How Fast Should You Send a Quote? Hours, and How to Do It

Send it the same working day. The rule you can run a business on: acknowledge every enquiry within 15 minutes, and send a complete quote within 24 hours — under four working hours for anything you have priced before. That is how fast you should send a quote in 2026, because the customer is not waiting on you alone. They fired off three or four enquiries the same afternoon, through web forms, Google and a mate's recommendation, and the clock runs on their side. The first complete quote to land usually wins. Not the cheapest, not the prettiest: the first one that answers everything, so the customer can stop thinking about it.

The word doing the work there is "complete". A fast half-quote is worse than a slow full one: it gets you compared on price alone, then re-priced when the scope turns out bigger. The job is to be quick and unambiguous, which is an admin problem, not a sales problem.

Why the first complete quote usually wins

Nothing mystical is going on. Four ordinary things stack up in your favour when you are first:

• You set the shape of the comparison. Your quote becomes the template. Later quotes get read as "same as the first, but cheaper?" If yours itemised the consumer unit, the certificate and the making good, the others look thin rather than cheap.
• Speed is read as competence. The customer cannot judge your terminations. They can judge whether you did what you said, on time, once. Your response time is the only work sample they have before they hire you.
• Decision fatigue is real. People chasing three quotes get bored around quote two. A price in hand on day one beats a hypothetical better one on day five.
• Urgency is usually why they called. Nobody enquires about a dead socket circuit for fun. Waiting five days signals you have no capacity, whatever your quote says.

The mirror image matters more. Slow quoting loses you the good jobs first: the customer organised enough to have a budget and a deadline is also the one who books whoever answers.

What "fast" actually means for each type of enquiry

One target time for everything is why people give up on this. Different enquiries need different clocks:

Notice the acknowledgement is never the quote. It is a separate, cheap action that buys you the rest of the time. Two lines: got it, this is what I need from you, and you will have the price by X. That message alone parks the customer's shopping impulse. Skipping it is the most expensive habit in trades admin.

How to build the 20-minute quote without guessing the price

A 20-minute quote is not typing faster. It is quoting from stock. Everything below has to exist before the enquiry arrives, or you will be inventing a number under time pressure. That is how you end up eating the difference.

1. A live price list, not a folder of PDFs

Your wholesaler's prices move. If your quote maths runs on a spreadsheet you last touched in spring, your 20-minute quote is a 20-minute mistake. Import the supplier price file, keep your rebate agreement applied to it, and price materials from the current line, not from memory. This is the part people skip, and the part that decides whether fast is safe.

2. Assemblies, not individual lines

Stop pricing components. Price kits. One line for "double socket, spur off existing ring, chase and make good", already carrying its materials, its labour minutes and its wording. Ten to twenty assemblies covers most of what a small firm sells all year. Building them is one wet Sunday. After that, a quote is picking from a list.

3. A labour rate you have actually checked

Your rate has to cover the van, the insurance, the unbillable hours, the certification and the holiday. If you do not know your real recovery rate, speed only gets you to the wrong price sooner.

4. Standard terms, exclusions and validity

Pre-written and attached to every quote: what is included, what is explicitly not (making good, decorating, scaffolding, asbestos survey, parking, out-of-hours), payment terms, and a validity period. In Sweden, consumer work sits under konsumenttjänstlagen and most firms base their terms on Hantverkarformuläret, the standard consumer contract form. Elsewhere the instinct is the same: written scope plus standard terms. Exclusions are what make a fast fixed price survivable.

5. Tax relief handled in the quote, not after it

If you work on private homes in Sweden, the ROT deduction is part of the price the customer sees. ROT takes 30% off the labour cost, with an annual per-person ceiling shared with RUT; check the current amount at skatteverket.se, because it changes. Green-tech installs are a separate scheme with their own rules. For readers outside Sweden: think of it as a national scheme paying part of the labour bill straight to the installer, so the quote must show gross, deduction and net. Calculate it inside the quote. Doing it by hand at 17:30 on a Friday is how the wrong net price gets sent.

6. An enquiry form that does the first half of the quoting

Most of your delay is not writing. It is waiting for the answer to a question you should have asked at the enquiry. Ask it on the form:

• Photos: the consumer unit or boiler, the meter box, the room, the access route. Three photos remove a survey more often than people expect.
• Property age and type, and whether it is tenanted, let or listed.
• Floor, parking, key or door-code access, and who is on site.
• The deadline and what is driving it: sale, tenant move-in, insurance claim.
• For Sweden: whether ROT applies, plus the property designation and the owners' shares.

An embeddable intake form that asks these and lands as a job record you can quote straight from is the difference between "I'll get back to you" and a price before lunch. That chain is what OdinTask shortens: enquiry form to templated quote with the ROT deduction already calculated and an e-signature on the end, no retyping.

When fast is dangerous

Speed is a habit, and habits do not know when to stop. These are the jobs where a same-day fixed price costs you real money:

• You have not seen it and cannot see it in photos. Anything behind a wall, under a floor or in a loft. Concealed is not quotable.
• Old fabric. Pre-1970s wiring, rubber or fabric insulation, unknown earthing, plaster that will not survive a chase. Mid-century buildings also raise asbestos in board and adhesives, which in Sweden puts duties on you under Arbetsmiljöverket's rules before you cut.
• The scope is a sentence. "Rewire the flat" is not a scope. If you cannot list the circuits, you cannot list the price.
• Someone else started it. Half-finished work by another firm is a survey job every time, no exceptions.
• Insurance, landlord or dispute jobs. The payer is not the person talking to you, and the price must survive a third party reading it cold.
• They want "just a ballpark". Ballparks become contracts in the customer's memory. Give a band with the assumptions written next to it, or a survey date. Never a bare number in a text message.
• The lead time or material price is volatile. If the item is on allocation, quote a validity measured in days, not the usual 30.

The honest version of the rule: be fast with the answer, not with the number. On a job you cannot price today, the same-day response is a booked survey slot and a written explanation of why. That still beats every competitor who went quiet.

Measure your own time-to-quote

Do not borrow anyone's benchmark, including this one. Your own data is the only thing that changes behaviour. You need two timestamps you cannot fudge: when the enquiry arrived, and when the quote went out.

• Track the median, not the average. One tender that took three weeks hides twenty enquiries you answered in an hour, or the reverse.
• Bucket your win rate by response time: under 4 hours, same day, 1–3 days, 4 days or more, across 30–50 quotes. The pattern shows up quickly, and it is yours, not a statistic from a blog.
• Count the enquiries you never quoted at all. In most small firms this is the biggest number on the page and nobody has looked at it.
• Track time to first reply separately from time to quote. Different problems, different fixes.

A workflow that gets a quote out in under an hour

1. 0–15 min: The enquiry lands as a record with photos and access details attached. You send the acknowledgement with a promised time. Two lines.
2. 15–25 min: Decide the basis: fixed price from an assembly, banded estimate, or survey. The only real thinking in the process.
3. 25–40 min: Pick the assemblies, adjust quantities, check the two or three material lines that actually move the price against the live price file.
4. 40–50 min: Apply exclusions, validity, and ROT or the relevant scheme so the customer sees the net figure. Read it once as if you were the customer.
5. 50–60 min: Send it with a signing link, so accepting is one tap and not a printer. Set a day-three follow-up.

None of that is heroic. It is refusing to rebuild the same quote from a blank page every time. Build the templates, the price list and the form once, then let the speed come from the system instead of from you working evenings. If you want the whole chain in one place — form, quote, deduction, signature, job, invoice — that is what OdinTask does. See the pricing page, or start a free trial and price your next enquiry before the customer has finished ringing round.