It is 9 pm. You have 3 quotes to send tomorrow morning. You open the Excel file, last year's, and edit the lines by hand. You forget to update the VAT on one line. The client signs anyway. You discover the €400 gap when you invoice.
Sound familiar? You are not alone. And you are not bad at Excel. Excel was simply never designed to manage your quotes and your job sites.
This article answers a simple question: when should you leave Excel, for what, and at what price? You will see the tools on the market, free and paid, then the case where custom quote software becomes the right choice. Even if you buy nothing, you will know how to decide.
Excel for quotes: what is the real problem?
Excel is excellent for calculating. It is poor at keeping a reliable memory of your business. Three reasons.
Errors creep in silently. Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, studied real spreadsheet audits. According to Computerworld (2004 article), recent audits of 54 spreadsheets found errors in 49 of them, or 91%. The study is old and spreadsheets are not specific to the trades, but the finding remains simple: a file you edit by hand ends up containing an error.
Versions multiply. “quote_dupont_V2_final.xlsx”, “quote_dupont_V2_final_OK.xlsx”. Which one went to the client?
Nothing is connected. The quote is in one file, the job tracking in another, the hours in a notebook. Nobody can answer “where are we on the Martin job?” in 10 seconds.
The 7 signs it is time to change
Count how many lines you recognize.
- You redo the same quote every time, copying the old one and changing the figures.
- You have already sent a wrong quote (wrong price, wrong quantity, forgotten VAT).
- You cannot find an old quote without digging through your folders.
- Only you understand the file. Your spouse, your partner or your secretary does not dare touch it.
- You do not know how much each job earned you, or cost you, before the end of the month.
- You re-enter the same data in three places (quote, schedule, invoice).
- You lose more than an hour a day keeping all of this up to date.
Three signs or more: your file already costs you more than a tool would. One or two signs: you can probably wait.
What to choose: Excel, off-the-shelf software or a custom tool?
There are three routes. Each has its place.
Keep Excel (or Google Sheets): free
Choose this if you do fewer than 5 quotes a month, work alone and your quote fits in 10 lines. A good template, locked cells for the formulas, an automatic backup: it can last for years. Spend nothing if that is you.
Off-the-shelf software: from 0 to about €110 per month
For the construction trades, ready-made software exists. Here are benchmarks taken from the Shine comparison, all prices excluding tax per month, to check on the vendors' sites because they change:
- Costructor: a free plan, then €12.50 (sole proprietor) and €25 (construction professional).
- Obat: from €25 (sole proprietor) to €109 (company).
- EBP Bâtiment: from €29.25 to €69 depending on the plan.
- Sage Batigest Connect: from €34.67.
If your trade is standard (plumber, electrician, painter) and your quotes follow the classic construction logic, these tools do the job very well. Their strength: price libraries, invoices, payment tracking. Their limit: you adapt to the tool, not the other way around. And you pay every month, with no end.
A custom tool: one payment, then maintenance
It becomes interesting when your way of pricing is particular. Concrete examples:
- A carpenter who prices by dimensions, wood species and in-house coefficients.
- A landscaper who calculates by square meter, with price tiers and travel fees by zone.
- A cleaning company that bills by surface, frequency and type of premises.
- A firm that tracks cases with steps of its own.
If no off-the-shelf software fits your calculation, or if you end up redoing everything on the side in Excel, the custom tool is the right candidate.
How much does a custom quote tool cost?
Here we need to be honest about the market orders of magnitude. According to Fenxi, a full custom development for an SME starts around €10,000 to €30,000 excl. VAT (basic tool) and climbs to €30,000 to €80,000 for a business application with several user profiles, workflows and integrations. The same article notes that below €5,000, we are generally talking about no-code or an improved script, not a structured application.
That is not the same need as yours. A quote calculator is not an ERP. That is why Fiddes Apps offers scoped tools at posted prices:
| Plan | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Simple tool | €790 | 1 function (for example a quote calculator), up to 3 users |
| Business tool | €1,490 | several screens, database, user accounts, PDF/Excel export |
| Custom | from €2,900 | integrations (accounting, calendar, CRM), more than 10 users |
Hosting and maintenance: €149 per month, 12-month commitment. This includes fixes, backups and small updates of up to 1 hour per month. Additional updates are quoted separately.
Payment: Simple tool and Business tool are paid at order. Custom is paid 50% at order, 50% on delivery.
Which tool for which problem?
Let's go back to your 7 signs.
Your problem is calculating the quote (signs 1, 2 and 4). A quote calculator is enough: you enter the quantities, it applies your prices and your rules, and you get a clean quote. That is the Simple tool at €790, with a single function and up to 3 users.
Your problem is finding and tracking everything (signs 3, 5, 6). You need several screens: quote list, job sheet, a database that keeps the history, accounts for each team member, and a PDF or Excel export to get your documents out. That is the Business tool at €1,490.
Your problem also touches accounting, the calendar or a CRM, or more than 10 of you use it. That is the custom option, from €2,900.
A simple rule to avoid mistakes: start with the smallest plan that solves your biggest problem. If in doubt, tell us what you do today in your file. We will tell you which one fits.
How long to pay off a tool?
Let's do a calculation you can redo yourself, with your own figures.
Suppose you spend 30 extra minutes per quote because of the file (re-copying, checking, layout), and you do 20 a month. That is 10 hours a month. At €40 an hour for your time, that is €400 a month. A Simple tool at €790 plus €149 a month of maintenance: the math works out in a few months. This is a worked example, not a promise: use your own figures, your own hours.
And that does not count the wrong quote, the one that costs you €400 in one go.
How does it work in practice with Fiddes Apps?
The model is simple: a posted price, a promised turnaround. There is no work before payment, so no free mockup. In return:
- You know what you are paying before you order.
- Money-back guarantee.
- 2 revisions included.
- The software is delivered in a few days, not a few months.
You describe how you price: your prices, your rules, your special cases. We build the tool around that. Not the other way around.
