Process audit
Writing quotes without starting from scratch every time
You are writing a quote. You know you wrote almost the same one three weeks ago. You cannot find it. So you write it again. That is the most common time sink I find in businesses, and the easiest one to lift.
The finding
Where the time sits in the office
- The empty page. Every quote starts at zero, although 80 per cent of it is the same.
- Finding it again. Searching for the old quote that definitely exists.
- Items and prices. Putting them together, looking them up, doing the sums again.
- Chasing up. Who has not replied, when was that, where did it stand.
- Order confirmation. The same data once more, in a different shape.
- Follow-up questions. What was agreed again? Go and find the document.
The numbers
A typical calculation
This is what it looks like when you go through the tasks one by one instead of guessing. Your values come out of the call.
How I count it
Actual effort 7.0 h a week. Realistically 4.5 h of that can be won back.
An example built from typical values. Your numbers come out of the call, not out of a table.
The limits
What can be handed over, and what cannot
A tool can take over the first draft from a few bullet points, finding comparable cases again, suggesting suitable items from your own history, automatic reminders to chase up with the message already written, the order confirmation out of the quote.
It cannot take over the price. The judgement how much work a job really is. The decision whether you want a customer at all. And the call that turns a quote into an order.
Why me
I know this trade from the inside
Most recently B2B customer service and order management at a distributor in Manching: quotes, order processing, returns, complaints, building internal knowledge bases.
I have written hundreds of quotes myself that barely differed from each other. That is exactly where I start looking.
Common questions
- Do the quotes then become impersonal?
- Only if you do it badly. The draft saves you the empty page, the final touch is yours. In practice the quotes even get better, because there is time again for the individual part.
- We already have text blocks.
- Good, that is the first stage. The question is whether they are kept up to date and whether anybody finds them. It usually fails at the finding, not at the block.
- Does this work for very individual jobs?
- Even there the structure repeats, even when the content does not. The gain is then smaller, and the report says so honestly.
The next step
Let’s talk for 45 minutes
Call or write an email. I reply the same or the next working day. The first call is free and commits you to nothing.
+49 159 01777901 gabriel@stundenmacher.deGabriel-Florian Chiș
Ingolstädter Straße 29 · 85077 Manching, Germany
Remote across Europe · English, German, Romanian.
How to reach me
The phone is quickest. If I am with a client, leave a message or write an email — I reply the same or the next working day.
You do not need to prepare anything for the first call. Just tell me what piles up every week.