Free tool
In a building materials store, someone reads the customer's list, looks each item up in the catalogue and builds the quote. It is work that shows up in no report. This calculator puts a number on it — with your data, in your browser.
Calculator
Five fields, no sign-up. The maths runs in your browser and nothing is sent to us — you can use your real figures.
Your team spends
108
hours a month putting quotes together
The figures already in the fields are an example of an average store, not a measurement of the trade. Replace them with yours. A month has 4.33 weeks — 52 divided by 12.
What's left out
The sum above measures one thing: the time to build a quote once. Four costs stay out of it because nobody can put a stopwatch on them — and they are the ones that show at the end of the month.
The customer asks to swap a brand, fix a quantity, drop two items. The work starts almost from scratch, and it rarely makes it into anyone's estimate of what a quote costs.
Whoever is building asks three or four stores and buys from the one that answers first. Your store spends the same effort on every quote knowing only a share becomes a sale.
Quotes don't get built in a free block of the day. They get built in the middle of counter service, between two phone calls — and every restart costs more than the clock shows.
A quote on paper, in a private chat, on the phone of someone who is away. The store doesn't know how many were asked for, how many closed, or which item ran short over and over.
Where we come in
What eats the hours isn't setting a price or negotiating. It is reading the list and finding each item in a catalogue where the name is almost never the one the customer wrote. That part is repetition, and repetition is what Tablia takes on.
The final word stays with the salesperson. The quote arrives built, with anything missing flagged, and only reaches the customer once someone at the store has checked it.
Reading the list in whatever format it arrives
PDF, photo, spreadsheet, document or plain text. Handwritten lists are not accepted.
Finding by meaning, not by matching text
The item is looked up for what it is, even when it is catalogued under another name. The alternative names the store records are part of the search.
Flagging what it did not find
Missing items appear counted, with the customer's original wording. Nothing drops out of the quote quietly.
Using the catalogue the store already has
Import comes from the CSV, XLS or XLSX file that already exists, with assisted column mapping. There is no catalogue to rebuild.
Questions
All of them come from you. The tool only does arithmetic on what you type: requests per week, minutes per quote, people on the team, working hours and hourly cost. There is no market average built in and no estimate of ours. The figures shown filled in are an example so the page arrives working.
No. The maths runs entirely in your browser, in JavaScript, and the page has no submit form. Nothing you type leaves your computer or is stored.
Time three ordinary quotes, from the moment the list arrives to the document being ready to send, and use the average. Include the time spent looking items up one by one in the catalogue, which is usually the longest part and the most underestimated.
No. It means the store receives more quote requests than the team can put together within working hours. In practice that shows up as a queue, overtime, or requests left unanswered — and a customer who isn't answered buys from the store that answered.
Tablia reads the customer's list in whatever format it arrives, looks each item up in your store's catalogue by meaning and builds the quote from what it found, flagging what was missing. Checking and sending stays with a person at the store: human review is part of the design, not an optional step. How much of your time that gives back depends on your catalogue and your volume, which is what the demo shows using a list of yours.
In the demo we use a real quote request from your store and your own catalogue. It is the only honest way to answer how much of the time above comes back to the team.
Book your demo