Every driver knows that sending quotes takes time. Most underestimate how much.
The time cost of manual quoting isn’t just the minutes it takes to type out a price. It’s the context-switching, the interruptions, the follow-up messages when the first one wasn’t clear enough, and the jobs that slip through because the whole process was too slow or too complicated. Add it up across a week and it’s often an hour or more.
What Manual Quoting Actually Involves
Walk through a typical enquiry end to end. The customer sends a message — often incomplete, no destination, no floor information, sometimes no date. You read it mid-job and make a mental note. You finish the job and come back to the message. You reply asking for the missing details. The customer responds hours later. You read the full job spec and try to work out a price. You type out a quote. The customer asks a follow-up question. You confirm. They say they’ll think about it.
That’s ten steps, across potentially multiple hours, for a job you may not win. And this is a clean example — no awkward location, no tricky access, no customer who wants itemised pricing. In reality, many enquiries are messier. And across a week of enquiries, this process repeats many times.
The Time Maths
If a driver receives 15 enquiries per week and each one takes an average of 12 minutes to handle end to end — reading, chasing missing information, calculating, composing, following up — that’s 3 hours of quoting time per week.
At a typical van rate of £45 per hour, three hours of your time is worth £135. Every week. That’s not revenue lost — that’s just the opportunity cost of the time. If those three hours were spent on an additional job, or on rest that made the following day’s work more profitable, the number compounds.
And this doesn’t count enquiries that dropped off mid-conversation because responses were too slow, jobs quoted incorrectly because the mental arithmetic was done on the fly, or time spent chasing customers who never replied.
The Hidden Cost: Pricing Errors
Manual quoting under pressure leads to inconsistent pricing. Not deliberately — just because estimating on the fly, without a systematic approach, produces different answers depending on how tired you are, how distracted you are, and how complete the customer’s information is.
Some drivers undercharge when they’re busy because they didn’t think through travel time properly. Others overcharge unfamiliar jobs because they’re hedging against uncertainty. Neither outcome is ideal. Undercharging costs money directly. Overcharging loses jobs. Consistent pricing is hard to maintain when every quote is built from scratch.
What Drivers Do to Cope
The most common workarounds each have their limits. Fixed-price guessing — setting a standard rate and applying it to everything — leads to undercharging complex jobs and overcharging simple ones. Back-of-envelope calculation works when it works and produces errors when it doesn’t. High minimum charges build enough buffer that errors don’t hurt as much, but make you uncompetitive on smaller jobs. Scheduling a daily quoting window is better for accuracy but worse for conversion.
None of these are wrong — they’re rational responses to a friction-heavy process. But none of them actually fix the underlying issue.
What Faster Quoting Actually Changes
When the quoting process is quick and produces a consistent result, a few things happen. You respond faster — not because you’re rushing, but because there’s less to figure out. You price more accurately because a systematic approach removes the guesswork. You spend less time on admin per enquiry, which reduces cognitive load even when conversion stays the same.
Van Manager is built around this — a quoting tool for drivers that handles the calculation and produces something you can send straight to the customer. The idea is that quoting a job should take as long as it takes to enter the details, not as long as it takes to figure everything out from first principles. You can see how it works on the Van Manager page.
What’s Worth Auditing
If you track your time at all — even loosely — spend one week noting how long each enquiry actually takes. Not just the time to type the quote, but the full interaction from first message to confirmation or drop-off.
Most drivers are surprised by the number. And once you have it, it’s easier to make a case for doing something differently. The quoting process should be an asset. For most drivers running manually, it’s a slow leak.
