The average Australian tradie spends 5–10 hours per week on quoting. That's $400–$1,500 of billable time lost every week. Here's how the most productive trade businesses cut quoting time without cutting corners.
Most slow quotes happen because of three things: starting from a blank page every time, manually looking up material prices, and going back and forth between spreadsheets and email. Fix these three habits and your quoting time drops dramatically.
For every job type you do regularly — bathroom renos, deck builds, rewires — create a standard template with your typical line items pre-filled. The first job takes 30 minutes to template. Every quote after that takes 10 minutes to customise. FMN calls these 'Recipes' and lets you save and reuse them in one tap.
Quoting from memory or last month's price list costs you money. Material prices change. Build a habit of checking live supplier prices before you finalise any quote. FMN integrates with Bunnings, Reece and others to pull current prices automatically.
The most time-consuming part of quoting is generating the initial line-item list. AI estimating tools like FMN can produce a full itemised draft from a written scope description in under 2 minutes — then you spend your time reviewing and adjusting, not building from scratch.
If you're walking a job and then writing the quote that evening, you're doing it twice. Use a mobile-friendly quoting tool to capture measurements, scope notes and even photos on-site, so the quote builds itself as you walk the job.
Interrupting productive work time to quote every day is expensive. Most efficient trade businesses batch quoting into one dedicated block — either Monday morning or Friday afternoon. This builds momentum and reduces context-switching.
A professional, consistent PDF quote that your client receives within 24 hours wins more jobs than a detailed one that arrives in a week. Standardise your format, automate the document creation and let your speed and professionalism do the selling.
Quoting faster only helps if you're quoting the right jobs. Track which types of jobs you win most often and adjust your quoting priority accordingly. Stop spending 4 hours on jobs with a 10% win rate.
Skip the manual work
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