From site notes to a quote before dinner

The quote you meant to write

The walkthrough went well. Three bedrooms and a hallway, walls and ceilings, owner wants low-sheen, there's some peeling around the ensuite window that needs prep. You said you'd get a quote over “in the next day or two”. That's the job, right there — and it's won or lost in what happens next.

Because the honest version of “the next day or two” is: dinner, kids, an early start, another walkthrough, and by Thursday night you're squinting at a photo of a window frame trying to remember which house it was. Slow quotes don't just cost evenings; they cost jobs. The tradie who quotes first, while the owner is still keen, wins more than the tradie who quotes best.

Say it in the ute, while it's fresh

With TradieCue, the site notes and the quote are the same act. Sit in the ute for ninety seconds and talk:

Same flow for a deck build, a switchboard upgrade or a bathroom strip-out — mutter what you saw and what it costs, get back a structured draft. The numbers are yours: Prices come from the user and stay editable. Timmy structures the work and wording; it does not invent amounts.

If you left something out, Timmy asks

Real ute notes have gaps. When an important detail is missing (a price, a customer, a scope item), Timmy asks rather than making it up. Typical questions on a quote note:

• “Who's the quote for?” — if you described the work but not the customer.
• “What's the price for the prep work?” — if you listed a scope item without a number.
• “Is that $4,800 including or excluding GST?” — if the note was ambiguous about it.

Answer in a sentence and the draft updates. No detail gets quietly invented to paper over a gap — a wrong guess in a quote is worse than a question.

The two-minute check before it goes out

Nothing is sent automatically. Every quote, variation and follow-up is a draft the user reviews, edits and shares themselves. The draft opens as an editable preview, and this is where your judgement earns its keep:

• Scope — is everything you saw on the walkthrough in there, and is anything you're not doing clearly excluded?
• Numbers — right amounts, right GST treatment, margins where you want them.
• Terms — validity, deposit, and anything conditional (“weather permitting” earns its place in writing).

Then share it. Sarah gets a professional quote the same evening she showed you the peeling window, while every other painter she called is still “getting back to her”. What makes a quote read professionally — structure, exclusions, terms — is covered in how to write a professional trade quote.

The manual alternative

The traditional pipeline: scribbles or phone photos on site, then an evening session with a laptop — open the old quote template, delete last customer's details, retype the scope from memory, fight the formatting, PDF it, email it. Call it 45 minutes if you remember everything, longer when you have to ring the owner back to re-ask something you knew perfectly well in the driveway.

That pipeline fails in a specific way: the notes and the quote are separated by hours or days, and detail leaks out in between. Talking the quote out in the ute closes that gap — capture and drafting happen in the same ninety seconds, and the evening job shrinks to a review. The underlying capture habit works for more than quotes; see voice notes for tradie admin and the voice-to-quote feature for the full picture.

Common questions