A builder sends a photo of a distribution board for a 3-bedroom house in Kleinmond and asks for a price before Friday. Today that photo sits in a WhatsApp thread until somebody who knows the prices has an hour free. On Friday the answer is a day late, and the job has gone to whoever answered on Wednesday.
That is the work we install an agent for. Your own price list goes in, and a priced quote comes back, with your margins, in the shape you already send to customers.
What goes in
Three things, and the third one is the reason this works rather than half-works.
Your price list, in whatever form it lives in. A spreadsheet, a printed book, a PDF from the supplier. It comes in as it is, and it gets loaded with your margins, not ours.
Your quote layout. The one you already send, so the customer does not notice a change.
2 hours with whoever prices today. This is the part people want to skip, and it is the part that makes the difference between a quote that is nearly right and one you can send.
What comes out
A quote with line items, quantities, unit prices, VAT at 15% and a total, written into the same document you already use, ready for a person to read and sign.
When the request is a list, it is quick. When it is a photo of a board, the agent reads what it can see, prices what it recognises, and leaves a line marked for a person to check rather than guessing quietly.
Where it stops
It does not do site visits and it does not measure. It does not decide to cut a margin to win a job. It will not send anything to the customer until you say it may.
The failure mode worth naming is a price list with two versions in circulation. The agent will use the one it was given. If the real price is on a rep's laptop in a different file, the quote will be wrong, and it will be confidently wrong.
One list, one version, before we install. That is a rule about the business, not about the software.
What it is worth
A quote that goes out the same day wins against a quote that goes out on Friday, and that is the whole argument. The hours saved pricing it are the smaller half.
One recovered invoice, or one job won on timing, pays for the monthly. After that it is profit, and the person who used to price is doing the site visits instead of the admin.
Who this fits
Any business that prices from a list: builders, electrical and plumbing contractors, suppliers who quote from a catalogue, and anyone whose quote is a variation on the last fifty they wrote.
It fits badly where every job is genuinely bespoke, and where the person quoting is the only one who knows why the price is what it is. That is the two-hour conversation, and sometimes the answer at the end of it is that this is not the package to start with.
What to do before you call anyone
Find the last five quotes you sent. If they share a structure and a price list, you are ready. If every one was built from scratch off the top of someone's head, the first job is the price list, not the agent.
