4 things you need to start AI quoting in 2026

You calculate every quote in your head. You have done it for years, and you are almost always right. The problem is that it only works when you do it. When three requests come in while you are on a job site, they wait until you have time. When someone offers to help with quotes, they cannot, because they do not know your prices. Everything runs through your head, so everything waits on your head.

Quoting is one of the first problems you run into when you grow. Your marketing works, requests come in, and you are also running the day-to-day work. Every new request is a good sign. And every one of them needs a price that only you can give.

In 2026, AI can make a good quote for a job. DoneQuote does that, but only if it knows what you charge. Not because AI is dumb, but because your prices are not written down anywhere.

Until now there was one way to hand off quoting: hire someone. You spend weeks or months training them. You explain how you price: your hourly rate, what a call-out costs, which materials you use. When that person leaves, the knowledge leaves with them. And even when someone takes over, it is hard to let go completely. Many business owners still approve every quote someone else wrote.

With DoneQuote, the same training takes an afternoon. You record how you price once, and it stays. DoneQuote gets exactly as smart as you make it, and it forgets nothing. These are the four things you need to start AI quoting in 2026:

1. Split your work into repeatable chunks

A job is almost never one line. "Landscape the backyard" says nothing about price. Groundwork, paving, planting and disposal do. Jobs are almost never exactly the same, but the work inside every job repeats.

• No two gardens are alike, yet a landscaper does groundwork a hundred times a year.
• A tiler rarely sees the same bathroom twice, but lays floor tiles and grouts them every week.

Those chunks are your subjobs. They are the building blocks DoneQuote uses to price a job.

2. List the materials you use

Pavers, sand and soil for the landscaper. A panel, breakers and cable for the electrician. You do not have to type these in one by one. Upload your supplier's price list as a spreadsheet, and DoneQuote reads the materials and prices from it.

Listing materials also helps with customers. They like to see what goes into the job, even when not every cost is shown separately. The "Make customer-friendly" rewrite in DoneQuote presents the quote that way: materials visible, internal costs folded into the price.

3. Set an hourly rate for each kind of work

Once your subjobs and materials are in place, there is always work that fits neither. A one-off repair, an odd request, a job you have never done before. For that work you fall back on your hourly rate.

One hourly rate for everything is fine. But if you do both cheap work and expensive work, keep the rates separate. Groundwork is not pruning. Hanging a light is not finding a fault. With a rate for each kind of work, you and DoneQuote can estimate a new job in hours together.

4. Price call-out and startup costs per day

Driving out, loading the trailer, the disposal container, setting up and cleaning up. These costs are part of every job, and when you price in your head they are the first thing you forget. Record them per visit or per working day. Then a three-day job automatically gets a different price from a three-hour job.

You can always leave them out of a quote. Some businesses prefer to turn them into a discount on bigger jobs, or to carry them in their margin. That choice stays yours, but DoneQuote should know the costs exist.

With those four building blocks, the training is done. A request comes in and DoneQuote:

• recognizes the subjobs,
• applies your rates and material prices,
• adds the daily startup costs,
• and writes a clean cover letter.

Under the hood, AI does the recognizing and writing, with your prices as its reference. What lands in front of you is not a guess anymore. It is your way of pricing, applied to a new job. The more you train it, the better it gets. A quote starts out 80% done and moves toward 99% as your prices and rules fill in.

DoneQuote aims to make your week easier. Even when you are on job sites, most of the work gets done without your attention. You check the quotes and adjust the last part. That part stays yours, and that is exactly right. You see things no price list contains: the awkward driveway, the tree against the fence, the crawl space you can barely reach. You adjust, you send. You just no longer start from zero.

If you want to grow, your business has to depend less on you. One of the biggest steps is getting the day-to-day work in order. That means going from organised, fluid chaos to a bit of structure. Written-down prices are the first piece of that structure.

Writing them down is confronting, because you have to think about them:

• What does an hour of our time actually cost?
• Which jobs are we quietly doing below cost, because we set that number years ago and never touched it again?
• Are we pricing jobs consistently, or too emotionally? A big customer, a friendly customer, a customer who sighs at the number: each one nudges the price in a different direction.
• Could we charge more? Especially when you are fully booked, you have room to raise prices. You can charge a little more and customers still pay.

Once the prices are written down, they stop being a feeling and start being a model. You quoted six hours of paving and it took nine. That is not bad luck, that is information. You now know exactly where your model runs tight, and you adjust one number instead of your gut feeling. Every job makes your pricing sharper.