DEEP DIVE
Who's Allowed to Say the Price?
A contractor walked me through the quote form he's building. Every quote goes to the owners. Here's what I'd decide before switching it on.
I was talking with a waterproofing contractor who sent me a list of things he wants automated.
One of them is already half built. A Zapier quote form: his tech fills it out on site, it emails the owners, and the quote lands in Jobber for review.
Good instinct. He already runs Jobber and Zapier and he's trying to get quotes out of people's heads and into the system. I'd have built the same thing a few years ago.
But every single quote still waits on the owner.
So here's what he's working on, and what I'd do before he turns it on.
Drew
The Happy Path
THE DEMO
Tech fills out the form โ owners get an email โ quote lands in Jobber โ owner reviews and sends
No napkin quotes. No retyping. Every quote in one place.
Most of that is a real win. Field quotes landing in Jobber as structured data beat texts and photos of a notebook every time. The retyping goes away. The owners see everything. Nothing lives only in a tech's truck.
On a slide, it's done: quote captured, review queued, project complete.
Then Reality Hits
REALITY
The form automates the approval step. It doesn't decide what needs approval.
Every quote still waits on an owner. The wait is just better organized.
Look at what the form actually encodes. Every quote, big or small, standard or weird, goes to the owners. Not because anyone decided every quote needs an owner. Because nobody wrote down what a tech is allowed to quote on his own.
That's pricing authority, and in most shops it's undefined. So the owner becomes the approval step by default. The form doesn't change that. It just makes the pile build faster.
Here's where it gets stuck once it's live:
The homeowner is ready to sign. The tech quoted a standard job on site. The quote is sitting in Jobber waiting on review, and the owner is on another site.
Two techs, two prices. There's no standard line item for the job, so each tech builds it his own way. The form captures both versions perfectly.
A discount to close. Was the tech allowed to give it?
The rubber stamp. The owner approves most quotes without changing a thing, but still has to open every one.
You didn't remove the work. You hid it. The approval still happens. It just moved from the hallway to an inbox the owner checks between job sites.
And the form inherits whatever pricing exists today. If three techs price three ways, the automation stores three ways, very efficiently.
Nobody asks who's allowed to fill in the price. That's where work gets stuck between people: between the tech standing with the homeowner and the owner who's the only one allowed to say yes.
The Play
Before you ask "can we automate this?", ask "should this process exist in this form?"
For quotes, the fix happens before the form:
Ownership. Who owns pricing, and who updates it when material costs change?
Pricing authority. What can a tech quote and send on his own, on site?
A standard price book. Standard line items in Jobber with set prices, so common jobs get picked, not invented.
Thresholds. What kicks a quote to review: custom scope, a discount, a missing measurement, or a dollar amount the owner picks.
Thresholds are the exception path. If your workflow has no exception path, it's probably a demo.
Not a contractor? Swap "quote" for discount, refund, or purchase order. Same question: who's allowed to say yes without you?
Then automate the stable version. The same form gets much better. Quotes built from the price book and inside the tech's authority go out. Only the exceptions hit the owners' inbox, with the reason attached. The review queue shrinks to the quotes that actually need an owner.
Three Takeaways
Define authority before you automate approval. A one-page pricing authority doc can do more than any approval bot.
Standardize, then encode. Price book first. Automate the stable version, not the average of three.
Review exceptions, not everything. If the owner approves every quote, the owner is the process.
Steal This
STEAL THIS
The Quote Authority Check
About 30 minutes with the owner and one tech.
Who owns pricing, and who updates it when costs change?
Which jobs show up in most of your quotes? Do they have standard line items with set prices?
What can a tech quote and send without asking anyone?
Above what dollar amount does a quote need review? (The owner picks the number.)
What discounts can a tech give, and how much?
What always triggers review: custom scope, a missing measurement, an unusual site, a customer asking for changes?
When a quote is held, who reviews it, and how fast?
Only now: build the form, and route only the exceptions.
If nobody can answer #1, stop there.
Close
His instinct is a good one: get the work into the system. The step before that is deciding which work still needs the owner. Fix that, then automate the stable version.
If the automation makes the process harder to explain, you automated the wrong thing.
FROM SMB AUTOMATIONS
Write the rule down before you automate it. The Write a Clear SOP for Any Business Process prompt works for pricing authority too: put in who quotes, what they can send on their own, and what usually goes wrong, and it hands back one version the whole team can follow.
I send one prompt like that every weekday morning. Get the weekday prompts โ
A SECOND SET OF EYES
Thinking about automating something like this? Book a 30-minute Handoff Check. We walk one process and mark where it breaks first. You keep that list either way. If nothing's worth building, I'll say so.
Drew Reynolds
The SMB Operator