How to write a professional trade quote

1. Business details, up top

Trading name, ABN, contact details, and your licence number where your trade and state require one. This isn't decoration — customers comparing three quotes use "looks legitimate" as a first filter, and for licensed trades many will check. A quote from an identifiable, licensed business beats a bare number in a text message before anyone reads the scope.

2. Scope: the included list

List what you will do as concrete line items, specific enough that the customer could tick them off at the end: "supply and install 6 LED downlights to living room" rather than "lighting work". Include quantities, areas and materials where they matter. Two things happen when scope is specific: the customer understands what they're paying for (which defends your price against a cheaper, vaguer quote), and the finished job can be checked against the document instead of against memory.

3. Exclusions: the dispute killer

Whatever a customer plausibly assumes is included, and isn't, goes here. Patching and painting after electrical work. Removal of asbestos if found. Council fees. Making good landscaping after trenching. Rubbish removal. The exclusions section is the single highest-value paragraph on the quote, because almost every "but I thought that was included" dispute is an exclusion that lived in your head instead of on the page. If you find yourself explaining the same assumption on every job, that sentence belongs in every quote.

4. Price, with GST shown plainly

Show the subtotal, the GST, and the total including GST as separate lines. "$4,200" with no GST context is an invitation for the customer to hear the total and you to mean plus-GST — a built-in 10% argument. If parts of the job are genuinely unknowable (what's behind the wall), say how they'll be handled — a provisional sum, or a stated rate for the unknown work — rather than silently padding the number or silently hoping.

5. Validity period

"This quote is valid for 30 days" (or 14, or whatever suits your material-price risk). Without it, a customer can accept a six-month-old quote after materials have jumped, and you're choosing between eating the difference and starting the relationship with a price fight. The validity line is one sentence of insurance.

6. Payment terms

When and how you get paid: deposit if any, progress payments on bigger jobs, final payment terms ("7 days from invoice"), and how to pay. Terms stated on the quote — before the customer says yes — are agreed terms. Terms that first appear on the invoice are a suggestion. Note that deposits and progress payments on domestic building work are capped by law in some states; check the rules that apply to your trade and contract size.

Tone: plain professional English

The writing itself is part of the quote. Full sentences, no shorthand ("S&I" means nothing to a homeowner), consistent capitalisation, no slang, no walls of caps. You don't need corporate polish — you need to sound like a careful professional, because the customer is using this document to guess what your workmanship is like. A quote with drifting prices and half-sentences reads as a job that will be run the same way.

Speed is part of the quote

An honest framing, without invented statistics: a customer who has asked three tradies for quotes is most interested the week they asked. Every day your quote doesn't arrive, their attention goes to whoever's did, and a quote that arrives after they've mentally committed elsewhere is waste paper regardless of price. Slow quotes go stale. The practical fix is reducing the distance between the site visit and the sent document — which is mostly about capturing the details while you're standing there, not reconstructing them at 9pm.

A worked example

Common mistakes

• Vague scope. "Bathroom electrical work — $2,400" can't be defended, compared or checked off. Specific line items can.
• No exclusions section. The assumptions in your head are not on the customer's page. This is where disputes are born.
• Ambiguous GST. Always three lines: subtotal, GST, total inc. GST.
• No validity period. You're underwriting material prices for as long as the customer feels like deciding.
• Payment terms introduced at invoice time. Terms belong on the quote, where acceptance makes them agreed.
• Quoting a week later. The details fade, the customer cools, and the job quietly goes to whoever answered first.

Where TradieCue fits

Structure is learnable; the grind is production — turning site-visit scribble into a clean document that same day, every time, including the days you're flat out. TradieCue is built for that step: talk or type the rough notes (English, Chinese or a mix) and Timmy drafts a quote in the shape above — scope organised into line items, your prices with GST laid out, in professional English. Prices come from the user and stay editable. Timmy structures the work and wording; it does not invent amounts. If a key detail is missing, Timmy asks instead of guessing, and the draft stays an editable preview until you choose to share it.

See voice to quote for how it works, or the free tradie quote template if you're building quotes by hand.

Common questions