how long should a quote take to write
How Long Should It Take to Write a Quote?
You've done the site visit, you're home, the tea's gone cold, and that quote is still sat in your head waiting to be typed up. Sound familiar? Most new tradies spend far too long on this, then resent every minute of it. A simple domestic quote should take 10 to 20 minutes to write. A bigger job with a proper breakdown, 30 to 45. Anything more and the problem isn't the quote, it's that you're building it from scratch every single time.
Here's the honest truth: the writing isn't what takes the time. It's the deciding. The faffing. The starting from a blank page at 9pm.
Why your quotes take so long
If you're spending an hour or more per quote, one of these is biting you. They're all fixable.
- You re-type the same descriptions every time instead of reusing them
- You stop mid-quote to look up a price you should already know
- You're quoting late at night when your brain's fried and slow
- You're over-thinking the wording instead of being clear and moving on
What actually matters in a quote
Customers don't grade your prose. They want to know what you're doing, what it costs, and when you can start. Clear line items beat a beautifully worded paragraph every time. Stop polishing and start sending.
The 24-hour rule still wins
Speed books jobs. A decent quote out the same day beats a perfect one three days later, because by day three two other lads have already been round. So the goal isn't a slow, gold-plated quote. It's a clear quote, out fast, every time.
The 15-minute quote system
Steal this. It's how you get a quote out the door in the time it takes to drink a brew, without it looking rushed.
- ✓ Start from your last similar quote, don't open a blank page
- ✓ Drop in your saved line items (labour, materials, testing, making good)
- ✓ Adjust quantities and prices for this specific job
- ✓ Add one clear scope line: what's included, what isn't
- ✓ Add VAT as its own line so the net and tax are obvious
- ✓ Set your validity (e.g. 'valid 30 days') and deposit terms
- ✓ Read it once out loud, then send. Don't re-read it five times
Where new tradies get this wrong
The mistakes here cost you whole evenings, not minutes.
- Treating every quote as a one-off. You rewire houses for a living, the descriptions barely change. Reuse them. Typing 'supply and install consumer unit' for the 40th time is a waste of your life.
- Quoting at midnight. Tired quoting is slow quoting and it's where the costly errors creep in. Knock it on the head and do them in a 20-minute slot during the day.
- Confusing detailed with slow. A good detailed quote can still be quick if your line items are ready to go. Detail comes from your system, not from typing harder.
Let your past work do the typing
This is exactly the job a reusable line-item database is built for. Inside Quotato you save every common line, your labour rates, your standard materials, your testing and certification, with prices attached. Next quote, you pull them in and tweak the numbers. The descriptions you've written once never need writing again.
That's where the hours go back in your pocket. Instead of staring at a blank page each night, you're assembling a quote from parts you've already built. Same accuracy, a fraction of the time.
Quote faster, win more, get your evenings back. That's the whole point.
Build your line-item library once and quote in minutes from now on.
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