How to Cut Your Quoting Time in Half (Without Cutting Corners)

If quoting takes your team more than 30 minutes per job, you’re leaving money on the table. Not because the quote itself is wrong, but because the slow turnaround means fewer quotes out the door, slower follow-up, and more opportunities for the customer to call someone else.

The good news is that most quoting processes are slow for fixable reasons. Not because the work is complicated, but because nobody has sat down and streamlined the workflow. Here are the practical changes that make the biggest difference — starting with the ones you can do this afternoon.

Start With Templates, Not Blank Pages

The single biggest time killer in quoting is starting from scratch every time. If your estimator opens a blank spreadsheet or empty document for every job, they’re rebuilding the wheel on every quote.

Build templates for your most common job types. An HVAC business might have templates for split system installs, ducted replacements, and maintenance contracts. A plumber might have templates for hot water replacements, rough-ins, and bathroom renovations.

Each template should include:

• Pre-filled line items for the typical scope of that job type
• Standard terms and conditions already in place
• Your branding, contact details, and payment terms locked in
• Placeholder fields clearly marked for the variable stuff — site address, specific measurements, customer name

The goal isn’t a one-size-fits-all template. It’s five or six templates that cover 80% of your work, where the estimator only needs to adjust quantities and add site-specific items.

Standardise Your Pricing

If your estimator has to look up supplier prices, calculate markup, and figure out labour rates from memory for every line item, that’s where the real time goes. Build a pricing sheet — one central reference that your team works from.

This pricing sheet should include:

• Material costs updated monthly (or whenever your supplier prices change)
• Your markup already applied, so the quote-ready price is right there
• Labour rates per task or per hour, depending on how you price work
• Common extras like travel charges, disposal fees, or permits

When pricing is standardised, the estimator doesn’t need to think about margin on every line. They pick the items, enter quantities, and the numbers are already right. A quote that used to take 45 minutes of calculation now takes 10 minutes of selection.

Pre-Qualify Before You Quote

Here’s a hard truth: not every enquiry deserves a full quote. If you’re spending an hour putting together a detailed proposal for someone who’s just shopping around, or whose budget is half of what the job costs, you’re wasting your best people’s time.

Build a simple pre-qualification step into your process. This can be as basic as a five-minute phone call or a short online form that captures:

• What’s the job? (scope and type)
• Where is it? (travel distance matters)
• When do they need it done? (timeline expectations)
• Have they got a budget range? (you’d be surprised how many people will answer this honestly)

This doesn’t need to feel like an interrogation. Frame it as “helping us give you an accurate quote faster.” Most customers appreciate it. The ones who won’t engage with basic questions are usually the ones who’ll ghost your quote anyway.

Batch Your Quoting

Context switching is expensive. If your estimator does one quote, then answers some emails, then does another quote, then takes a phone call, each quote takes twice as long as it should.

Block out dedicated quoting time. Two hours in the morning, no interruptions, just working through the queue. This works because:

• Pricing is fresh in their head — they’re not re-looking up the same rates between interruptions
• Templates and tools are already open — no setup time between quotes
• Momentum builds — the third quote of the session is always faster than the first

If your team does site visits in the morning and quotes in the afternoon, protect that afternoon block. Quoting time is revenue time — treat it accordingly.

Speed Up Approvals

Plenty of businesses have a quick quoting process that gets bottlenecked by approvals. The quote is done in 20 minutes, then sits in someone’s inbox for two days waiting for sign-off.

Set clear approval rules. Quotes under $5,000 don’t need approval. Quotes between $5,000 and $20,000 need one manager. Over $20,000 needs the director. Whatever makes sense for your business. The point is removing unnecessary checkpoints that add days to your turnaround for no real benefit.

When Manual Speedups Hit Their Limit

Everything above will genuinely help. Templates, standardised pricing, pre-qualification, batch processing, streamlined approvals — these are real improvements that cost nothing to implement.

But there’s a ceiling. If you’re doing 20+ quotes a week, or your pricing has complex dependencies (quantity tiers, customer-specific rates, multi-trade scoping), or you need quotes to flow into job management and invoicing — manual speedups only get you so far.

At that point, the bottleneck isn’t your people or your process. It’s the tools. A spreadsheet with templates is faster than a blank spreadsheet, but it’s still a spreadsheet. It doesn’t talk to your CRM. It doesn’t track which quotes were followed up. It doesn’t tell you that the customer you’re quoting has three outstanding invoices.

The Quick Wins Checklist

If you’re looking to speed things up this week, here’s where to start:

1. Build three templates for your most common job types. Spend an hour on this. It’ll save you hundreds of hours over the next year.
2. Create one pricing sheet with your current rates and markups. Update it monthly.
3. Add a pre-qualification question to your enquiry process — even just “what’s your approximate budget?” filters out a surprising number of dead-end quotes.
4. Block out quoting time on your calendar. Even two hours of protected time, three days a week, changes the pace completely.
5. Review your approval thresholds. If every $800 quote needs the boss to sign off, that’s a process problem, not a quality control measure.

None of this is complicated. The businesses that quote fast aren’t doing anything magical — they’ve just removed the friction that most teams accept as normal. Start there, and when you hit the ceiling of what manual improvements can do, you’ll know it’s time for a system that scales with you.