Most owners count the hours a slow quoting method eats. Almost none count the enquiries it never gets to on a busy day — and that second number is usually several times the first. This works both out from eleven figures you already know, and shows every line of the arithmetic.
The cost of standing still is what you pay every year for keeping a quoting method that lives in someone's head or a spreadsheet. It is two numbers added together: the hours the method eats, expressed as the hire you would need to absorb them, and the enquiries it physically cannot get to on a busy day, expressed as revenue you never competed for. Change any figure and the answer moves.
In two halves, because they are two different kinds of number and owners usually only see one of them.
Quotes a year is your quiet-day volume across the quiet days plus your busy-day volume across the busy days — weighted separately, because averaging them hides the peak. Multiply by minutes per quote for the hours the current method consumes, do the same for a systemised method, and the difference is the hours returned. Costed at the hourly rate that is the wage saving; add employer on-costs and it becomes the honest figure: the hire you would have to make to keep doing it the old way at today's volume. A saved hour costs a wage; a hired hour costs a wage plus everything on top.
This is the half almost nobody counts. Take the hours a day one person can realistically spend quoting and divide by minutes per quote. That is the number of quotes they can physically produce. On a peak day, every enquiry above it did not get a quote, or got one late enough not to matter. Multiply the unquoted enquiries across the peak days by your win rate and your average order value, and you have the revenue you never competed for. It is not an admin cost. It is turnover that went to whoever answered faster.
Because nobody knows that number, and a guessed input is where calculations like this quietly fall apart. Capacity, on the other hand, is arithmetic. If you have three hours to quote and each one takes fifteen minutes, you can do twelve. If seventeen come in, five did not get done. No estimate, no optimism — and if anything it is conservative, because it ignores every other interruption in the day.
It also produces the sentence that changes the conversation: on a busy day, your method needs more hours than exist. Once you can see that, hiring stops looking like the answer. A second person gives you six hours and the same fifteen minutes a quote; you have doubled the wage bill to move the ceiling, not remove it.
Any method where the price comes out of a catalogue or a price book rather than out of memory or a spreadsheet, and the quote is built in the same place the order will live. It does not have to be bespoke. At the wholesale nursery it was an existing WooCommerce catalogue feeding a CRM tailored into order management, connected with off-the-shelf tools. At the fencing contractor it was a survey tool that priced the fence as the surveyor drew it. Both went from around fifteen minutes to two or three, and the second thing both removed was the ceiling on who was allowed to quote.
The figures the tool loads with are the nursery's own. Nine enquiries a day in the quiet period, seventeen in the season, sixty busy days in a 250-day year: 2,730 quotes. At fifteen minutes each that is 683 hours; from a system at three minutes it is 137, so 546 hours come back — £8,190 in wages, or about £9,700 as the hire that would otherwise be needed once on-costs are added. Three quoting hours a day at fifteen minutes is a capacity of twelve; seventeen arrive, so five a day and 300 a year go unquoted. At a 25% win rate and a £1,500 average order that is £112,500 never competed for. Total: about £122,000 a year, for a change that took three to four months and no custom code.
Send it to whoever signs the cheques — the link button copies your exact result. Then time your quotes for a week rather than estimating, and run it again with the real figure; it is almost always longer than the owner thinks. If the peak-day warning is showing, the constraint in your business is capacity, not effort, and the fix is the price book, not the headcount.
If you want it found rather than estimated, that is what the operations audit does: two days inside the working week, timing where the hours actually go, and a costed list of what could be collapsed. It is guaranteed to find at least ten recoverable hours a week with evidence, or it is refunded. The other calculators cover the hire, the charge-out rate, the margin leak and the supplier ceiling, and the short version of the whole method is on the byHoratio homepage.
It is what a business pays each year for not fixing a slow process — in this tool, quoting. It has two parts: the wage cost of the hours the slow method consumes, expressed as the hire you would need to absorb them, and the revenue you never compete for because on busy days the method cannot physically produce enough quotes. Most owners only ever count the first part, and the second is usually several times larger.
Because nobody knows that number, and guessing it is where these calculations usually go wrong. Instead the tool takes the hours a day one person can realistically spend quoting, divides by your minutes per quote, and gets the number of quotes that person can produce. Anything above that on a peak day did not get quoted — or got quoted late, which in a competitive week is the same thing. It is a derived figure, and it is conservative, because it ignores every other interruption in a working day.
Any method where the price comes out of a catalogue or price book rather than out of somebody's memory or a spreadsheet, and the quote is produced in the same place the order will be. In the wholesale nursery this was a WooCommerce catalogue feeding a CRM tailored into order management — no bespoke software at all. In the fencing business it was a survey-and-drawing tool that priced the fence as it was drawn. Both took quoting from around fifteen minutes to two or three.
The case study rounded to an average of about 13 enquiries a day across 250 working days, giving roughly 3,250 quotes and 675 hours. This tool weights quiet and busy days separately, so the same inputs give about 2,730 quotes and 546 hours returned — a more careful and slightly lower figure. The revenue never competed for comes out higher here, because the tool derives five unquoted enquiries a day from capacity where the case study used four as an illustrative placeholder. Both are the same arithmetic; this one shows its working.
It solves the hours but not the ceiling. If your current method needs four and a quarter hours of quoting on a busy day and each person has three, a second person gives you six hours and the same fifteen minutes a quote. You have doubled the wage bill to move the ceiling, not remove it, and the on-costs — employer contributions, holiday cover, recruitment, the months before they are useful — come with it. Moving the price book into a system removes the ceiling for everyone at once.
As accurate as the eleven numbers you put in, and every one is shown with its arithmetic so you can argue with it. The load figures should come from your own diary or CRM. The minutes per quote are worth timing for a week rather than estimating. The result is illustrative — it is a decision-making number, not an accounting one, and it is not financial advice.
The calculator estimates them. The audit finds them, with evidence, inside your working week — and it is refunded if it can't. Twenty minutes, no deck, no pitch.
HORATIO@BYHORATIO.COM
The nursery whose figures this tool loads with — £1m to £3.2m, office unchanged at three.
How many quotes your revenue target needs a day — and whether that is physically possible.
The hire, the charge-out rate, the margin leak, the supplier ceiling, and more.