Quote and estimate generator

1. Fill in your business and the customer, and give the job a one-line title.
2. Set an issue date and how long the quote is valid — thirty days is conventional.
3. Add line items with quantities and rates. Line items outperform a single total, consistently.
4. Add any optional extras. These are priced separately and excluded from the total on purpose.
5. Write what is NOT included, one per line. This is the field that prevents disputes.
6. Set tax and a deposit percentage if you take one, then download the PDF.

Fill in the exclusions even when they feel obvious. The obvious ones are exactly the ones that get argued about — making good to plasterwork, removing the old unit, parking charges, disposal.

An invoice records work already done and asks for money. Everything about it is settled: the scope happened, the price is agreed, the only open question is payment. That is why an invoice needs a due date and payment details and very little else.

A quote is a proposal about work that has not happened, made under uncertainty, to someone who is comparing you against alternatives. Its job is to win the work and to define the work, and those two jobs need fields an invoice never has.

Using an invoice template with the word Quote at the top is common and it leaves out exactly the parts that protect you. There is no expiry, so your price from March is still being waved at you in September. There is no exclusions list, so the scope is whatever the customer assumed. And there are no optional extras, so the only direction the conversation can move is down.

Writing down what you are not doing feels negative, and there is a real fear that it makes the quote look mean. In practice it does the opposite: a quote that is precise about its boundaries reads as professional, and a quote that is vague reads as one that will produce surprises.

The mechanism is simple. A customer reading your quote is silently filling in the gaps with assumptions, and their assumptions are generous, because they are imagining a finished result rather than a scope of work. When the job ends and the plasterwork has not been made good, they are not being difficult — they genuinely believed it was included, because nothing said otherwise.

The items worth naming are the boring ones that recur in your trade: making good, removal and disposal of the old thing, parking or permit charges, works needed if something unexpected is found behind the wall, anything requiring a different trade.

There is a second benefit. Half of what you list as excluded is work the customer will now ask you to include — priced, and agreed in advance. The exclusions list is quietly one of the better upselling instruments available to a small business, precisely because it does not feel like selling.

Material prices move, your availability changes, and a quote you gave in spring may be unprofitable by autumn. Without an expiry, honouring an old price is a choice you have to make in the moment, in front of a customer who is holding a document with your name on it.

With an expiry, there is nothing to argue about. The quote said thirty days, it has been ninety, and repricing is administrative rather than confrontational. That is the entire value: it converts an awkward negotiation into a form.

Thirty days is the conventional default and works for most trades. Shorten it if your material costs are volatile; lengthen it for large projects with long lead times, where a customer genuinely needs months to arrange finance.

One honesty note: an expiry date on a quote is a statement of intent rather than an automatically enforceable term unless your terms of business say so. It works because it is clear and reasonable, not because it is legally armour-plated.

A quote with one total invites one question: can you do it for less? A quote with a total and three priced optional extras invites a different one: should we also do the valve while you have access?

This is not a trick. It reflects something true about most jobs — there genuinely are things worth doing while the access is open, the scaffolding is up, or the floor is lifted, and the customer usually does not know what they are. Listing them priced and separate is useful information delivered at exactly the moment it is actionable.

The extras appear on the PDF below the total, explicitly excluded from it, so there is no ambiguity about what the headline number covers. The tool also shows you what the job is worth if they take everything, which is worth knowing before you walk in.

Keep it to two or three. A list of nine optional extras stops reading as helpful and starts reading as a menu of things you left out.

In local services, the first credible quote wins a disproportionate share of the work. A customer who has asked three businesses is, in practice, choosing among whoever replied — and the third quote arrives into a conversation already in progress.

That makes speed the highest-return improvement available to most quoting processes, and it is why having a template you can fill in from your phone matters more than the template's design. A same-day quote that is slightly rough beats a beautiful one on Thursday.

The second factor is legibility. Line items outperform a single total because a customer comparing three quotes needs something to compare, and a single number gives them only price. Broken down, they can see that yours includes something the cheaper one does not.

The third is what happens after. A quote sent and never mentioned again converts far worse than one followed by a single short message a few days later. Not a chase — a check that they received it and an offer to talk it through. One follow-up, not three.