Quote Systems for Electricians
A £266 job cannot carry a thirty-minute quote
The volume problem nobody else on this site has
A full rewire is £3,990. An EV charger installation, £1,015. A consumer unit changeover, £710. A new lighting circuit, £581. An EICR, £266.
Look at the bottom of that list. An electrician quotes constantly, and a large proportion of what gets quoted is worth a few hundred pounds.
If producing a quote takes half an hour of an evening, a £266 EICR cannot bear it. So one of two things happens, and both are expensive.
Either you quote everything properly and lose four or five hours a week of unpaid evening time to documents worth two or three hundred pounds each. Or — far more commonly — you give a number over the phone, write nothing down, and discover later that what you priced and what they expected were different things.
The trade’s answer to this is usually to stop quoting the small stuff formally. That is understandable and it costs money in two directions: disputes on the small jobs, and slow quotes on the big ones because there is no system to speed them up.
What an electrician actually needs is a quote that takes four minutes, and that is entirely achievable because your work is far more standardised than you probably credit.
Why your trade templates better than any other
Most of what you do repeats. A consumer unit changeover in a three-bed semi is broadly the same job in every three-bed semi. An EICR on a two-bedroom flat takes a known time. A charger installation varies mainly by cable run and whether the board can take it.
That means a priced template library covers a large share of your quoting, and each new job becomes a matter of picking the right template and adjusting two or three lines.
A rate card behind it. Point rates, circuit rates, day rates, testing rates, batch rates for multiple properties. Once those exist, pricing is arithmetic rather than judgement.
Standard exclusions, written once. Making good, plastering, chasing walls, access to the loft, asbestos. Almost every dispute in domestic electrical work is about one of those five things and every one of them can be dealt with in a sentence that appears on every quote automatically.
Batch pricing for agents, so twelve EICRs is one document with a per-property rate rather than twelve separate quotes.
A same-day standard. With templates, most quotes can go out from the van before you have driven home, and in semi-urgent work that speed wins a meaningful share of jobs on its own.
The ratio
A rewire is £3,990. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One rewire covers more than six years.
On time: five hours a week of evening quoting is roughly two hundred and fifty hours a year. Templates typically cut that by two-thirds. Whether you value the recovered time as chargeable work or as evenings, it is the largest single return available from a system rather than from marketing.
What we’d actually build
A template library covering your fifteen or twenty commonest jobs, priced from your own rate card.
A rate card you can actually maintain, so prices move once rather than job by job.
A standard exclusions block that appears on everything without being remembered.
A batch quote format for agents and landlords with multiple properties.
A same-day issuing habit, from a phone, with a follow-up prompt attached.
Win-rate reporting, because most electricians have no idea what proportion of their quotes convert or at what value.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Most quotes issued the same day, from site
- Small jobs priced in writing rather than verbally
- One rate card driving everything, updated in one place
- Exclusions stated on every document without anybody thinking about it
- A visible win rate, split between domestic and commercial
The mistakes we see most
Pricing small jobs over the phone. It saves four minutes and produces most of the disagreements in this trade.
No exclusions. Making good is the single most common argument in domestic electrical work and it is solved by one sentence.
Rebuilding every quote from scratch. Your work repeats far more than it varies.
Never measuring the win rate. Without it, pricing decisions are guesses about what the market will bear.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The rate card, built from what you actually charge rather than what you think you charge. This is usually a useful exercise in its own right.
Weeks 5–8. The template library and the exclusions block, which together produce the four-minute quote.
Weeks 9–12. Batch pricing for commercial clients, the same-day habit, and win-rate reporting.
At ninety days the measure is how long a standard quote takes to produce. Under five minutes is achievable and it changes how much you are willing to quote for.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Quote templates hold your rate card, so pricing a consumer unit changeover is a matter of choosing the job type rather than rebuilding the document.
Quotes issue against the client and property, which is what makes a twelve-property batch one document rather than twelve, and what puts the previous certificate in front of you while you price.
And because quotes carry outcomes, the win rate is a number on a screen rather than an impression — including how it differs between domestic and agent work.
Two prices for two different buyers
There is a second thing a template library makes possible, and most electricians never get to it because they are still writing every quote from scratch.
Your domestic and commercial work should not be priced the same way, and at the moment it almost certainly is.
A homeowner buys one job. They compare your figure against two others, they have no idea what is reasonable, and what reassures them is a clear scope and a fixed price. They are relatively insensitive to a fifty pound difference and very sensitive to uncertainty.
A letting agent buys volume. They are comparing a per-property rate across a portfolio, they know exactly what the market rate is because three contractors have quoted them this year, and a five pound difference on an EICR multiplied by forty properties is a real number to them. What they want is a batch rate, a turnaround time and a certificate that arrives quickly.
Those are different pricing strategies, not different documents. The domestic rate carries the margin. The commercial rate carries the volume and is won on the schedule around it rather than on the figure.
Running one rate card across both is how electricians end up either too expensive for portfolios or too cheap for homeowners, usually without ever realising which. Two rate cards, one system, and the win rate for each measured separately.
Questions electricians ask
Is it worth quoting a £266 job in writing? With a four-minute template, yes. Without one, that is exactly why the trade stopped doing it.
Will templates make me underprice? The opposite, usually. A rate card exposes the jobs you have been pricing from habit rather than arithmetic.
How many templates do I need? Fifteen to twenty covers most electricians’ work. The rest are adjustments.
What about commercial tenders? Different document and a different process, and the rate card underneath it is the same.
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