The most expensive hour in the trades is the one where nobody is building yet.
Read the tender, capture the items, gather the prices, write the quotation, chase it. None of this work is paid for, and all of it decides which jobs you win.
It is also the part where today's tools deliver the most – provided somebody first understood how you cost a job.
Typical
What I regularly find in trade businesses
Costing happens after hours
The business runs during the day. Quotations get written in the evening and at weekends, usually by the person who also decides everything else.
Eighty pages of specification, twelve lines that matter
The requirements that count are scattered through the document. Finding them is dull work – missing them costs you the job or the margin.
Prices from memory
The most reliable figures the business has are written down nowhere. They sit in two or three heads, which makes them neither transferable nor checkable.
Variations noticed too late
That the work has drifted from the contract is noticed on site. By the time the office hears about it the month is over and the evidence is thin.
Site reports on paper and in five apps
Hours, materials, day work: every site reports differently. What reaches the office has to be smoothed out before it can become an invoice.
Starting points
Where the effort usually pays off
Not a list of possibilities, but the places I look first in this sector.
From enquiry to draft quotation
Pull the line items out of the tender, email or drawing and pre-fill them with the firm's own experience. Checking and releasing still happens by hand.
Working through specifications
Extract requirements, deadlines and exclusion criteria from long documents and map them to your existing text. What is missing gets flagged instead of overlooked.
Making costing knowledge visible
Feed the figures from completed jobs back in, so that costing rests on your own history rather than on someone's memory.
Collecting site reports
Turn what the site sends anyway – a photo, a voice message, a note – into invoicing data, with a follow-up question instead of guesswork.
Chasing without remembering
Open quotations report themselves before they go cold. Unspectacular, and one of the most reliable revenue levers there is.
Between the programs
Close the seams between job management, time tracking and accounting so the same number is not entered three times.
Example
How this can turn out
Constructed examples – I show no client cases.
Joinery, 18 staff
Example
Two out of three quotations go out late because only the owner reliably holds the prices.
Two days working alongside them, logging every enquiry for a week. Then a first stage that pulls the line items from the enquiry and pre-costs them from the firm's own figures.
The first draft takes minutes. The owner checks and releases instead of starting from zero.
Invented example for illustration, not a client case. Figures are orders of magnitude, not promises.
Electrical contractor, 55 staff
Example
Day work is recorded on paper slips and retyped at the office. Part of it goes missing every month and is never invoiced.
A week working in the back office, counting what actually arrives. Then moved capture to where the work happens, with automatic allocation to the job.
Day work gets invoiced in full. The back office no longer retypes, it only checks exceptions.
Invented example for illustration, not a client case. Figures are orders of magnitude, not promises.
How does this look in your business?
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