Same-day quoting, and per-order margin visible for the first time
A custom furniture manufacturer replaced paper quoting and job cards with a system that prices an order in an afternoon and shows what each one earned.
Quotes that took three days and margins nobody could see
Custom-order quoting and production job tracking were handled on paper. A quote meant someone working out materials, labour and finishing by hand, usually after the workshop closed.
Three days to price an order lost work to faster competitors. Worse, because the estimate was never compared against what the job actually consumed, nobody knew which products made money and which were being sold at a loss.
Delivery dates were the third symptom. With jobs tracked on cards on a wall, a promised date was a guess about a workshop nobody could see the whole of.
Constraints
- Quoting had to be usable by the person already doing it, on the shop floor, without a costing background.
- The material and labour rates behind a quote change often, so the pricing logic had to be editable by the client rather than by us.
- Job tracking had to survive a workshop environment — quick status updates, no long forms, tolerant of being updated at the end of a shift.
Discuss, Design, Develop
The same three steps, applied to a workshop where the estimate and the actual had never been compared.
Discuss
Two weeks between the office and the workshop floor, rebuilding six past quotes by hand to find what the estimate actually depended on, and where it drifted from what the job consumed.
What you get
- Quote build-up broken into material, labour and finishing
- Job stage map for the workshop
- Rate table drafted with the owner
Design
A quote builder driven by a client-editable rate table, and job cards that mirror the stages already used on the wall. Margin was designed as a comparison of quoted against consumed, not as a separate report.
What you get
- Quote builder with editable rates
- Job card and workshop board design
- Per-order margin view
Develop
Quoting went live first, because it was the bottleneck that cost orders. Job tracking followed, and margin became meaningful once enough completed jobs had both an estimate and an actual against them.
What you get
- Quotes produced same day
- Live job board across workshop stages
- Margin per order, quoted against actual
A quote builder, a job board, and the gap between them
Quoting and production use the same order record, so the difference between what was priced and what was consumed is visible without anyone assembling it.
Screenshots require written client permission. Rate tables and margin figures are commercially sensitive and will need to be replaced with demo values.
What changed, measured
3 days → same day
Quote turnaround
Time from enquiry to a priced quote sent to the customer.
Per order
Margin visibility
Quoted cost against consumed cost, on every completed job.
100+
Jobs tracked live
Orders moving through workshop stages on one board.
Pricing logic the client owns, not us
Application
- React
- Node.js
Data
- PostgreSQL
- Versioned rate tables
Workshop use
- Tablet-friendly job board
- On-premise server
We are quoting the same day now, which we could not do before. The part we did not expect is knowing which products actually make money.
How this work is delivered
Tell us what you are trying to do. We will scope it.
Priced per project or per engagement, no public rates. A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit.