Most shops know roughly what quoting costs them: an hour or two a day of somebody senior. What they do not know is the other three costs, because manual quoting is structurally incapable of recording them.
Cost one: the ones you lost to latency
A buyer who needs a bracket has sent the same file to three shops. The first useful answer wins, not the best one. If you reply the next morning and someone replied in ninety seconds, you did not lose on price - you lost on being second, and your quote never even got compared.
You cannot see this in your data because the enquiry you lost looks exactly like the enquiry that was never serious. Both are an e-mail with no reply.
Cost two: the ones you priced wrong and won
Worse than losing. A rushed manual estimate on an unfamiliar geometry is a coin flip, and you only find out which way it landed when the job is done. Systematically, manual estimates are conservative on parts that look complicated and optimistic on parts that look simple - which is how shops end up with an order book full of fiddly work at prices that do not reflect the fiddliness.
Cost three: the questions nobody wrote down
Every enquiry contains information: what material was asked for, what size, what quantity, what process, what finish. Quoted by e-mail, that information is in an inbox, unaggregated, and gone. Quoted through a form, it is a distribution you can look at.
The most common surprise for shops that start measuring is a process they do not offer being asked for regularly - which is a buying decision they had no data for before.
Cost four: the senior person
The most expensive part is that quoting is usually done by the person who understands the work, which is also the person you need for everything else. And it is not a task that can be batched: an enquiry that waits until Friday is an enquiry that is already lost.
What automating actually changes
Not everything. Plenty of jobs genuinely need a human to look at them, and a system that pretends otherwise will quote something embarrassing. The realistic change is:
- The routine 80 % answer themselves, immediately, at prices derived from your own numbers.
- The other 20 % arrive at your estimator already measured, with the file viewable and the geometry computed - so the human effort goes into judgement rather than into opening files.
- Everything that happens, including what did not become an order, is recorded.
That last point is the one shops underrate before they have it and cite most often afterwards.
How to tell if this is you
Three questions:
- How long between an enquiry arriving and a price going back? If the answer is “hours”, how many did you lose to someone who took seconds?
- Of the quotes you sent last month, how many became orders? If you cannot answer, that is the finding.
- What was the smallest job you quoted, and did it make money? Add up the handling.
What the funnel looks like when you can see it →
Quotometry prices every part from your own machines and rates, on your website, in seconds.