Quote to invoice: stop typing the price twice

The customer says yes to the quote. A few days later, someone in the office types it into the invoice. Somewhere in the typing, the $200 service call fee goes missing.

Nobody notices. The customer pays the smaller bill, says thanks, and the $200 is gone. It’s what happens when everything gets typed twice.

What goes wrong when you retype a quote into an invoice?

Small things, one at a time. The quote is in one place and the invoice in another, so a person copies it across by hand. Each line is a chance to drop something. It isn’t carelessness. It’s copying from one window to another at the end of a long day.

The usual way: typed twice.

The fix: made from the quote.

Example. The $200 is made up.

Here’s what can go missing:

• A fee. The service call fee or the extra hour gets skipped.
• The right price. Someone types last year’s rate, not the one on the quote.
• The extra job. They asked for one more thing on site. It’s in your head, not on the bill.
• A digit. Two digits get swapped, and nobody spots it at a glance.

A bill that’s too high gets a phone call. A bill that’s too low just gets paid.

How do you turn a quote into an invoice without retyping it?

Make the invoice from the accepted quote. Don’t copy it. The lines, the prices and the customer come across exactly as agreed. Nothing is typed a second time, so nothing gets dropped on the way.

A lot of businesses still build their quotes and invoices in Excel. Each invoice starts as a copy of the quote, typed or pasted across by hand. That copy is where the retyping happens.

If something changes on site, add it to the quote before it becomes the invoice. Then the bill still matches the job.

In Income Mavericks, you turn an accepted quote into the invoice with a click, so the price they agreed to is the price they get.

The quote the customer said yes to should be the bill they get. Type it once, and it stays that way.