Turned site-visit notes into priced quotes in 4 minutes – cutting quoting time by 88%.

ATL Electrical’s sparkies were spending their evenings turning scribbled site-visit notes and phone photos into priced quotes, with a small estimating team re-keying every line against price books for office fit-outs, switchboard upgrades and large commercial jobs. The work was slow, repetitive and easy to get wrong: a missed sub-circuit or an out-of-date cable rate could quietly erode margin or sink a competitive tender. Across ATL’s electrical, automation and heat-pump divisions, quote turnaround had stretched to days, and on busy weeks the backlog only grew — which meant the most experienced people were spending their best hours on data entry rather than winning and delivering work.

For a Christchurch trades business running a 30-strong crew around the clock, that quoting bottleneck had become a direct handbrake on revenue. Tenders for fit-outs and commercial maintenance contracts were going out late or not at all, and the inconsistency between estimators made it hard to trust margins from one job to the next. The instinct in most firms is to buy estimating software and bend the team around it. We did the opposite.

We set out to give ATL its own operating system for estimating — a Company OS that maps onto how this firm already quotes, rather than a generic package the crew has to learn. We walked the whole workflow end to end, capturing price books, supplier rates and labour bands across the electrical, automation and heat-pump divisions, then grounded the model on hundreds of past ATL quotes. The result is a system that prices work the way ATL’s senior estimators genuinely scope it — their knowledge, encoded — not a vendor’s averages.

Inside that OS, a sparky’s voice memos, typed notes and on-site photos become a clean, itemised, priced quote covering materials, labour hours and margin. An estimator review step is mandatory, with inline edits and one-click export into simPRO and Xero, so a person signs off everything that reaches a client. Supplier price-book updates flow in automatically, so quotes draw on current material costs and flag any line that has moved since the last job. We ran it live on real tenders first, tuning the assistant’s prompts and confidence checks against estimator feedback before rolling it across the full crew.

Now quotes are drafted on-site or same-day — often written before the van is back at the yard — instead of piling up for an after-hours catch-up. Estimators have shifted from heads-down re-keying to reviewing and sharpening, noticeably lifting how many quotes they push out each week, and faster, more consistent pricing has made ATL more competitive on the commercial tenders it used to lose to slow turnaround. Because the OS keeps learning from every quote the team approves, it gets sharper the more the company uses it — and the senior tradespeople have their evenings back.