How to Reduce Your Quoting Turnaround Time (Because Speed Wins Jobs)

The business that gets the quote out first wins more often than it should. Not always — price and reputation still matter. But when two businesses are roughly comparable, the one that responds within hours while the other takes a week has an enormous advantage. Speed signals competence. It signals that you want the work. And in practical terms, it means the customer makes a decision while your quote is the only one on the table.

Most businesses know this. They just can’t act on it because their quoting process has too many bottlenecks, too many manual steps, and too much dependency on one person who’s already stretched thin.

Reducing quoting turnaround isn’t about working faster. It’s about removing the friction that makes quoting slow in the first place.

Why Quotes Take So Long

Before fixing the problem, it helps to understand where the time actually goes. In most businesses, the quoting delay breaks down like this:

• Waiting to start: The enquiry comes in but nobody acts on it for 24-48 hours because the estimator is on site, in meetings, or buried in other quotes. This is often the single biggest delay.
• Gathering information: Looking up customer details, checking pricing, confirming product specs, reviewing site photos, pulling data from previous similar jobs. Information scattered across systems, emails, and people’s heads.
• Building the quote: Actually putting numbers on paper. Calculating quantities, applying margins, writing the scope description, formatting the document. This step is where most people think the time goes, but it’s usually a smaller portion than the gathering and waiting phases.
• Review and approval: For businesses with approval workflows, the quote sits in someone’s inbox waiting for sign-off. The boss is on site all day and doesn’t review quotes until 9pm. The quote goes out the next morning — a full day later than it could have.
• Formatting and sending: Converting to PDF, writing the cover email, finding the customer’s email address, attaching the right document. Small steps that add friction.

Pre-Built Assemblies: The Biggest Single Time-Saver

An assembly is a pre-configured group of items that you quote together regularly. Instead of building every quote from individual line items, you select the assembly and it populates all the associated materials, labour, and pricing automatically.

Examples by trade:

• Electrical: “Residential switchboard upgrade — 24-pole” includes the board, main switch, RCDs, circuit breakers, cable, conduit, labour, and commissioning. Select the assembly, adjust quantities as needed, done.
• HVAC: “7.1kW split system supply and install” includes indoor unit, outdoor unit, pipe kit, electrical components, mounting hardware, consumables, and labour. The estimator selects the assembly and only adjusts for site-specific factors like pipe run length.
• Plumbing: “Bathroom rough-in — standard” includes water supply points, drainage connections, vent piping, fittings, and labour. Customise for the specific layout rather than starting from scratch.

The power of assemblies is that 70-80% of most quotes are made up of combinations you’ve quoted dozens of times before. Pre-building these combinations eliminates the repetitive work and dramatically reduces the chance of forgetting items.

Template Libraries

Assemblies handle the pricing side. Templates handle the document side. A template library gives your estimators a starting document for each common job type, with standard scope descriptions, inclusions, exclusions, terms, and formatting already in place.

Build templates for your top 5 job types. That typically covers 70-80% of your quotes. The estimator selects the template, fills in customer and site-specific details, adjusts quantities and pricing, and the quote is ready. No formatting from scratch. No writing scope descriptions from memory. No forgetting to include terms and conditions.

The key is making templates editable, not rigid. Every job has its quirks. The template handles the 80% that’s standard; the estimator adds the 20% that’s specific to this particular job.

Approval Shortcuts

In businesses where quotes need sign-off before they go to the customer, the approval step is often the bottleneck. The estimator finishes the quote at 2pm. The approver doesn’t see it until they check their email at 8pm. The quote goes out the next morning.

Practical ways to speed up approvals:

• Set approval thresholds. Not every quote needs the boss’s eyes on it. Quotes under $5,000 can often go out with no approval. Quotes between $5,000 and $15,000 need a quick review. Only quotes above $15,000 need detailed sign-off. This dramatically reduces the approval queue.
• Mobile approval. The approver should be able to review and approve from their phone. If approval requires sitting at a desktop, opening a spreadsheet, and sending an email, it won’t happen until evening. If it’s a push notification with a summary and a “approve” button, it happens in 30 seconds between site visits.
• Auto-approval rules. If the quote uses standard assemblies, standard margins, and standard terms — and the total is within a threshold — consider auto-approving it. The system checks that the quote meets your rules and sends it without human intervention. Reserve human review for exceptions: non-standard margins, custom scope, or large values.

Mobile Quoting

Your estimators are on site. That’s where they have the freshest information about the job — measurements, photos, site conditions, customer requirements. But they can’t quote until they get back to the office, find their laptop, open the spreadsheet, and rebuild the information from memory and notes.

Mobile quoting means your estimators can build and send a quote from the job site, on their phone or tablet, while the information is fresh and the customer is standing right there.

This doesn’t mean typing a quote into a phone. That’s painful. It means selecting assemblies, adjusting quantities, adding notes, and generating a branded PDF — all from a mobile interface designed for the purpose.

The turnaround time improvement is dramatic. A quote that would take 3-4 days (site visit Monday, back to office Tuesday, quote Wednesday, approval Thursday) becomes same-day — often within an hour of the site visit.

Batch Processing vs Real-Time Quoting

Many businesses batch their quoting — the estimator accumulates enquiries all week and does quotes in a block on Friday, or sets aside Monday morning for quoting. This feels efficient because it minimises context-switching. But it’s devastatingly slow from the customer’s perspective.

If an enquiry comes in Monday morning and the quote goes out Friday afternoon, that’s a 4-5 day turnaround on what might be 30 minutes of actual work. The customer doesn’t know you’re efficient within your batch. They know they waited nearly a week.

The alternative: Quote within 24 hours as a hard rule. This doesn’t mean dropping everything — it means treating quoting as a daily priority, not a weekly batch. Dedicate 60-90 minutes each day to clearing the quoting queue rather than letting it accumulate.

For simple, templated jobs, aim for same-day. For complex jobs requiring detailed estimation, 24-48 hours. For large projects requiring supplier pricing and detailed scope, communicate a timeline upfront: “I’ll have the detailed quote to you by Wednesday.”

A Practical Turnaround Reduction Plan

Week 1: Measure your baseline. Track the timestamp of every enquiry and every sent quote for two weeks. Calculate your average turnaround. This number is your starting point.

Week 2-3: Build your first five assemblies. Identify your five most common job types and create a pre-built assembly for each. Include all standard materials, labour, and pricing. Test them on real quotes.

Week 4: Create quote templates. Build a branded template for each of your top job types with standard scope, inclusions, exclusions, and terms pre-populated. Train your estimators to use them.

Month 2: Streamline approvals. Set approval thresholds. If you’re the bottleneck, delegate approval on quotes under a certain value. If possible, enable mobile review so you can approve between site visits.

Month 3: Go mobile. Whether it’s a dedicated quoting app, a mobile-friendly web tool, or a custom-built solution, give your estimators the ability to quote from the field. This is the step that collapses turnaround time from days to hours.

Ongoing: Measure and improve. Track your turnaround weekly. Celebrate when it drops. Investigate when it spikes. The data will tell you exactly where the remaining bottlenecks are.

The fastest quote doesn’t always win. But the slowest quote almost never does. Every day your quote sits in a queue is a day your competitor could be sending theirs. Reducing turnaround time isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about winning work that’s already yours to lose.