Introduction
For many businesses, quotes are the gateway for new customers and revenue. That means if your quoting process is slow, tedious, error-prone, confusing or unprofessional, this will be your potential customer’s initial impression of your business and the bottleneck restricting your overall success. It also means that selecting the right tool for your quoting process can be a major lever for increasing revenue, maximizing profit, and decreasing stress in the office.
So what is the best quoting software for your business to use? Is it Excel, Google Sheets, Quickbooks, or SaaS solutions like PandaDoc or Jobber? There’s a lot of confusing (and conveniently self-serving) advice on this topic available on the internet. That’s why we’re going to cut through the clutter and provide an easy to follow, detailed guide to help you make the right decision with your best interest in mind.
Overview of Options
When it comes to generating quotes for your business, you have 3 main options to choose from:
1. Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions like PandaDoc, Jobber and QuoteWerks. There are many options to choose from and each one has it’s own pros and cons. The best ones are fairly intuitive to use, provide access anywhere with a cloud-based solution and offer some customization for your business.
2. Custom Spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets). Much to the chagrin of new SaaS startups, Excel continues to be an extremely popular choice for managing quotes, invoices and price sheets especially for small to medium sized businesses. But like any solution, it’s not a one-size fits all and is not the best fit for every business.
3. Spreadsheet Templates. Pre-built Excel and Google Sheets quoting templates also remain a relatively popular solution, at least as a starting point for small businesses.
In addition to the options listed above, some businesses are still operating manually using pen, paper and calculator. This information may then be handed to a customer in paper format, or may be transferred into a basic quote generator like PayPal, Quickbooks or Stripe. This method is not recommended for most businesses and will not be discussed in detail here.
How to Decide
Which Option is Best for You and Your Business?
So which quoting solution is best for your business? Here is the answer no one wants to tell you. It depends. The rest of this guide is going to help you understand the pro’s and con’s to each option more thoroughly and will give you an easy-to-use decision matrix for determining which route to go for your business.
Understanding Your Priorities and Preferences
One of the first things you need to do is get some clarity surrounding what is important to you as a business owner/manager. We’ll start with some helpful questions to guide you through the process. Later you’ll see which solutions are best for you based on how you answer these and other questions.
Rigid vs. Flexible
- Are you okay with substantially changing the way you do things now to conform to a pre-built template someone else has created?
- Do you mind having limitations and restrictions around how your quotes come together and what the end result looks like? Or is it important to you to have the flexibility to structure everything so that it perfectly fits your business and preferences?
- Are you likely to change the way you do things down the road, or have you got a process figured out that is unlikely change in the future?
- Does your solution need to be ready to scale up, or are you fine with something that works at your current scale with a little upward buffer?
Niche and Detailed vs. Generic and Broad
- Does your business operate in a broad market where a generic quoting system would do the trick, or a niche market with more complex quoting rules?
- Is your method for quoting projects simple like a list of pre-defined materials or labor units at a single price? Or is it more complex with cascading options, variable pricing or unique quoting rules like ‘item A and item B can never be quoted together’ or ‘anytime A is quoted, items B and C should also be added’?
Pricing
- Do you need something as cheap as possible (maybe even free) just to get by, or are you ready to invest in a solution that can help your business get to the next level?
- Do you like the idea of paying $50 – $500/month for SaaS, or would you prefer to have a one-time expense upfront and have an asset that you own and can continue using indefinitely?
SaaS Options
What is SaaS?
In simple terms, SaaS (Software as a Service) is a software suite provided via the internet and typically used on your web browser, though some offer desktop programs as well. Most SaaS companies use a subscription model where you pay a monthly or annual fee, and in exchange are given access to use the software for your company’s needs.
Benefits to Using SaaS Quoting Solutions
As mentioned earlier, good SaaS solutions are mostly intuitive once you spend some time learning them. They tend to provide a good user experience which allows you to build quotes much more quickly than some alternatives, while getting a professional looking product at the end to share with your customers and producing reliable quotes you can count on. Additionally, many of them provide options to integrate with other platforms like payment and accounting services (PayPal, Stripe, QBO).
Another reason to consider using SaaS for your business quotations is if your company needs to have many different users with user-friendly mobile and desktop access. Not all SaaS options provide this, and most will have different pricing based on user counts, but in general SaaS may be the best fit if your company needs to accommodate 5 or more integrated (rather than stand-alone) users.
SaaS solutions tend to be great for business where a one-size-fits-all generic quoting system will do the trick just fine and for business owners who are not very particular about the way things are done— meaning they don’t mind using a somewhat rigid system with restrictions set by someone else opposed to being able to decide how everything looks and what features they have. SaaS solutions can also be very attractive for specific industries where a SaaS platform has been tailored to meet the needs of that industry.
Drawbacks to Using SaaS Quoting Solutions
One potential concern with SaaS solutions is that there is no guarantee the SaaS you select will not go out of business or be bought out by another company which substantially changes or discontinues it. It’s important to remember that many SaaS startups have an exit strategy— their whole goal is to get big enough to garner the attention of a major platform who will buy them out. Ultimately, you are at their mercy when this happens, so when possible it may be best to select a company that has been around for a while and has a very large and well-established customer base.
Another problem with SaaS solutions is a lack of customizability. If your business has a unique quoting process, complex quoting rules or multiple levels of products and materials, for example, you may feel like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The way SaaS companies work is by providing a relatively generic solution that works for a large number of their customers. If you happen to be one of those, that can be great. If not, the experience can be frustrating and costly as you try a variety of SaaS solutions only to find out none of them are configured to accommodate your unique needs.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, most are affordable and provide a low barrier of entry since you pay monthly rather than a lump sum upfront. However, they do require you to pay monthly (or annually) for as long as you want to use their service, and they can change their pricing any time. Depending on your needs and the SaaS solution you select, you can expect to invest anywhere from $6k – $20k over the next 10 years.
Custom Spreadsheets
What is a Custom Spreadsheet?
A custom built spreadsheet quoting system is what you get when you hire a spreadsheet expert to build a custom quoting tool for you using Excel or Google Sheets.
Benefits to Using a Custom Spreadsheet Quoting System
One reason so many business owners prefer this option is that it doesn’t require them to change their whole system to conform to someone else’s structure. Instead, you get a quoting system that is tailored to your exact needs with virtually no limitations. You can decide exactly what tools are available to you, how they work, where they are placed and what the end result looks like. You can also integrate your tool with other services like PayPal, Stripe and other spreadsheets.
Another big advantage is that it doesn’t require you or your staff to learn new software and because Microsoft Excel has been around for almost 4 decades and is one of the most widely used business software platforms around, you can rest assured it isn’t going anywhere.
Excel also provides virtually unlimited import and export capabilities and can easily be integrated with other spreadsheets and some other platforms your business may be using. Because it is completely customizable, Excel can be used to extend your business’s quoting system to also include KPIs or metrics dashboards all in once place.
Drawbacks to Custom Spreadsheet Quoting Solutions
While integration between spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets and other CRM, accounting and payment platforms is typically possible, it can be expensive to implement and may not be as seamless as the more robust integration capabilities of a well-developed SaaS solution.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, you pay for the tool to be developed initially and then have an asset that you own and that gives your business a competitive advantage. Depending on the complexity of the system needed, pricing typically ranges from $1,000 – $4,000.
Summary
In summary, using a custom spreadsheet for your business quoting system is ideal for business owners who are operating in a niche or industry that is not well-suited to the more generic SaaS options available and for those who want to have maximum control over how the tool works and what features it has. Backed by visual basic programming, custom-built Excel programs can be extremely powerful and versatile.
If you are interested in exploring this option in detail, or speaking with a consultant who can help you decide which tool is best for you and your business, click the button below to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts.
Excel Templates
What is an Excel Template?
Pre-built Excel templates are templates you can find online which have been pre-designed and developed as quoting tools for businesses. Some are free, while others are paid. These files can be downloaded directly from the internet, or may be provided to you in an email after signing up or issuing payment.
Benefits to Using Excel Quoting Templates
The advantage to using pre-built Excel templates for your quoting system is that they are cheap and easy to find. If your business quoting system is extremely simple and generic, you may be able to find a great template for under $100 and never have to pay another dime, while using something that does everything you need.
Another potential advantage is that since these templates are built using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, they are technically customizable. We’ll explore the difficulty of customizing them in the next section.
Drawbacks to Using Excel Quoting Templates
Aside from the most basic and generic quoting needs, this option is typically a disappointing one. Every template will have it’s restrictions and they can be very challenging to customize on your own if you do not have advanced Excel or Google Sheets knowledge and experience.
Additionally, if something breaks or is not working properly with the template, then your options for getting support will be limited at best.
Lastly, because the person creating the template did not have you or your business specifically in mind when doing so, there may be hidden issues that result in errors due to a mismatch in the design of the template and your use of it.
Warning: If you decide to try this route, be sure to only download and use files from trustworthy sources. Excel files can contain malicious code that can harm your computer.
Pricing
Pricing for templates can vary from free ($0) to $250, but are typically less than $100.
Summary
This option can be good for very basic needs on a small budget. Otherwise, it is not usually the best fit due to the limitations on customization, features and support.
If you think this might be the right solution for you, check out my blog post here, where I share my favorite free and paid quote templates.
Decision Matrix
In this blog post, we’ve covered how to select the best quoting system for your business as well as the pro’s and con’s associated with the three most popular options on the market. To simplify the decision process for you, I’ve compiled a decision matrix below that you can use as a guide to select the option that best fits your preferences and priorities.
Conclusion
Selecting the right quoting solution for your business is a critical decision. Getting the right fit for your quoting needs will save you time, reduce stress and provide you with one of the tools you need to operate your business effectively and impress your customers.
There are many solutions available, with the three most common falling into the categories of SaaS, custom spreadsheets and spreadsheet templates. While many articles are written to steer their readers in a particular direction, the purpose of this blog was to provide you with a guide for figuring out which solution is the best fit for you and your business based on your unique needs and preferences. In this case, there is no one solution that is best for everyone.
