The Real Cost of Quoting by Hand

Your Spreadsheet Isn't Free

I know what you're thinking. "I already have a system. It's a spreadsheet. It works fine. It costs me nothing."

I thought the same thing for six years. And I was wrong about all three of those statements. Especially the last one.

Your spreadsheet doesn't cost you a subscription fee. That's true. But if you're running a custom window treatment workroom, your quoting process is costing you real money every single week. You're just not seeing the invoice.

Let me show you the math.

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The Time Tax

Let's say you do 15 quotes a week. That's a pretty normal volume for a mid-size workroom with a few regular designers sending you work.

A typical quote, where a designer sends over specs for a project with 4-6 windows, mixed treatment types, maybe some COM fabric, takes you 30 to 45 minutes to build manually. You're looking up fabric widths, calculating yardage, checking your labor rates, formatting the thing so it doesn't look like a tax return.

Call it 35 minutes on average. That's 8.75 hours a week just building quotes.

But that's not the whole picture. You also spend time:

• Revising quotes when specs change (and they always change). Add another 10 minutes per revision, and if even half your quotes get revised once, that's another 1.25 hours.
• Double-checking your math because you don't fully trust the spreadsheet. Another 5 minutes per quote if you're honest. That's 1.25 more hours.
• Digging through old quotes to find pricing you used last time for a similar treatment. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. Call it an hour a week.

So we're really looking at 12+ hours a week on quoting-related tasks. That's a day and a half. Every week. Of work that isn't sewing, isn't fabrication, isn't growing your business.

12 hours a week. $31,200 a year. On your "free" spreadsheet.

At even a modest $50/hour for your time as the owner (and honestly, if you're the one running the workroom, your time is worth more than that), those 12 hours cost you $600 a week. That's $31,200 a year.

On your "free" spreadsheet.

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The Error Problem

Time is one thing. Errors are where it gets expensive.

I'll tell you a story I'm not proud of. I once quoted a large project. Twelve windows, all pinch pleat drapery, beautiful Schumacher fabric. And I forgot to account for the pattern repeat on the yardage calculation. Not on one window. On all twelve. The pattern repeat was 27 inches.

I was short by almost 40 yards of a $95/yard fabric. That's $3,800. On one project. Because I was tired and the spreadsheet didn't know to ask me about pattern repeats.

$3,800. One project. Because I was tired and the spreadsheet didn't know to ask me about pattern repeats.

I ate most of that cost. The designer was not interested in hearing about my spreadsheet problems.

That's an extreme example. But smaller errors happen constantly:

• Outdated labor rates. You raised your prices in January but the formula in your spreadsheet still references the old rate table. Every quote for the first three weeks of the year goes out underpriced. On 15 quotes, even a $50-per-quote shortfall is $750 you'll never recover.

• Wrong fullness ratio. You quote ripplefold at 2.5x fullness instead of 1.8x because you copied from a pinch pleat template. That's 30-40% too much fabric on the quote. Either the client balks at the price and you lose the job, or you win the job and have to eat the difference.

• Missed line items. Lining surcharges. Installation fees. Hardware brackets. The small stuff that's easy to forget when you're building a quote from scratch every time. $15 here, $30 there, across a year of projects. It adds up to thousands.

Industry surveys put the average error rate on manual quotes at around 8-10%. If your average project value is $3,000, and you do 60 quotes a month, that's roughly $1,400 to $1,800 per month in pricing errors. Some you catch. Some you don't.

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The Bids You're Losing

This one's harder to measure but it might be the biggest cost of all.

A designer sends you specs on a Tuesday afternoon. You're in the middle of production. You've got three installs this week and a fabric shipment that arrived wrong. You'll get to the quote tonight. Or tomorrow. Or... Friday.

By Friday, the designer has already given the job to the workroom that quoted it Wednesday morning.

Not because their price was better. Not because their work was better. Because they were faster.

I can't tell you how many times I heard "Oh, I went with someone else, they got back to me faster" when I was managing a workroom. Not because their price was better. Not because their work was better. Because they were faster.

If slow quoting costs you even two projects a month at an average of $2,500 each, that's $60,000 a year in lost revenue. Not lost profit. Lost revenue. Work that went to someone else because your quoting process couldn't keep pace with your production schedule.

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The Growth Ceiling

Here's the part that really got me.

When I was running the workroom, we hit a point where we physically could not take on more work, not because we didn't have production capacity, but because I couldn't quote fast enough. Every new designer relationship meant more quotes, more revisions, more time at the laptop instead of the cutting table.

I was the bottleneck. The spreadsheet made me the bottleneck.

If your quoting process doesn't scale, your business doesn't scale.

If your quoting process doesn't scale, your business doesn't scale. It doesn't matter how fast your sewers are or how beautiful your work is. The funnel starts with the quote, and if that funnel is one person with a spreadsheet, you've capped your growth at whatever that person can produce in the hours they're not sleeping.

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So What's It Actually Worth?

Let's add it up. For a mid-size workroom doing around 15 quotes a week:

• Time cost: ~$31,000/year
• Error cost: ~$18,000/year (conservatively)
• Lost bids: ~$60,000/year (even at just 2 per month)
• Growth ceiling: incalculable, but real

That's north of $100,000 a year in direct and indirect costs. For a workroom doing maybe $400,000-$600,000 in annual revenue, that's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a business that's surviving and one that's thriving.

Purpose-built quoting software (not Pleat specifically, any real quoting tool built for this industry) typically costs $100-300/month. Call it $3,600/year on the high end.

You don't need a finance degree to see that math.

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This Isn't a Software Pitch

I work for a quoting software company. I know how this reads. But I'm writing this because I lived it.

I was the workroom manager spending 12 hours a week on quotes. I was the one who forgot the pattern repeat. I was the one who lost bids because I couldn't quote fast enough. This isn't a hypothetical business case. It's my actual experience, plus the stories of dozens of workroom owners I've talked to since.

The question isn't whether quoting software is worth it. The question is how long you keep paying the hidden cost of not having it.

Sit with that number for a minute. Then go look at your quoting process with fresh eyes.

You might not like what you find. But at least you'll see it clearly.