Your Quoting Process is Bleeding More Profit Than You Think

I have spent over 25 years working with print businesses, and I can tell you that the single most common scene I walk into looks something like this: The owner is sitting at their desk, or more often standing at the counter, working out a price on whatever’s closest to hand. It’s usually a scrap of paper like the back of a delivery note. Sometimes literally the back of a cigarette packet. They’re pulling numbers from memory, adjusting on gut feel, and giving the customer a price before anyone’s had a chance to check whether it actually makes the business any money.

The figures might be close. They might even be right some of the time. But here’s the thing. Nobody knows. There’s no record of how the price was built. No way to check the margin after the job’s done, and when three different people in the business quote the same job three different ways, you’ve dumped your pricing strategy and replaced it with a lucky dip.

The Real Cost of Winging It

Most owners I speak to think their biggest challenge is speed. Getting quotes out fast enough, turning jobs around quickly, keeping the workflow moving, and yes, speed matters. But it’s not where the real money is leaking.

The biggest profit leak in most print businesses isn’t speed, it's accuracy, repeatability, and the jobs that simply fall through the cracks. The quote that never got followed up. The finishing costs that weren’t included. The job that got invoiced at the wrong price because someone remembered the rate from six months ago, or worse, the job that never got invoiced at all.

I see it more often than you’d think. A business running flat out, the team working long hours, the owner convinced they should be doing better than they are, and when we dig into it, the answer isn’t about working harder. It’s about plugging the holes in a process that was never really a process in the first place.

This is cigarette-packet pricing, and it’s a dangerous way to run a company.

What a Grown-up Quoting Process Actually Looks Like

Let me walk you through what changes when a business moves from guessing to knowing.

First, you build standard product templates. Your top 20 products, the bread-and-butter work that makes up the bulk of your orders, should each have a pre-built quote template.

That template captures every variable: stock, size, quantity breaks, finishing options, machine time, and labour. When a customer rings up for 5,000 flyers on 350gsm silk with a matt laminate, you’re not starting from scratch every time. You’re selecting a template, adjusting the specifics, and producing a consistent, accurate quote in minutes.

Second, you introduce time-based costing. Every machine in your shop has a cost per hour to run. Every finishing process takes a measurable amount of time. When those numbers are built into your system, you stop guessing what a job costs to produce and start knowing. That shift alone changes the way you price.

Third, you track materials and finishes properly. Stock costs fluctuate. Finishing prices change. If your quotes are based on what you remember paying for a laminate six months ago rather than what it actually costs today, you’re leaving profit on the table every single time.

Then there’s the process around the quote itself. A proper system gives you approval workflows, so quotes go out checked and consistent. It handles deposit requests upfront, so you’re not carrying all the risk – it keeps a full job history, so when a repeat customer comes back for the same order they placed in March, you can pull it up in seconds rather than trying to remember what you charged them.

You Don’t Need to Be Big Enough for a System. You Need a System to Get Bigger

This is the objection I hear most often: “We’re too small for an MIS” or “We’ve only got eight people; we don’t need all that.” I understand the hesitation. The word “system” sounds expensive, complicated, and like something designed for businesses much larger than yours. But let me reframe that for you. If you’re the person who holds all the pricing knowledge in your head, you are the single point of failure in your business. If you go on holiday and your phone starts ringing with questions about how to price a job, you don’t have a structured business. You have a business that can’t function without you in the room.

A quoting system isn’t about turning your shop into a corporate operation. It’s about buying back your own hours and protecting your margin. It’s the difference between running a business and just being busy. The moment you democratise that data, the moment you give your team the ability to produce accurate, consistent quotes without needing to come and find you for every job that walks through the door, you’ve taken the first real step toward a business that doesn’t depend entirely on you.

The reality is the tools available today aren’t the clunky, six-figure installations they used to be. Products like Accura, Clarity, and PrintLogic are designed specifically for businesses your size. They don’t need a dedicated IT team to run. They need someone willing to put in the groundwork to set them up properly.

Start Small, Stay Consistent, Measure Everything

Here’s a 90-day plan that I’ve seen work time and again.

In the first two weeks, identify your top 20 products. Not your entire catalogue. Just the items that make up the majority of your revenue. These are the ones worth getting right first.

Over the next month, configure your system around those 20 products. Build the templates. Input your actual costs, your machine rates, your material prices. Resist the urge to customise everything to perfection before you start using it. Configure before you customise. Get the foundations right and refine as you go.

From day 30, start quoting every one of those top 20 products through the system – no exceptions. If you let people bypass it for the “quick jobs” or the “easy ones,” you don’t have a process. You have a preference, and preferences don’t protect your margin.

At 90 days, pull a margin report. Compare what you quoted against what the jobs actually cost to produce. I guarantee you’ll find jobs where you were undercharging. You’ll find products where the margin was thinner than you assumed and you’ll have the data to do something about it.

That’s the shift. From guessing to knowing. From reactive to proactive. From cigarette-packet pricing to genuine profit control.

The Conversation That Starts It

None of this is complicated. But it does require a decision to stop doing things the way you’ve always done them. The owners who make that shift, who put in the groundwork and enforce the process, are the ones who stop bleeding money on jobs they should be profiting from.

If you’re ready to move from guessing to knowing and want a straight-talking conversation about where to start, get in touch.