What quoting already costs before anybody chases anything #
Two UK figures are worth having in mind.
2h 24m
A week quoting and invoicing, on average
Checkatrade research, November 2023
5h 20m
A week on quoting, invoicing and chasing together, on average
NOW Report 2026
93%
Report stress or anxiety from running the business
NOW Report 2026
The first is Checkatrade research reported by Electrical Times in November 2023. The second and third are the NOW Report 2026, run by Powered Now with Installer across 140 UK tradespeople and reported by PHAM News on 22 July 2026, which put business admin more broadly, quoting, invoicing and chasing together, at 5 hours 20 minutes a week.
Where that time lands matters as much as its size.
eats into evenings and weekends more than people realise
That is the part the weekly average hides: it is not an hour carved out of a working day, it is an hour taken after one.
What actually happens after a quote goes out #
In most small trade firms the cycle runs like this.
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The owner or a senior engineer prices it
Late, after a day on site.
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It goes out by email or text
-
It enters a state that nobody owns
The person who priced it is back on the tools the next morning.
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The office does not chase it
Because the office does not know whether it was a real enquiry or a price check.
-
Nothing happens
Two weeks later it is written off as a customer who went elsewhere.
Sometimes they did. Often they were getting three prices and yours was the one they could not find again in their inbox. The two cases look identical from your side.
Which parts of this run on rules #
Split the cycle into its stages and the answer is not a matter of opinion. The test is whether two competent people, given the same information, would do the same thing.
Runs on rules
- Recording that a quote was sent, to whom, for what, at what value
- Knowing which quotes are still open and how old each one is, which is arithmetic on a date
- Prompting somebody at a fixed interval
- Marking the outcome so the next quote is priced better, once someone says what happened
The first of these is worth sitting with.
Needs a person
- Deciding the price and the scope, which is the estimator
- Deciding whether to discount, or to walk away, which is commercial judgement
- The follow up conversation itself, at least if you want the job
A large number of trade firms cannot answer the question "how many open quotes do we have, and what are they worth" without going through a sent items folder. If the list does not exist, no amount of discipline will produce consistent follow up, because there is nothing to be consistent about.
The paperwork the law attaches to a quote you win #
There is one part of this that is not a matter of style. If you agree the work at the customer address rather than at your own premises, which is normal for domestic trade work, you are making an off-premises contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.
ends at the end of 14 days after the day on which the contract is entered into
What regulation 10 requires before an off-premises contract
Regulation 10 requires the trader to give the consumer the information listed in Schedule 2 in a clear and comprehensible manner, along with a cancellation form where a cancellation right exists, and says that information "must be given on paper or, if the consumer agrees, on another durable medium and must be legible".
What we will say is that issuing a required document at a known trigger is exactly the kind of work that should not depend on somebody remembering at nine in the evening.
Why the follow up gap is usually a data gap #
When a trade business tells us that quote follow up is the problem, what we usually find underneath is that four separate facts live in four places.
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The quote
In a sent email.
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The customer
In a phone contact.
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The site visit
In a diary.
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The outcome
If anybody recorded it, in one person's head.
Nothing can chase a quote consistently when the quote does not exist as a record. That is a diagnosis, not a product recommendation.
What it changes is the order of operations: the argument about how to chase is downstream of whether you can list what there is to chase. Firms that fix the list often find the chasing problem partly solves itself, because a visible list of open work at a stated value is hard for an owner to ignore.
What to look at first #
Take last month, and count four things.
- The quotes that went out
- The ones that were followed up at all
- The ones that were won
- The ones where you still do not know the answer
That fourth number is the one that hurts, and it is the number that tells you whether you have a conversion problem or a bookkeeping problem. The quote turnaround calculator will help you put hours and money against it, and getting paid covers what happens after the job is done, which has a very similar shape.