What a quotation should never show the customer
The customer buys the works at a price. Overhead, profit and cost are how the price was built, and none of the three belongs on the page.
A quotation is an offer to do named work for a stated sum, and almost every way of getting one wrong comes from putting the build-up on it. The customer is buying the works at a price. How that price was arrived at — the labour rate, the overhead recovery, the profit percentage, the cost before margin — is the business’s own commercial position, and a quotation that discloses it has handed the other side the negotiation.
The worst version of this is not a printed margin line. It is an exclusion. A quotation that reads "Not included — Overhead" and "Not included — Profit" tells a client what the business does not intend to charge them. It sounds absurd written down, and it is exactly what a system produces when the estimate’s heads are listed on a form where a blank box means excluded and the margin heads are in the list.
The four things that do belong
The works, described as they were measured. The quantities. The money. And the qualifications — every head stated as an exclusion, in the wording the estimate recorded, so the customer reads what is not in the offer rather than assuming. Those qualifications are the customer’s copy of what the estimate recorded, and they are the first thing an adjudicator would read.
And the rows have to add up
A quotation whose lines do not sum to its own total is the first thing a client’s surveyor finds, and it costs more credibility than the error is worth. Where a tender total is apportioned across measured lines, each line’s share should be its share of the cost, using the same arithmetic the estimate used, with the rounding remainder carried onto the last line rather than dropped.
There is a related trap in the presentation. A measured item described properly under NRM2 runs well past eighty characters — "Excavation for two number pad foundations, commencing from existing ground level, maximum depth not exceeding 2.00m" is a hundred and eight — and a document that uses the description as a row label will either refuse it or truncate it. Truncating is the worse of the two: the description is what the customer is being offered, and a quotation that shortens it offers something else, with nothing on the page to say anything was removed. Every issued quotation carries a content hash, so the document a customer holds can be checked against the one that was sent.
See the record being made rather than described.
Launch the demo environment