Supplier Costs Marked Up and Made Customer-Safe
No more quotes carrying your supplier's part numbers. No more markup applied by hand and missed on the last three lines. No more twenty-minute tidy-up before you dare press send.
Who it's for
Anyone quoting work built from supplier costs. Materials, plant, specialist equipment, subcontracted elements.
What it saves you
The margin lost to markup applied line by line at half past five, and the customer who takes your part numbers and prices the job themselves.
Set up time
Most businesses are live within a week.
The problem
Your quote can give away what you paid
The costs come across from suppliers with their descriptions attached. The manufacturer's name, the model number, the catalogue code, half a specification.
Somebody applies the markup line by line. Then they read down the quote taking out anything that should not go to a customer. On a five-line quote that is fine. On a twenty-line quote, written at the end of a long day, one line keeps its part number.
That one line is all the customer needs. They search the part number, find the unit priced at trade rates somewhere online, and now the conversation is about your margin rather than the work you are proposing to do. Or, more often and worse, they say nothing at all. They just do not accept, and you never learn why.
The markup goes wrong the same way, quietly. Apply it by hand across twenty lines and one gets missed, or keeps last year's percentage. You find out when the job's margin comes in short, by which time the work is done.
The two ways this leaks money
The margin you did not apply. One line in twenty missing its uplift does not sound like much. Take your average quote value, take the proportion that is bought-in cost, take your markup percentage, and work out what a single missed line is worth. Now multiply by the number of quotes you send in a year. It is not a rounding error, and because it never shows up as an event, nobody investigates it.
The margin you had to defend. Harder to price, and more damaging. A customer who can see what you paid negotiates from a stronger position, and a customer who has learned to look for part numbers checks every time. Instead of talking about the work, you spend the meeting defending your margin. Some of those you win at a lower price. Some you do not win at all.
Both come down to the same twenty minutes of manual tidying. It is boring, it is easy to rush, and when it goes wrong nobody notices. A task like that is worth handing to something that does it the same way every time.
What the automation does
When supplier costs come across onto a quote, Build Concierge:
- Applies your markup across every line, at the percentage you have set, with the twentieth line treated exactly like the first.
- Rewrites each description for a customer audience. Brand and manufacturer names removed, model numbers and SKU codes stripped, internal specification detail cut back.
- Leaves a clear short description of what the customer is actually buying.
- Puts the priced, cleaned lines onto the quote, ready to send.
Every line, every time
The value of this is not speed. It is that line seventeen gets the same treatment as line one, on every quote, however late in the day it is written.
What you get
- Quotes going out at the margin you intended, with nothing missed.
- Descriptions written for the person reading them rather than lifted from a supplier's catalogue.
- What you paid, who you bought it from, and what you call it internally staying inside your business.
- Quotes that go out the same day, because the tidy-up is not a job any more.
- Consistency across everyone who quotes. The new estimator's quotes look like your best estimator's.
Ways to run it
One markup across the board.
The simplest version. A single percentage applied to every cost line.
Markup by category or client.
Different percentages for materials, plant and subcontracted work, or different rates by client and contract.
Clean without repricing.
If pricing is already handled elsewhere, run the description clean-up on its own.
Review before it is sent.
The cleaned, priced lines land on a draft quote for someone to approve rather than going straight to the customer. Most businesses start here.
What you need
- Your markup rules. A percentage, or a set of them by category or client.
- Supplier costs arriving somewhere Build Concierge can read them, whether that is quotes by email or costs already sitting on the job.
- A quoting process it can write the finished lines into.
Getting set up
- We look at real quotes. Two or three recent ones, so we can see what your supplier descriptions actually contain and what your team currently strips out by hand.
- We set the rules with you. The markup percentages, and what counts as internal detail in your business. Some trades keep the manufacturer name deliberately, because customers buy on the brand. Others never do.
- We check the output before anything is sent. The first batch of cleaned quotes is reviewed line by line with you before a customer sees one.
Common Questions
Then it stays. Some customers buy on the brand, and in some sectors the specification is exactly what they are paying for. The rule is yours, and it can differ by category.
Yes. It shortens and removes. It does not rewrite the substance, and anything you specify as protected is left untouched.
Always. Cost and marked-up sell price both sit on the line internally. The customer only ever sees the sell.
Exclusions can be set by category, by supplier or by individual item.
Yes, and it is often more valuable there, because subcontractor quotes tend to arrive as free text with more internal detail in them than a supplier's catalogue line.
It takes twenty minutes a quote, it is boring, and it fails silently when it is rushed. Those are exactly the conditions that make something worth automating.
Ready to send the quote, not your cost file?
Get in touch with the Build Concierge team and we’ll set it up around the way you work.
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Give your team time back from the very first customer contact. Build Concierge connects your CRM to your job management system, so new customer details can be matched or created automatically and your team can get on with arranging the work.
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