Building & construction
Quoting that used to swallow every Sunday, done between site visits
A Melbourne builder was pricing jobs from scratch every weekend. We built him a quoting app inside Claude that knows his rates, checks material costs and writes the proposal for him.
- Business
- Building and construction, Melbourne's west
- Bottleneck
- Quoting and proposals eating most of every Sunday
- Built
- A Claude app holding his rates, margins and proposal template
- Result
- Quotes out the same day, weekends back, pricing consistent
What was happening before
Every quote started from a blank spreadsheet and the last proposal he could find. Labour, equipment hire, support rates and overheads were in his head or scattered across old files, so pricing drifted between jobs. Material costs were checked one supplier at a time. A single quote took two to three hours and most of them landed on a Sunday, after the work week was done.
What we looked at in the audit
In the 45 - 60 minute audit we mapped where the hours actually went. Site work and client conversations were fine. The bottleneck was everything between winning interest and sending a number: gathering rates, checking current material prices, calculating, then writing the proposal. All of it repeatable, all of it a candidate for a structured tool rather than a blank prompt box.
What we built
A simple app inside Claude that already knows his business: labour rates, equipment and support rates, overhead loadings, margin rules and his standard proposal template. He enters the material sizes and quantities for the job. The app checks current material costs, calculates the price using his own rules, and generates the finished proposal in his own wording and layout.
Why it stuck
Nothing about it asks him to be good at prompting. It is a button, not a guess. Because the rates and template live inside the tool, two quotes for similar jobs come out priced the same way, and anything he changes once flows into every quote after it. That is the difference between a tool people try and a tool people use.
The outcome
Quoting went from a Sunday job measured in hours to something he does between site visits. Proposals go out while the enquiry is still warm, pricing is consistent, and the mental load of remembering rates is gone. He also stopped declining to quote smaller jobs because the admin was no longer the reason to say no.
If you are still working out which tools would be worth your money, start with how to choose the right AI tasks and tools, or see the other client stories.
Want a second opinion on your own task list?
Bring the jobs that eat your week and we'll talk through which of them AI can genuinely take on, and what that would be worth to you. The 45 - 60 minute AI audit is $599 incl GST, one-off, and includes your task and ROI report, guided set-up and AI basics training.
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