Quotes out the same hour, not next week
Turn a call note, a few photos or a form into a priced, branded quote ready to approve and send, with follow-ups that chase themselves.
The problem
How it works by hand
For trades and service firms, the quote that arrives first wins far more often than the cheapest one. And quoting is exactly the evening admin that gets postponed: you get home from a full day on the tools, the kids need feeding, and three quotes slip to the weekend. By then the customer has accepted whoever replied on Tuesday.
A worked example
What a working version looks like
Job details come in however they naturally arrive: a voice note from the van, photos of the site, a web enquiry form. The AI extracts what the job actually involves, materials, labour, access, anything unusual, and prices it against your own rate card, not a generic one. It produces a branded quote document with your terms attached, queued for a thirty-second approval on your phone rather than an evening at the laptop. Once approved, it sends with online acceptance built in, and if the customer goes quiet the system follows up politely at intervals you set, so unanswered quotes chase themselves instead of dying in a sent folder. Accepted quotes flow straight into your job list.
The exact tools change per business. The shape does not.
What it needs
Honest inputs, nothing exotic
- 01Your rate card, or a pile of past quotes we can build one from
- 02Your logo and standard terms for the quote template
- 03Wherever jobs come in now: phone, WhatsApp, web form
- 04How chasing should sound, friendly nudge or formal reminder
The payoff
What you get back
Quotes go out while the customer is still comparing, usually the same day they asked, without costing you another evening. Nothing sits unquoted in a notes app, and nothing you did quote gets forgotten, because the follow-up runs whether you remember or not.
Do it yourself
How you would build this yourself
No course, no upsell. This is the order we would build it in, with the tools named, and a prompt to start from.
- 1
Get your rate card out of your head and into a file. If it only exists as instinct, pull it from your last twenty quotes. Nothing can price from a feeling.
- 2
Standardise how jobs arrive: a voice note transcribed by your phone, photos, or a short form. The input does not need to be tidy, it needs to be captured.
- 3
Have Claude extract the job from the raw description: work involved, materials, labour, access issues, plus a list of what is missing so you ask before pricing wrongly.
- 4
Generate the quote as a branded PDF from an HTML template: logo, line items, terms, validity date. Claude Code will build the generator in an afternoon.
- 5
Add the chasing last: a polite reminder after three days of silence and again at seven. It is the least clever part of the system and it wins the most work.
I am a [your trade]. Build me a quoting tool I can run on my laptop. Input: a job description pasted as text. I will transcribe voice notes with my phone's dictation to start. The tool should: 1. Extract the work involved: job type, materials, labour, anything unusual about access 2. Price it line by line from my rate card, which I will paste below 3. Flag anything it cannot price instead of guessing, as questions for me to ask the customer 4. Produce a finished quote as a PDF from an HTML template with my logo, payment terms and a validity date Ask me for the rate card, logo and terms before you start, and show me the template for approval before wiring up the PDF. Phase two will be follow-up reminders for quotes nobody answered, so keep the quote data in a simple SQLite store. My rate card: [paste it here]
Copy it into Claude Code, fill the brackets, and it will plan the build with you before writing a line of code.
We would rather show you how than bill you. The whole ladder of free help, answers, guides and the weekly build-along, is on the do-it-yourself page.
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