Quoting is unpaid work, and it is the largest unpriced cost in most painting businesses. This puts a number on it: the hours spent producing quotes, and the work lost to quotes that arrived after someone else's.
A typical painting quote takes painters 2–4 hours of office time after the site visit — measuring from notes, calculating hours and litres, building the proposal, and sending. Painters using purpose-built software cut this to 30–60 minutes by automating measurement, hours, and material calculation.
The painting industry close rate is typically 25–40% — most painters win 1 job for every 3–4 quotes sent. Improving close rate is partly about presentation (branded proposals beat napkin quotes) and partly about response time (quotes sent within 24 hours tend to convert at a much higher rate than quotes sent a week or two later).
Multiply hours per quote × quotes per month × your loaded labour cost rate. A painter spending 3 hours per quote on 10 quotes a month at $50/hr loaded cost is burning $1,500 a month on quoting — without including the lost revenue from quotes that arrive too late to win.
Three factors: (1) measurement workflow — measuring with a tape and notebook is 3–4× slower than measuring digitally with a saved surface library, (2) calculation — manual hours and litres calculations are slow and error-prone vs automatic, (3) proposal — typing each quote vs branded template with auto-fill.
Within 24 hours of the site visit. Same-day if possible. Quote response time is the strongest non-price predictor of close rate — clients receiving a polished quote on Day 1 commonly accept before they receive Quote 2 from a competitor.