A customer asks for a price. Someone goes round, has a look, and says they’ll send something over. A figure goes out by text that evening. Then nothing happens.
Not a no. Just nothing. Two weeks later the customer has either forgotten, gone elsewhere, or is still waiting for the follow-up call that never came because nobody wrote down that it was due.
That’s how most quotes are lost in a jobs-based franchise. Not to a cheaper competitor, but to silence. The price was fine. The follow-up never happened, because the quote lived in a phone, a notebook or someone’s head, with no date attached.
Jobs360 now has a quotes module. This post is about what it does and, just as important, what it makes you do.
Three ways a quote starts
Quoting doesn’t happen one way in the real world, so Jobs360 supports three.
Price it from the desk. The customer has sent photos, or the work is standard. Create the quote directly, from the Quotes area or from the customer’s record, and send it.
Go and look first. Some work can’t be priced unseen. Book a quote visit: a job whose only purpose is to see the work. It sits in the calendar like any other job, can be dragged or booked as a flexible morning or afternoon slot, and carries instructions on what to look at. When the visit is completed, the operator has to say what happens next: write the quote now, write it later, or no quote needed, with a reason. Visits parked as “later” stay on a list of unquoted visits until someone deals with them.
“While you’re here.” An operator on site for one job gets asked to price something else. A quote can be raised from any live job, picking up the customer, site address and contact. A job can carry several quotes, which is also how you offer a customer two options.
Head office can raise a quote for any franchise. It always belongs to the franchise that owns the customer, with that franchise’s numbering and tax settings.
No quote goes out without a date
Every quote moves through four states: draft, sent, won, lost.
A draft can be edited, previewed as a PDF and deleted if it was raised by mistake. To send it, you either email it from Jobs360 or mark it as sent if it was handed over another way. Either way, the system asks for a named contact and a follow-up date. It won’t let a quote out without one.
That’s the rule that matters. The rest of the module is built around it.
Once sent, the PDF is frozen as the record of what the customer received. The quote can be re-sent, its follow-up date pushed back, or pulled back to draft for a correction, with a warning that the customer may already have the original. Eventually it’s won or lost. A lost quote needs a written reason, so over time a franchise builds a real record of why work was turned down, rather than a vague sense that “prices are too high round here”.
From won to booked, without a gap
Marking a quote as won offers to schedule the job straight away. The job arrives with the customer, site, contact, discount and every quoted line at the quoted price. All that’s left is the date, time and operatives.
The two stay linked. The job shows which quote it came from, the quote lists the jobs raised from it, and any photos taken on the quote visit appear on the job, so the operative doing the work sees exactly what was looked at and priced. If a won quote hasn’t had its job booked yet, it’s flagged. Won work can’t quietly fall between the sale and the diary.
After that, the job is completed and invoiced as normal.
What head office sees
For the franchisee, the Quotes area has a pipeline view: open quotes and their value, overdue ones, unissued drafts, won quotes still waiting for a job, and quote visits still waiting for a quote. Under that is a Quotes To Chase list, in follow-up order, showing how many days overdue each is, with click-to-call and click-to-email, and one-click won, lost and reschedule.
Head office sees the same thing across the network: every franchise’s pipeline in one table, with the ones most in need of attention at the top. An analysis view looks back over a period at quotes issued, won and lost, the win rate by count and by value, a twelve-month trend, and value by service. By franchise, head office gets win rate and average quote value, which is a useful early signal of who converts well and who needs a hand.
What it doesn’t do
A few things are deliberately not in this release, so you know before you start. Customers can’t accept a quote online; the franchise records won or lost itself. There are no automatic reminder emails, so chasing is a person working the list. Quotes don’t expire on a date; validity is stated in the terms footer that prints on every quote. Alternatives are separate quotes rather than optional lines within one.
Why it belongs in the job system
A quote isn’t separate from a job. It’s the job before it exists, and the reason a quote visit is a job type rather than a diary note is the same reason callbacks and goodwill visits belong in the job system: someone drove there and spent an hour, and that should be on the record.
The quotes module is live now for every Jobs360 network, including the free tier. Head office and your first franchise cost nothing, and the pricing page has the rest. The full feature list is on the features page.