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 50 per hour — salary plus EPF, SOCSO and overhead, not take-home pay.
First pass: 4 hours × 12 quotations = 48 hours a month. At RM 50 an hour, that is RM 2,400 a month, or RM 28,800 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 600 a month, RM 7,200 a year.
Total: RM 36,000 a year. Check it the other way: 5 hours per quotation × 12 a month × RM 50 = RM 3,000 a month; × 12 months = RM 36,000. 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
How to work out the payback
Now set a build cost against that. Suppose a custom-built estimating tool 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 50 = RM 2,400 a month, and RM 28,800 a year after that, at the same volume. We quote each build per project, so divide our quotation by RM 2,400 to see the payback in months.
The same arithmetic also says when not to build. Three quotations a month at 2 hours each is RM 3,600 a year — a saving too small to carry a custom build, and we would tell you so. That is what the free 30-minute call is for. Every build is quoted for the job, after the diagnostic; the numbers have to clear the bar first.
