Service quoting and installation quoting are different acts of selling, and the software support for each is different enough to change the shortlist.
Two motions
Service quoting happens at the door or beside the equipment, takes two minutes, and comes from a flat-rate book. The software’s job is to make the book fast to search and the price impossible to get wrong.
Installation quoting happens at a kitchen table, takes an hour, and is built from equipment selection, options and often finance. The software’s job is to make a good-better-best presentation that closes without a second visit.
A product strong at one is frequently weak at the other, and a shop doing meaningful volumes of both needs to know which it compromised on.
The flat-rate book is the real question
If you price flat rate, the book is your pricing strategy in a file. Whether the vendor supplies one, how it is maintained, whether it updates with equipment cost changes, and who owns it if you leave, are all worth more than most demo features.
Ask specifically: is the book yours to export? Several shops discover the answer at the point of migration.
Approval and revision
Whatever the motion, three things decide whether quoting works in practice: can the customer accept it on their phone without printing anything; does acceptance create the job automatically; and does a revision keep a record of what was quoted before.
The third is the one that matters in a dispute, and it is the one most often missing.
Sources
- Workyard — secondary unverified, read
Vendor pricing changes without notice. Every figure above carries the date it was read. If a vendor’s current page disagrees with this one, the vendor’s page is right and this one is stale — and that is a bug worth reporting.
