Quoting Mistakes Tradesmen Make: Copying A Quote You Never Checked

You've got a quote to do, and you've done one like it before. So you open the old one. Change the name, change the address, nudge a couple of numbers, send it. Twenty minutes, job done, back to your tea. And you've just copied a mistake you made eight months ago and never found out about. Right, let me be straight about this one, because there's a lot of people who'll tell you never to copy an old quote. That's rubbish. Copying is fine. I do it. It's what you're copying that decides whether it saves you an evening or costs you a grand. Because a quote isn't a price. It's a set of decisions you made once, on a day you can't really remember. And if those decisions were wrong, copying them doesn't make one job wrong. It makes all of them wrong. Two quotes, both copied, and only one of them is a problem. First one. EV charger, domestic, same as the last dozen you've done. You copy it. That's completely fine, and I'll come back to why. Second one. You did a school last year. Went alright, as far as you know. Now an industrial unit's come in and it's roughly the same kind of work, so you open the school quote and start editing. That second one is where the money goes. If you quote right, the job will go right. So here's the only question that actually matters before you copy anything. Did you ever go back and check that quote? Not "did it go alright". Not "I think we did OK on that one". Did you actually look at the hours booked against the hours you estimated? Because "yeah, that one made loads" is a feeling. It isn't a number. And when people finally do go back and look, it's usually the same story. It made less than they thought, and it took longer than they remembered. Now, the EV charger. Why that one's fine. Repeat work barely moves. Same unit, same sort of run, same test, same certificate. You've done it a dozen times, so even if you never formally reviewed it, you've effectively reviewed it a dozen times with your own hands. That's not really copying a quote. That's a catalogue with extra steps. Solar, chargers, boards, the same job over and over. If that's a lot of your work, copy away. I've got no issue with it. Then there's the middle one, which is most people's actual work. Say it's a rewire. Every house is different, but a rewire is still a rewire. The rooms change, the number of points changes, the age of the place changes. The shape of the job doesn't. You're not inventing anything new. So you can copy that quite happily, as long as you're going in and changing the quantities properly. Not glancing at the total, thinking that looks about right, and sending it. The copy isn't the danger. Not looking at what you've copied is the danger. The school and the industrial unit is a different thing entirely. The kit list copies over perfectly well. Cable's cable, boards are boards. It's the labour that doesn't copy. Different access, different parking, working round other trades, an occupied building where you can't just crack on. Same materials, completely different day. So what you've done is copy a set of fit times that were priced for somewhere else. And this is the bit that really gets people. If you copy the quote, you copy the catalogue with it. So whatever was wrong in that quote is now sat in the new one, wearing a different customer's name. You haven't made one bad quote. You've made a template out of a bad quote. Let's put that in numbers, because this is why it matters more than it sounds. Say there's a cable in that quote you priced off last year's list, and it's gone up 15% since without you noticing. On a job carrying £1,200 of cable, that's £180 you're short before you've picked a drill up. Once, that's a bad afternoon. But copying is a multiplier. That's the entire point of copying. Copy that quote a dozen times over a year and your £180 is £2,160. And it never shows up anywhere, because every one of those jobs looked fine on the day. A number you get wrong once costs you once. A number you copy costs you every time you use it. Two things to be careful with. First, don't take this as "review everything before you quote anything". You'd never send a quote. The test is whether the thing you're copying is repeat work you know in your hands, or a one-off from a site you barely remember. Those are completely different risks and they deserve completely different amounts of care. Second one, and this is the bit nobody says out loud. Weigh up whether you're even going to win it. If you genuinely don't think that job's coming your way, don't sit there for three hours pricing it properly. There's no prize for a beautiful quote on a job you were never getting. Spend your time on the quotes you've got a real shot at, and be honest with yourself about which ones those are. Understanding this isn't the hard part. It never is. The hard part is that reviewing a job and copying a quote are two different jobs in two different places, so the review never happens and the copying always does. This is half the reason I'm building FieldHive. When you book work in, you're scheduling it against the quote, so the job and the number you priced it at stay attached. There's something to go back and check. And once you've checked it, the answer isn't to copy the quote at all. It's to fix the item in your catalogue and select it next time. FieldHive won't tell you which of your old quotes were any good. Only your finished jobs can do that. But it'll stop them disappearing into a folder where you can never look at them again. If you quote right, the job will go right. Copy the work you know. Check the work you don't. That's the whole thing. Now, there's one more decision on every quote you send, and it's got nothing to do with the price. It's how much of it the customer actually gets to see. That's the next one.