follow-up admin each week and the answer is usually somewhere between three and eight hours. Not doing the job. Writing up quotes, sending them, chasing them, losing track of which jobs they are waiting to hear back on, and re-sending quotes they cannot find.
This is time that could be on tools or with family. For most trades businesses it has just become an accepted part of the job, an invisible overhead that nobody has ever tried to fix.
It is fixable.
What the quoting process usually looks like
The typical trades quoting process goes something like this. A customer calls or messages about a job. The tradesperson visits the site, measures up, works out what is involved. They write up a quote, usually in a Notes app, a Word document, or by hand. They send it by text, email, or WhatsApp. They wait.
If they do not hear back, they might follow up once. Or they might not, because they cannot easily remember which quotes are outstanding and for how long. Weeks later, a customer calls to say they want to go ahead with a job that was quoted two months ago, and the tradesperson has to work out what they quoted and whether the price still makes sense.
Every step of this process is slower and more effortful than it needs to be.
Where the hours go
Writing up quotes from scratch each time. Most trades businesses quote similar jobs repeatedly. The labour rates, material costs, and structure of the quote are largely the same from job to job. Writing each one from scratch rather than starting from a template wastes time on formatting rather than thinking.
Sending and tracking manually. A quote sent by WhatsApp is a message in a thread. Finding it later, knowing whether it was read, and knowing whether it was accepted or rejected requires memory or scrolling back through conversations.
No pipeline visibility. Without a record of outstanding quotes, there is no way to know at a glance how much potential work is in the pipeline, which quotes need following up, and which jobs are confirmed but not yet scheduled.
Re-quoting accepted jobs. When an accepted quote cannot be found, the tradesperson has to reconstruct it from memory before starting the job. This is avoidable friction on every confirmed job.
What a better process looks like
The foundation is a simple quoting template that covers the standard elements of your most common jobs. Not a complicated system. A structured starting point that halves the time it takes to produce each quote.
On top of that, a way to send quotes that creates a record, confirms receipt, and makes it easy to follow up. Building a quoting tool like this does not require expensive software. A simple tool or even a well-designed spreadsheet can do most of it.
The result is a quote that goes out faster, is tracked automatically, follows up on a schedule thanks to automating follow-up, and is stored where it can be found when the customer calls to confirm three weeks later.
For most trades businesses, fixing the quoting process recovers three to five hours a week. That is time that was previously invisible, and it is one of the systems that run without you once properly set up. It does not feel like a business improvement until you have it back.
Maebh Collins builds quoting tools and digital automations for small and micro businesses in Ireland.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.