Economics · August 2026
How much does manual quotation actually cost?
A worked example in ringgit — hours × frequency × loaded rate. Every number below is an assumption you can swap for your own; the point is the method.
Quotation time is the most invisible cost in an engineering business, because it is paid in salary rather than invoices. Nobody writes a cheque for it, so nobody totals it. The exercise below totals it — deliberately using round, conservative inputs so the arithmetic stays checkable on the back of an envelope.
A worked example, in ringgit
Take a mid-sized fabrication firm, and three assumptions:
- Time per quotation: 4 hours — finding the last similar job, rebuilding the costing sheet, formatting the document.
- Volume: 12 quotations a month.
- Loaded cost: RM 60 per hour — salary plus EPF, SOCSO and overhead, not take-home pay.
First pass: 4 hours × 12 quotations = 48 hours a month. At RM 60 an hour, that is RM 2,880 a month, or RM 34,560 a year.
Now add revisions, because almost no quotation survives first contact — the customer trims scope, a material price moves, a delivery date shifts. Call it one extra hour per quotation on average: 12 more hours a month, RM 720 a month, RM 8,640 a year.
Total: RM 43,200 a year. Check it the other way: 5 hours per quotation × 12 a month × RM 60 = RM 3,600 a month; × 12 months = RM 43,200. Same answer. That is one estimator, at moderate volume, at a modest loaded rate — before anything goes wrong.
The arithmetic deliberately leaves out the costs that are real but unmeasurable from outside: the enquiry that went elsewhere because your quote arrived third; the price that drifted because it lived in someone's head; the senior engineer spending Friday formatting a Word document. We won't put invented numbers on those. The visible time cost alone is enough to reason with.
Where the hours actually go
6 manual steps · repeated for every revision
1 manual step · revisions are stored, not rebuilt
The payback arithmetic
A purpose-built estimating tool starts from RM 9,000. Suppose it cuts the 5 hours per quotation to 1 — data entry plus a review, with the calculation, formatting and revision history handled by the system. The saving is 4 hours × 12 quotations × RM 60 = RM 2,880 a month. RM 9,000 ÷ RM 2,880 ≈ 6.3, so the build pays for itself during the seventh month — and returns roughly RM 34,500 a year after that, at the same volume.
The same arithmetic also says when not to build. Three quotations a month at 2 hours each is RM 4,320 a year — nowhere near worth an RM 9,000 system, and we would tell you so. That is what the free Workflow Review is for. Every build is scoped before a fixed quote is issued; the numbers have to clear the bar first.
