Use cases / Quoting
Use case
Quoting software — and what happens after the yes.
Plenty of tools will turn your price into a tidy PDF with a signature line. Here's a fair look at the real options — and the gap they leave: between the customer's yes and the job actually starting, someone still opens the file, chases the deposit and hopes the paperwork was right.
The real options.
Quoting software builds the priced document, sends it, lets the customer accept — often with an e-signature — and converts the yes into an invoice. Two families do this well, and for a lot of firms one of them is exactly the right answer.
For trades & field service
| Tool | Known for | Typically best for |
|---|---|---|
| Tradify | Quote-to-invoice job management in one app | UK trade businesses of a few users |
| ServiceM8 | Job management priced by job volume; has a free tier | Contractors who want unlimited users |
| Powered Now | UK-built quoting, forms & certificates, MTD baked in | Sole traders and small UK trade teams |
| YourTradebase | Simple quoting and paperwork, simple pricing | The smallest trade firms |
For proposals & e-signature
| Tool | Known for | Typically best for |
|---|---|---|
| PandaDoc | Proposal documents with e-sign; payments on higher tiers | Services firms sending frequent proposals |
| Better Proposals | UK-founded proposals; sign then pay on every plan | Small services firms on a budget |
| Ignition | Engagement letters where signing triggers billing and payment | Accountants & professional services |
| Signable | UK pay-as-you-go e-signature, per envelope | Firms that only need the signature |
A snapshot, not a ranking — features and pricing change, so check current specs. Two notes: you may already own this — Xero and QuickBooks both include quoting, Zoho Invoice is genuinely free, and ServiceM8's free tier covers one user and thirty jobs a month — so switch on what you have before buying anything. And if your quoting is a standard flow — price it, send it, sign it, invoice it — one of these fits; use it. (Mid-market sales teams configuring complex deals want a CPQ suite — Salesforce Revenue Cloud, DealHub — a different aisle entirely.) This page is for the firms where the yes is supposed to start something.
Where the quoting tools stop.
The document is the easy part. The wall is everything the yes is supposed to trigger:
- Acceptance doesn't open the job. The customer signs — and then someone retypes the same name, address and price into the job system, the diary and the accounts package. The re-keying starts at the exact moment the work is won.
- The signature isn't money. Pure e-sign tools stop at the signature, and in several proposal tools payment collection is gated to the higher tiers. In most trades apps the card payment belongs to the invoice at the end — not to the yes, where the deposit should be.
- The legal paperwork isn't the template's problem. Price a consumer's job in their home and the Consumer Contracts Regulations put obligations on the document — a cancellation notice, a written express request before early starts. A generic template leaves that to you, and the cost of getting it wrong is in the next section.
- Your pricing lives in your head, not the tool. Day rates, materials markups, quantity breaks, the price that depends on which crew and which postcode — a generic quoting box makes you do that arithmetic somewhere else and paste the result in.
The cost of standing still
The moment they accept, obligations start.
Acceptance is a legal event, and the paper trail you do or don't have decides how expensive the bad days get:
Price a consumer's job in their home and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give them 14 days to cancel. Miss the required cancellation notice and that window can stretch by twelve months — and if work starts early without the customer's express request on a durable medium, the regulations say the customer bears no cost for what's already been done. Skipping the notice altogether is a criminal offence. (CCR 2013, reg 31) (reg 36) (reg 19)
Citizens Advice logged 36,534 complaints about home maintenance and improvement work in the year to June 2025 — more than 700 a week, over half of them about substandard work. When a dispute lands, the signed scope — what was priced, what was included, what was agreed — is the paper that settles it. (Citizens Advice, 2025)
Polling by Opinium for Citizens Advice in 2026 found a quarter of homeowners had problems with their most recent repair job — and among those who paid extra to fix earlier work or were overcharged, the median loss was £750. That's the recent memory many customers carry when your price arrives — a clear, signed scope is how a good firm looks different from the one they're still paying for. (Opinium for Citizens Advice, 2026)
What we'd build instead.
A signing flow where the yes actually does the work — shaped to your firm, live in weeks, yours to own:
Priced from your rules, not your memory
Day rates, materials, quantity breaks, the margins you actually want — your price book built into the flow, so the document is assembled from the same rules every time, whoever sends it.
The yes that opens the job
The moment the customer signs, the client file opens, billing is set up, the job lands in the diary and onboarding starts — nobody retypes the details the customer just confirmed.
The deposit in the same tap
We'd build deposit capture into the acceptance itself — signed and paid in one motion, not signed now and chased later. And HMRC's VAT Guide is blunt: receive payment before the supply is made and the tax point is when you receive it — so the system would account for the deposit the day it lands, not at quarter-end. (VAT Notice 700, s14.2.2)
The legal paperwork, baked in
For consumer work, the cancellation notice and the durable-medium express request would live inside the document the customer signs — the regulations from the section above, satisfied by design instead of remembered under pressure.
The unanswered ones, followed up
The price that got no reply would be chased politely on a schedule — and the moment it's accepted or declined, the chasing would stop. The same rails as invoice chasing, pointed at the other end of the job.
Every one is a capability we can build now with AI-assisted development — not a promise your firm needs all of it. We start where your yes leaks the most.
Where we've done it
We've built a signature that opens the file.
On the operating platform we built for a UK firm, a signed proposal becomes a live client on its own: the engagement is signed electronically, and the client's file, billing and onboarding are created from that same signature — work that replaced the firm's proposal tool outright, one of five subscriptions the platform retired.
Fair questions
What firms ask us about quoting.
Are electronic signatures legally binding in the UK?
Yes. The Law Commission's 2019 report on electronic execution — for England and Wales — concluded that an electronic signature is capable in law of being used to execute a document, provided the signer intends to authenticate it and any formalities are met, and the government accepted that position in 2020. Accepting a price is a simple contract with no special formalities, so a customer signing on their phone is as bound as one signing in ink.
Is there free quoting software?
Genuinely, yes. Zoho Invoice is free and includes estimates that convert to invoices; ServiceM8 has a free tier for one user and thirty jobs a month; and if you already pay for Xero or QuickBooks, quoting and estimates are built in — switch them on before buying anything. For many small firms that's the whole answer.
What's the best quoting software for a trades business?
Tradify, ServiceM8, Powered Now and YourTradebase all do the job well — price on site, send it, convert to an invoice. If one of them fits how you work, use it. The question changes when the yes needs to do more than make a PDF: open the job, brief the team, take the deposit and carry the legal paperwork for consumer work.
Can a customer cancel after accepting my price?
For consumer work agreed away from your premises — the kitchen-table job — usually yes: the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give 14 days. Handled properly, with the cancellation notice given and a written express request before starting early, that's a clean, short window. Handled badly, the window can stretch by twelve months, and work started without the express request can be free work. The paperwork belongs inside the signing flow, not in a drawer.
How much does a custom quoting flow cost?
It's a monthly retainer, not a big up-front project — tiers from £2,500 to £6,500 a month, with a free process audit first and an optional fixed-price discovery sprint credited against month one. You own the code and the data from day one.
Where this goes next
- For trades & field service → — price it, sign it, deposit taken, in one link.
- For legal practices → — a signed client-care letter that opens the matter itself.
- Invoice chasing that runs itself → — the other end of the same money pipeline.
- The 20-question self-audit → — ranks which of your processes could run themselves. Free, two minutes, no email.
Start here
Bring us the last yes you won.
A free process audit is thirty minutes. Walk us through what happened between the customer agreeing and the work starting — every retype, chase and crossed finger — and you'll leave with a written map of how acceptance could trigger all of it automatically, whether or not we ever work together.
No pitch deck, no obligation. The map is yours either way.