How to write an electrical quote on your phone

Before you open the app

Walk the job with the phone already out. You are collecting evidence you will not remember at the next light.

• Photos of the panel, the device, the path, and anything ugly.
• A count: openings, devices, feet if the run is the price.
• One sentence you could read back: what they asked you to do.
• The thing you are not doing: patch, permit, fixture by owner, a service change.

If you cannot say the sentence, you are not ready to quote. You are ready to estimate. Send that instead of a firm number. The difference is electrical quote vs estimate vs bid.

The order on the screen

Same order every house, so you are not designing a document in a driveway.

1. Your business name, already saved. Their name, typed while they spell it.
2. The job title in their words. “Six kitchen lights,” not “electrical.”
3. Lines from the pricebook. Quantity, then the row. Add a row only for the thing this house did that the row did not expect.
4. Tax the way your state actually works, or a note that the price does not add it.
5. Exclusions and how long the price holds.
6. Send. Then look at it once, as they will, before you drive.

The pricebook is the only way step three is fast. If you are typing descriptions from nothing, you will defer the quote, and deferring is the loss described in how fast should you send an electrical quote. Making the list is how to build an electrical pricebook.

A worked example, labelled as an example

Example, not a ticket from a real house. You are in a kitchen. Attic is open. They want six recessed lights and a dimmer. You are not patching. Your pricebook has a row for an opening in an open attic and a row for a dimmer.

You take one photo of the scuttle and one of the switch. You say, “Six lights, dimmer, I am not patching or painting.” They nod. On the phone you add the opening six times, add the dimmer once, write the exclusion, set the price good for 30 days because that is your habit and not a rule, and send the link while they are still in the room. They can accept it after you leave. You can see that they opened it.

The per-opening thinking behind that row is how to price recessed lighting. If they hesitate between basic lights and the dimmer, do not invent a discount. Offer the two scopes as options, which is good, better, best pricing for electricians.

If you do not have the software open yet

You can still leave with a page. The free electrical quote template takes a business name, a customer, lines, tax, and notes, and it prints to PDF. No account. It will not save the quote and it will not tell you they opened it. Use it once so the customer is not waiting on your evening. Move the same lines into a real quote when you want the accept link.

QuotePace is that next step: the pricebook on the phone, the link, the open, the accept. Quoting is free, with a cap of 100 quotes a month on the free plan. AI drafting is a paid extra and it is optional. You can write this whole sequence by tapping your own lines. A wider look at what “free” means next to the trials is free electrical estimate software.

The mistakes that make you reopen the laptop

Most “I'll finish it at home” moments are a missing habit, not a missing feature. Fix the habit and the phone is enough.

• No pricebook row, so you are composing prose. Add the row tonight if you will sell it again. For this house, use an hourly line plus material and say that is what it is.
• You did not ask them to spell the name and the address. The quote looks sloppy before they read the price. Ask while you are there. Typing it later from a voicemail is how you quote the wrong house.
• The exclusion stayed in your head. If it is not on the page, it is not in the deal. Read the exclusions out loud once. Patching, fixtures, permit, a full panel.
• You are redesigning the layout. Stop. The customer will read it on a phone. Lines, a total, a way to accept. A desktop theme will not win the job.
• You are waiting for a perfect photo set. Two clear photos are enough to remember the job. Ten photos you will not attach are a delay.

If the screen is fighting you, drop to the smallest true document. One scope sentence. The lines you are sure of. The exclusion. Send that as a quote if it is complete, or as an estimate if it is not. Completeness is the scope, not the graphic. A short page they can accept beats a beautiful one they see tomorrow.

When you get a row wrong, fix the row after the visit, not only the quote. Otherwise you will make the same mistake on the next job. The phone is only fast when the list behind it is right, and ten minutes fixing a row saves trouble on every quote after it.

After you send

Do not sit in the cab rewriting it. If they go quiet, one text that points at the exclusions is enough for today. The rest of the cadence is how to follow up on an electrical quote. If you find, on the way to the truck, that you forgot the permit, send a corrected quote. Do not correct it in a text and leave the old total on the page they might accept.

Check the total against the lines before you hit send. A phone makes it easy to tap an extra zero or to leave a quantity at one when you counted six. Read the quantity column out loud. If the total surprises you, it is better to catch it on site, where you can still explain it, not in a text thread an hour later. Tax, if you charge it, should be visible as tax and not hidden inside a round number you liked the look of.

Then look at the link on your own phone, not only on the screen you just typed. The customer will see it on a small screen too. If a line wraps into nonsense, rename the row in plain words and send again. If the business name is still the placeholder, fix it before they see it. The header is the first thing they read, and a wrong company name is hard to take back.

The longer version of the same habits, for when you are building the process rather than running it, is how to quote electrical work. The phone does not replace that process. It is where the process has to fit.