Five Checks Before the Price Goes Out: What Our Oldest Job Book Still Teaches Us
Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Every business keeps one thing it cannot quite justify throwing away. Ours is a run of job ledgers that begin in the spring of 1946, when the firm amounted to a workshop, a telephone on a shared line and a great deal of optimism. The paper has faded to the colour of weak tea. The handwriting is copperplate for the first dozen pages and then, mercifully, becomes ordinary. The columns are plain: date, customer, work described, materials, hours, price.
We kept them for years out of little more than habit. Then, somewhere in the middle of a busy decade, we noticed that reading them is rather like reading a set of instructions. Before a figure went out of the door, somebody had already answered five questions. They were never written down as a policy. They were simply how the work was done.
Why a job book from 1946 still applies
The tools have changed beyond recognition. A quotation now leaves the office as a PDF rather than in an envelope with a stamp, and the labour rates in the old books would raise a smile today. What has not changed is the reason a quote goes wrong. In our experience it is almost never arithmetic. It is a question left unasked.
The five checks below are the ones we still run through before anything is sent. They are not glamorous and they are not original. That is rather the point.
The five checks
1. Scope — what is actually included, and what is not. The oldest entries describe work in a single sentence, but they describe it completely: what was to be done, where it stopped and what the customer was expected to do themselves. A quote that is vague at the edges is not flexible, it is unfinished. Before we send anything, we ask whether a sensible person reading it would know exactly where our responsibility ends.
2. Materials — specified, not implied. The ledger columns for materials are fussy. Grades, quantities, sometimes the supplier. That fussiness exists because a price built on an assumed material is a price that will be renegotiated later, usually on a bad day for both parties. If two quotes differ sharply, the difference is often hiding in a specification nobody wrote down.
3. Labour — hours, rates and who is doing the work. An honest labour line tells you the rate, the estimated time and the grade of person likely to be on site. It also tells you what happens if the estimate proves wrong. We would rather set out a day rate and an assumption than present a single confident figure and hope. Customers forgive an estimate that moves for a stated reason. They do not forgive a price that quietly grows.
4. Contingency — stated, capped, explained. Contingency in the old books is often a shilling or two, noted without ceremony. Today it should be visible. A contingency that is buried inside a total is not a contingency; it is a margin wearing a disguise. Say what it covers, say how much it is, and say who authorises it going over.
5. Aftercare — the part most quotes forget. The final column in many old entries is a note about call-backs or a follow-up visit. It is the least commercial part of the page and the most revealing. What happens after the work is finished, and for how long, is part of the price whether or not it is written down. If it is not written down, assume it is not there.
Turning the checks into a comparison sheet
When several quotes land on the same kitchen table, the instinct is to read the bottom line first. We understand the instinct. We would gently suggest reading it last.
The sheet below is what we would use ourselves if we were the customer. Print it, put a column against each quote, and mark what is genuinely there rather than what you assume is meant.
| The check | What to look for in each quote | A warning worth heeding |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | A written boundary: what is included and what is excluded | Exclusions arrive later, by telephone |
| Materials | Named grades, quantities and brands where relevant | "Standard materials" with no definition |
| Labour | Rate, estimated hours, and who attends | A single lump sum with no breakdown at all |
| Contingency | A stated sum, a stated purpose, a named authoriser | No contingency mentioned, or one hidden in the total |
| Aftercare | A defined period, what it covers, how to invoke it | Verbal reassurance only |
Two further rows are worth adding in pencil. The first is availability: a firm quoting a start date it cannot honour is not cheaper, it is later. The second is who answers the telephone once the job has begun. Neither appears on a formal quotation, and both shape the experience more than most line items do.
What the cheapest number usually means
A low price is not evidence of sharp practice. Sometimes it reflects a smaller scope, a quieter diary, or a firm that has genuinely found a leaner way to work. All of those are legitimate reasons to be cheaper, and a customer is entitled to prefer them.
What a low price cannot do is tell you which of those reasons applies. That is what the five checks are for. They slow the decision down by perhaps twenty minutes and, in our experience, save rather more than that in the weeks that follow.
We have quoted a great many jobs since 1946 by this method, and we have occasionally lost work because of it. A quote that explains itself is easier to compare, and easy comparison does not always favour the person who wrote it. We have made our peace with that. A customer who understood what they were buying before they bought it tends to come back, and to say so to a neighbour. In a business that has traded through eight decades, that is the only sort of marketing that has ever really worked.
If you are currently weighing up two or three quotes and none of them will bear this kind of scrutiny, ask each firm the five questions directly. A good one will not mind. The ones that do mind have just answered the sixth question for you.
