09 — Quotes
CoderConda automates your quotes: a voice note, a site measurement or an enquiry becomes a draft with your line items and your prices, for €895 or €1,245 one-off. Every item gets a quantity, a unit and a rate from your price list.
The draft goes to you, not to the customer.
Draft 0412 · example6 items
Totalopen
Stage 016 of 6 named
6 items, Total: open
02 — The stages
01 — Said
You speak into your phone for twenty seconds on the way back to the van. That becomes six lines with quantity and unit. What you did not say is not in there either: the draft adds no line item just because it usually belongs in a bathroom.
Six lines, because six things were said.
02 — Matched
Every line looks for its counterpart in your catalogue: an item with a unit, a rate and a surcharge. The comparison runs against your price list and nothing else, not against market rates and not against what is customary. Five find a match. The sixth does not.
The comparison is to your list, not to the market.
03 — Calculated
Quantity times rate, surcharge on top, travel by your rule, tax rate last. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not belong in a language model. The model recognises what is meant. What it costs is calculated by code against your price list, and without an entry it does not calculate.
The model reads. It never calculates.
04 — Open
The drain channel is in the draft, with a quantity, without an amount, with the word “check” beside it. The sentence did not say which model was meant, and two models are more than a rounding error apart. So the line stays open, and the total below it stays open with it.
An open line is more honest than an estimated one.
Stage 1 of 4
Draft 0412 · example6 items
Totalopen
6 of 6 named
6 items, Total: open
03 — The signature
After four stages it seems obvious to estimate the last line so that a figure appears at the bottom. But a quote is not a suggestion. The moment the customer accepts it, the amount in it applies, and it is the one you wrote in.
The total line
Totalestimatedopen
The customer accepts, and the amount applies. What the channel really costs, you find out when you buy it. You carry the difference, quietly.
The customer calls and names the model. You add the rate and approve. It costs one question, and that takes two minutes.
The rule
Whatever has no source gets no amount. Not even when that leaves the total open.
That is why every draft carries one more line than you would like: the one that asks a question instead of asserting a figure.
04 — The back-test
Before a customer sees the first draft, your own past runs through the catalogue. Ten quotes you have written are recalculated. If the same total comes out, the catalogue is right.
The condition
Ten out of ten have to be explainable. A deviation without a reason means: not finished yet.
What it costs
Nothing. The result is yours, even if you have nothing set up afterwards.
What is missing here
There is no client case in the register for this offer. The projects page carries that as its fourth rung, in plain words: for local providers the evidence of my own is missing, and it is missing here in the same way. Until it exists, the evidence is a test you run with your own figures.
10 · Ten quotes of your own. 3 · Three outcomes
05 — The price
What the setup costs is decided by the size of your catalogue: one trade or several, with an ERP feed or without. That is settled after the back-test, and the back-test is free. What recurs is running it, if you want it.
Quote · setupDraft
Total€895 or €1,245
All prices are final prices. No VAT is charged under § 19 UStG.
06 — The catalogue
Any quoting software can add up line items. The reason most of them stand still after three weeks is the setup: somebody has to enter what your firm knows. In a company of twelve, nobody has a free evening for that.
What goes inYour rate
The right-hand column is empty because it belongs to you. It gets filled once and maintained after that.
If the bottleneck is not the road to the quote but the document that arrives afterwards, the work sits elsewhere. And if you need the path between two systems rather than a price list, you need wiring.
If the jam is not in the writing but in the documents that follow.
If two systems should talk to each other and no price list is involved.
5 · What goes in
07 — The objections
This page claims that nothing gets guessed. These four sentences question that, and each of them has a true core.
“Our prices are not in any list.”01
True, and that is the normal case. They are in your head and in the quotes you have written. That is exactly what the list is built from.
“What if the AI invents a price?”02
That is the right worry, and the answer is a separation. The language model recognises what is meant. The amount is calculated by code against your list.
“Nothing leaves here without approval.”03
Good, because nothing does here either. The draft goes to you and to nobody else. Without your approval no sheet leaves the system, not even a reminder.
“We write five quotes a month.”04
Then it does not pay for itself in saved time, and I will stand by that. The question is a different one: how many of the five arrived too late.
Almost no firm of this size has a maintained price list, and anyone who claims that is a precondition has never done a setup. Your prices do exist, they just sit in an inconvenient place: in your head and scattered over five years of quotes. Ten of those are enough to surface the recurring items, the units and the silent rules you already calculate by. The result is the list, and afterwards it is yours as a document, whether or not anything gets set up here.
A language model produces plausible strings, and a plausible number is exactly what has no place in a quote. The separation is therefore not a precaution but the architecture: the model maps a spoken sentence to an item from your catalogue, and that is all it does. Quantity times rate, surcharge, travel and tax are then calculated by code that knows entries and no guesses. If it finds no entry, it cannot calculate, and that is why a word stands there instead of a figure.
Approval is the point where you are liable, which is why it does not get automated away. What lies before it is the tedious work: finding items, looking up rates, calculating, retyping, formatting. What comes after it is work too: sending, filing, following up. Both run without you. In between sits a draft on your screen that you read in two minutes, and a button. The follow-up asks as well before it sends anything, because a reminder to the wrong customer costs more than none at all.
At five quotes a month you might save three hours, and nobody sets anything up for that. The calculation runs on the other side: in most firms two to five days sit between the site visit and the quote, and in that window some of the jobs are decided elsewhere. Losing one of five because it arrived late is losing a fifth of your intake, and that is a very different number from three hours. Whether that is the case for you, the back-test cannot say. Your calendar can.
08 — Appointment
Pick a time that suits you straight from the calendar. I go through with you where your company stands and what is worth doing. No obligation and no sales pressure.
The calendar is hosted by cal.com.
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