If you work for yourself is creating a formal quote for the customer an annoying job?

[steve1970]

Hi everyone

At the end of last year I had some work done in my bathroom, tiling and plumbing. It took a while to get the quotes in and it occurred to me creating the quote might be a tedious part of being self employed? Over Christmas I thought it would be good if a quote for a job could be quickly created using a smartphone or simple web site and sent to the customer electronically.

Basically you'd enter your business details once into the app and choose a layout for your quotations. Then you’d visit the customer, discuss the work etc. Maybe give them a rough idea of the price. Back in your vehicle you’d enter some basic details about the customer, a brief description of work and amount etc and the customer would get a pdf of the formal quote sent to them. The idea being if you had a few quotes to get out you could do it during an ad break or while waiting for takeaway etc. I think it would only take about 2-3 minutes to create and send a simple quote like this.

If anyone thinks this would be useful please let me know in the thread below or by a private forum message. I do a little programming in my job and I'd like to have a go at creating such a system but only if it would be useful.

Thanks
Steve

 

[Terry]

My accounting program does that.
Much of what I sell in added in as inventory, and it spits out an emailable pdf that is printed on their computer.
Quickbooks and Peachtree (Sage) does that.

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I can do all that on my Ipad and Iphone already. Its not the entering part that takes time, its the design, layout and pricing that takes time.

 

[hj]

There is no app that will figure out the cost of the labor, parts, etc., then use that to compute a final figure. Filling out the quote is no problem, but computing it is the time consuming part. It is not a problem for me, because I do very few jobs that need a "formal" price quotation.