What does manual quoting cost your team?
Three questions, answered with your own numbers: how many hours your reps lose to building quotes, how many errors reach your back office, and how much margin those errors put at risk.
Move the sliders to match your business and see what quoting by hand costs you.
How we calculate this
You pay for these hours either way. With QuoteXelerator they go into selling instead of building quotes.
We kept every default on the low side. Longer quotes, bigger price lists or more currencies mean more hours back.
QuoteXelerator catches these errors when the quote is created, before your back office spots the divergence in procurement.
Every change to a quote is logged in the compliance log with who made it, so you can show later how a deal was priced.
How we calculate this
- Quote volume a year
- Share of margin lost
- 4% – 13%
Panko’s review of fifteen years of spreadsheet research finds errors in at least 1% to 2% of cells, even in simple spreadsheets. The default is 1%, shown as a band from 0.5% to 1.5%.
- Selling time you get back
- Margin you secure
- What QuoteXelerator costs
- €3,690 a year
Hidden costs What it costs to bring a new rep up to speed
A new rep usually needs at least a month to settle in, and much of that goes into learning vendor price lists, currency conversion and your margin rules. They make mistakes while they learn, and colleagues lose hours training them. None of it shows up on an invoice.
With QuoteXelerator, learning to quote takes far less time. Your currency and margin rules are already in the recipe, so a new rep picks the quote and enters the prices.
Adjust the default values
Sales reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling. Salesforce, State of Sales, 2023
Price lookup, currency conversion, margin calculation and formatting are each a place where a manual quote can go wrong.
Research across 20+ years finds error rates of 1–5% per cell in spreadsheets. For complex tasks like currency conversion, rates cluster near ~5% (Panko; i‑nth). A review of 35 years of research found errors in 94% of spreadsheets (Poon et al., 2024). With enough volume, some of those errors will reach a customer.
The default is 1%, shown as a band from 0.5% to 1.5%. Use the slider to match your own process.
Ranges run half a percentage point below and above the error rate. Below 1%, they run half the rate itself either side. All figures are estimates.
What the numbers mean
Selling time
The hours figure is paid time your reps spend building quotes. You pay for it either way. The euro value prices those hours at your hourly rate and leaves out the deals your reps could close in that time.
Error band
Errors don’t hit every quote evenly, so the calculator shows a band. At the default 1% error rate it runs from 0.5% to 1.5% of your quote volume. Your back office tends to find these errors weeks later in procurement, when a vendor invoice doesn’t match what the customer signed.
Margin at risk
Resellers work on thin margins, so a small error rate takes a large share. On €2M of quote volume at a 12% margin, the upper end of the default band costs €30k, an eighth of your €240k yearly margin.
Oversight and compliance, end to end
What the sliders can’t show
A price changes after the quote went out, and nobody recorded who changed it. A discount outside your limits goes through with no approval on file. When a customer or auditor asks how a deal was priced, someone rebuilds the answer from emails and old spreadsheet versions. No slider measures this, and you still pay for it in hours and in disputes you can’t settle with a record.
How QuoteXelerator covers it
QuoteXelerator takes over one part of your sales operations completely: the path from vendor quote to HubSpot deal. Every step follows your rules and leaves a record, so you get process security on every quote.
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Vendor quote
Your rep picks the quote from your connected vendor account. Prices arrive as the vendor sent them, with nothing retyped.
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Recipe
The recipe your manager set up applies FX rates, discounts and margin rules. A discount outside your limits goes to approval.
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Preview
Your rep sees every line item and the margin before anything is written to HubSpot.
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HubSpot line items
The line items land on the deal, ready for the quote templates you already use.
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Compliance log
Every quote, change and approval is logged with who made it. Hash-chained snapshots make later edits detectable.
How the calculator works
How do you calculate the selling time won back?
Per inside sales rep we count 1,760 paid hours a year: 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, 11 months a year. Sales reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling (Salesforce, State of Sales, 2023), so 72% of those hours go elsewhere. We count half of that as quoting, which gives 634 hours. On average, a quote takes 95% less time with QuoteXelerator than one built by hand, so about 600 hours a year come back to selling for every rep, worth about €9,000 at €15 per hour. We kept every default low on purpose, with four-week months, eleven working months and a low hourly rate. Longer quotes, bigger price lists or more currencies win back more. You can change every value in the calculator above.
How do you calculate the loss from quoting errors?
We multiply your annual quote volume by the error rate. Panko’s review of spreadsheet research finds errors in at least 1% to 2% of cells, even in simple spreadsheets, so the default is 1%. The calculator shows a band half a percentage point below and above that rate. Below 1%, the band runs half the rate itself either side. The margin share sets that loss against your quote volume times your average margin. All figures are estimates.
Put every quote under the same rules.
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