The quote went out before anyone checked the numbers
Quotes leak more money than most owners realise, and AI-drafted quotes leak it faster. A simple approval path for contractors, workshops and service firms.
3 min read Provecta Group
A contractor gets an enquiry on a Thursday evening. The customer wants a price by Friday. The site lead, keen to win it, asks an AI assistant to draft the quote from a few photos and last month's job. It looks professional. It goes out that night.
On Monday the owner sees it. The labour rate is from before the increase. Scaffolding is missing. The payment terms say 30 days when the firm moved to a deposit and balance on completion. The customer has already accepted.
That is a made-up scenario, but it is built from parts every contractor, workshop owner and small service firm will recognise. The firm now chooses between eating the difference and an awkward call that may lose the job.
Where quotes leak
Quote mistakes tend to come from the same few places:
- Old prices. The quote was built from a previous one, and the rates in it have since changed.
- Missing items. Access equipment, disposal, travel, materials markup. Anything not on the last job is not on this one.
- Wrong terms. Payment, warranty and validity periods copied from a template nobody updated.
- Unapproved discounts. A "we can do a bit better" given to close the deal, without anyone deciding whether the margin allows it.
- No record. The quote went out by WhatsApp or personal email, so nobody else knows it exists until the customer calls.
AI speeds all of these up. It writes a quote in seconds, and it writes it confidently. It does not know your rates went up in August unless something tells it. It will fill gaps with plausible numbers. And a quote that looks polished gets less scrutiny than a scrawled one, not more.
A simple approval path
Most small firms do not need software for this. They need four things decided and written down.
1. One price source. A single, dated price sheet for labour, materials and standard items. Every quote, whether drafted by a person or by AI, is built from it. Old quotes are never the starting point.
2. A standard template with current terms. Payment, validity, exclusions and warranty, kept in one place and updated when they change.
3. A threshold. Below an amount the owner sets, standard work from the price sheet can go out on the site lead's say-so. Above it, or anything with a discount or a non-standard item, needs the owner's approval first. Write the threshold down. If it lives in the owner's head, it does not exist.
4. One place quotes are logged. A shared sheet with the customer, the date, the amount and who approved it. That record also becomes the follow-up list.
Where AI fits
AI is useful here. It can turn photos and notes into a draft quickly, and it can check a draft against the price sheet faster than a person. But only if it has the price sheet, the template and the rules in front of it every time, rather than whatever it remembers from the last job.
That is the same principle we run our own work on at Provecta Group. The rules and current facts live in a written memory every AI session loads before it starts, and anything leaving the company that is not on a short, written list of standing approvals waits for a person to say yes. For a contractor, the price sheet, the template and the threshold are that memory.
What this does not solve
A price sheet does not price an unusual job for you. It also does not stop someone sending a quote from their own phone outside the process. And the threshold only works if the owner actually answers approval requests quickly. If approval takes three days, people will route around it.
Measuring how much quote errors cost is worth doing, but we have no general figure to give you. It varies too much by trade, and the only number that matters is yours.
Pull your last ten quotes
Take the last ten quotes your business sent and check each against your current rates and terms. Count how many had an old price, a missing item or the wrong terms. That number is your starting point.
The revenue leakage check helps estimate where money is slipping out between quote and payment. Book 20 minutes at pgco.world/book to go through it.