> For the full site index see https://www.fenwickautomation.com/llms.txt > Every page has a Markdown version at the same URL with .md appended. # Estimation Quotes drafted from the enquiry, priced on your own rules, ready for a person to check and send. What it does, what it needs from you, what stays manual. Estimation is a bespoke build that reads each enquiry, prices it on your own rules and drafts the quote in your format for a person to check and send. The quote goes out while the enquiry is still warm. ## The problem An enquiry lands. Someone reads it, works out what is actually being asked for, and goes looking for the last job that looked like it. They open that quote, copy the parts that still apply, and start again on the parts that do not. Rates get checked against a spreadsheet, or against memory. Travel, access, minimum charge, the client's usual exclusions: each one is a rule that lives somewhere, and the somewhere is usually a person. That person is also running jobs. So the quote waits. When it does go out, the client has had others in the meantime, and the one that arrived first has set the shape of the conversation. If the person who prices is on site, off sick or on holiday, nothing goes out at all. The cost is not the typing. It is the hours of the one person who knows the rules, spent doing the same arithmetic on every enquiry, and the enquiries that never get a quote because there was no afternoon free. - The person who prices opens a draft with your rules already applied, instead of starting from a blank page. - The same enquiry gets the same price whoever is in the office that day, because the rules are written down and applied the same way every time. - Turnaround is set by how long it takes a person to check a draft, not by when they can find a free afternoon. ## What it does The enquiry is read, priced against your rules and drafted in your format. A person checks it, changes what they want and sends it. The build reads the enquiry as it arrives, by email, web form or a note typed up from a phone call. It pulls out the scope: what is being asked for, where, when, and under what constraints. It prices that scope against your rules, written down: your rate card, your minimums, your travel bands, your uplifts for out-of-hours or awkward access, your standard exclusions. It drafts the quote in your format, with your wording, and puts it in front of whoever signs quotes off, with a note on anything it could not price and why. Where the enquiry is missing something the price depends on, the draft says so, and a list of what to ask the client comes with it. ## Who it suits A business sending the same kind of quote more than once a month. Each one takes a chunk of somebody's day, and the rules for the price sit in a few people's heads. It suits work that repeats in shape: the same kinds of job, priced from the same rate card, with variations the rules can describe. It suits less well if every job is a one-off priced from scratch on site, or if the price is mostly a negotiation. Those are judgement calls, and a draft from a rule book does not help much with them. ## What it needs from you Your recent quotes, as many as you have, including the ones you lost. Your rate card, even if it is a spreadsheet with somebody's name on it. And an honest answer to the question "how do you actually price this". That last one takes the longest. Two people in the same office will describe the same rule differently, and neither of them is wrong. The build has to pick one and you have to agree it. Somebody's spreadsheet is load-bearing, and we need it, gaps and all. Your rates have gaps: jobs you have priced by feel for years without ever writing the rule down. Those come out in the data check, before anything is built on top of them. Signature to live: from 4 weeks, depending on the size of the job. ## What it does not do It does not send a quote. A person reads every draft, changes what they want, and sends it. It does not negotiate, and it does not decide whether you want the job. It does not price anything it has no rule for. That enquiry goes to a person with a note saying what is missing. It does not know that one client always wants the price shown a certain way unless somebody tells it, and version one will get something like that wrong in a way only the person who has been pricing for years will spot. That is what the parallel run is for: the old way keeps going beside the new one until your team says the drafts are right. This is a Drafts build. It produces a document for a person to check. It does not check work that already exists, and it does not assemble a pack from other documents. Drafts One route, signature to live: from 4 weeks, depending on the size of the job and the state of your data. We'll tell you on the audit. ## Where it sits in the process Estimation is one route, built on its own. The free 10-minute call tells you whether it fits and gives you a rough estimate: a range for the first route, not a quote. The paid audit looks at your real documents and your real data, works out what the work costs you a year in your own figures, and writes down what to build first. The fixed price for the build comes from the audit, with three options that cut scope rather than corners. Then the data check, the build, the parallel run, go-live and training, and monthly running. [All nine stages are on the About page](https://www.fenwickautomation.com/about.md#how-it-works). ### Related systems - [Quote chasing](https://www.fenwickautomation.com/services/systems/quote-chasing.md) - [Quote to handover gate](https://www.fenwickautomation.com/services/systems/quote-to-handover-gate.md) See it running: [read the case study](https://www.fenwickautomation.com/work.md). Last updated: 12 October 2026