How to write a quote for a job

When honing in on a final sale, it’s important to create a clear, detailed quote — a fixed price for a job within a specific time frame — for your customer. In addition to being timely, it also needs to look as professional as possible (since it’s a direct representation of your product/service and overall brand). Good quotes demonstrate attention to detail, while bad ones leave out vital information. And since preparing and sending a job quote is typically your last chance to make a sale, you need to make sure yours are good ones.

So, as a quick exercise, whether you’re at home or at the office, find the most recent quote you sent to a client. Look it over and give it a quick but thorough review. Is it a neat, understandable, and well-organized document? Or is it illegible, sloppy, and riddled with misspellings? Somewhere in between?

To increase your chances of securing projects — especially profitable ones with high-quality clients — here are five tips on how to write a quote for a job.

How to write a quote for a job

Hands down, one of the easiest ways to build trust with your prospective customers and demonstrate the value of the service you’re providing is by giving them a clean, well-ordered job quote.

Luckily, not only is it possible to create a professional job quote with online form builder Jotform, but it’s also easy, whether you use their wide variety of premade quote templates or design yours wholly from scratch. Jotform is powerful, fully customizable, and, best of all, completely code free — enabling you to create stunning, branded job quotes in mere minutes, regardless of your programming experience. (You can also use Jotform to determine, track, and manage job estimates for clients, decreasing the chances of any project tasks falling through the cracks.)

In addition to having the word “quote” somewhere on the document — ideally somewhere at the top — your quote template should include your business name and logo. It should also include these five elements:

1. A quote number

By assigning a quote number — which, like an invoice number, is a unique, short number that helps keep you organized — and including it on your quote, it’s much easier for your team to track and manage all your quotes over time, especially if you use some type of customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Like the word “quote,” the quote number should be clearly visible somewhere at the top of the template. And though your quote number can include both numbers and letters (perhaps a client’s initials), it shouldn’t be longer than five digits.

2. Contact information — both yours and your client’s

If your quote doesn’t include important client information, how will you know who it’s for? So, to stay organized and get the draft in the right hands, be sure to include important details on it like your client’s name, address, email address, and phone number.

And don’t forget to add your contact information as well — like your business name, address, phone number, email address, and fax number — to make it easy and convenient for your customer to reach you with any questions or concerns.

3. The date of issue

By including the date of issue (which will match the day you send the quote to your prospective client) on the quote, you’re simultaneously documenting when you sent it and starting the clock on when they need to make a decision whether to move forward with your business. To this end, make sure to also include a timeline on the quote — such as “Valid for 30 days” — to demonstrate this limited-time offer. After all, as supplier costs, worker availability, and gas prices fluctuate, so, too, can your prices.

4. An itemized list of your products/services

When creating this itemized list for your quote, it’s important to follow these best practices:

• List each product/service you’ll be providing, including quantities, unit prices, total price per item, subtotal (i.e., without applicable taxes) and grand total (with tax).
• Include any extra fees that you haven’t previously laid out or discussed, such as demolition fees when you’re renovating an old bathroom.
• Consider separating the labor and materials costs, depending on how detailed and extensive the prospective project is.

5. Terms and conditions

Lastly, when it comes to understanding how to write a quote for a job, you can’t forget to include the unexciting, yet necessary, terms and conditions that lay out the responsibilities of both vendor and customer. These can include payment terms (when and how the client will pay you), the cost of additional or overtime work, and unforeseen changes to the project (such as inclement weather that can delay the projected time frame).

While this level of detail may seem a bit excessive, remember job quotes are, more often than not, the last way to impress a prospect before they decide whether to work with you. And though job price and time frame are two of the most important elements of a purchase decision, being clear, organized, and transparent on a job quote certainly can’t hurt.

By implementing these five tips — and using a powerful platform like Jotform — your next quote can not only be easy to create, but also effective in landing you the account of your dreams.

Photo by Anna Shvets