7 Quoting Mistakes That Are Silently Costing You Money

Every quoting error has a dollar figure attached to it. Some are obvious — you underpriced a job and ate the difference. Others are invisible — the quote you forgot to follow up on, the customer who went elsewhere because you took four days to respond.

These seven mistakes show up in nearly every trades and service business we talk to. None of them are complicated to understand. Most of them are straightforward to fix. But left unchecked, they compound into tens of thousands in lost profit every year.

1. Underpricing Materials

This is the most common one, and it hurts because it’s so easy to miss. Your supplier raised prices three months ago. You haven’t updated your pricing sheet. Every quote since then has been 8-12% low on materials.

On a $15,000 job with $6,000 in materials, a 10% underquote on materials is $600 gone. Do that twenty times and you’ve given away $12,000 in a year — on jobs you thought were profitable.

The fix: Review your material pricing monthly. Set a calendar reminder. Better yet, get your supplier to send you updated price lists regularly and build the update into your process. If you’re using a quoting template or system, the prices should update in one place and flow through to every future quote automatically.

2. Forgetting Overhead in Your Rates

Your labour rate isn’t just what you pay your team. It needs to cover vehicle costs, insurance, tools, admin time, office rent, software subscriptions, training, and all the other expenses that don’t show up on a job sheet but absolutely show up on your P&L.

A common mistake is charging $85/hour for a technician who costs you $45/hour in wages, thinking that’s a healthy $40/hour margin. But once you factor in vehicle costs ($15/hour), insurance and compliance ($5/hour), admin and back-office ($10/hour), and tool wear ($3/hour) — your real cost is $78/hour. That “healthy margin” is actually $7/hour.

The fix: Calculate your true hourly cost by dividing total annual overhead by billable hours. Not total hours — billable hours. Your team isn’t billing 8 hours a day. Between travel, admin, breaks, and non-billable tasks, most field workers bill 5-6 hours out of an 8-hour day. That changes the maths significantly.

3. Slow Follow-Up on Sent Quotes

You send a quote. Three days pass. You get busy with other jobs. A week later, you remember to follow up. By then, the customer has already accepted a quote from your competitor who called the next morning.

The data on this is clear. Quotes followed up within 24 hours are 3-5x more likely to convert than quotes followed up after a week. For a business sending 30 quotes a month with an average value of $5,000, even a modest improvement in conversion — say from 20% to 28% — means an extra $12,000/month in won work.

The fix: Build follow-up into the process, not into your memory. At minimum, set a calendar reminder for the day after every quote is sent. Even better, use a system that tracks quote status and reminds you when something hasn’t been responded to. The follow-up call doesn’t need to be pushy — “Just checking you received the quote and whether you had any questions” is enough.

4. No Version Tracking

You send a quote. The customer asks for changes. You update the numbers and resend. Then they ask for a different scope. You adjust again. Three weeks later, the customer says “I want to go ahead with the second version” — and you’re not sure which one that was, or what prices were in it.

Without version tracking, you’re exposed. You might honour a price you already revised upward. You might miss a scope change that was added in version two but dropped in version three. And if there’s ever a dispute, you’ve got no clear paper trail.

The fix: Number your quote versions explicitly — V1, V2, V3 — with dates on each. Save every version, not just the latest. Note what changed between versions. This sounds tedious, but it takes 30 seconds and saves you from “he said, she said” situations that can cost thousands to resolve.

5. Inconsistent Pricing Across Your Team

If two estimators can quote the same job and come back with numbers that are 15% apart, you’ve got a pricing consistency problem. The customer who got the lower quote thinks that’s the real price. The customer who got the higher quote thinks you’re expensive. Neither outcome is good.

This happens when pricing lives in people’s heads instead of in a system. Each estimator has their own sense of what things cost, their own markup habits, and their own way of scoping work. Multiply that across a team of four or five, and your pricing is essentially random.

The fix: Centralise your pricing. One rate card, one markup structure, one set of rules that everyone follows. The estimator’s job should be scoping the work accurately and selecting the right items — not deciding what to charge for each one.

6. Not Tracking Win Rates

If you don’t know how many quotes you send, how many you win, and what your conversion rate is, you’re flying blind. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Most businesses we talk to guess their win rate. They usually guess high. “We win about half our quotes” often turns out to be 25% when they actually track it. That’s not a criticism — it’s normal. But it means three-quarters of their quoting effort produces zero revenue.

The fix: Track three numbers: quotes sent, quotes won, and total value won vs total value quoted. A simple spreadsheet is enough to start. Review monthly. Once you have data, you can start asking useful questions: Which job types do we win most? Which estimator has the best conversion rate? What’s our win rate by quote value? These answers tell you where to focus.

7. Manual Errors in Calculations

A misplaced decimal. A quantity of 10 instead of 100. A formula that references the wrong cell. Tax calculated on the wrong subtotal. These errors are embarrassingly simple, and they happen constantly in manual quoting processes.

A $200 line item accidentally entered as $20 on a quote. That’s $180 gone. Multiply tax on a subtotal that already included tax — now you’ve overcharged and the customer doesn’t trust your numbers. Miss a line item entirely because it was on page two of your notes and you were quoting quickly — there goes your margin on that job.

The fix: Use formulas, not mental arithmetic. Build your quotes in a structured template where line totals, subtotals, markup, and tax are calculated automatically. Have a second person review quotes over a certain value. And if the same errors keep happening — a particular line item that always gets missed, a calculation that’s always wrong — fix the template, don’t just tell people to be more careful.

The Compounding Problem

Any one of these mistakes, on any single quote, might cost a few hundred dollars. Annoying, but survivable. The problem is that they compound. A business making three or four of these mistakes regularly, across dozens of quotes per month, can easily be losing $50,000-$100,000 per year in profit it should have kept.

The fixes aren’t complicated. Templates, standardised pricing, follow-up reminders, version tracking, centralised rates, basic tracking, and calculation checks. You can implement all of them with nothing more than a well-built spreadsheet and some discipline.

But discipline fades. Spreadsheets get messy. The new hire doesn’t follow the process. The busy season hits and shortcuts creep back in. That’s when the mistakes return — not because anyone is careless, but because manual processes depend on humans being perfect every time. And humans aren’t.

The businesses that truly eliminate these errors are the ones that build the guardrails into their systems — where the right price is the only price available, where follow-ups are automatic, where versions are tracked without anyone having to remember. That’s not about technology for its own sake. It’s about protecting the margin you’ve already earned.