The hidden cost of Excel quoting (and why leaving it feels harder than it is)
Everyone's quoting spreadsheet has a cost column. Almost none of them have a handoffs column, and that's where the money actually leaks.
Excel is a great tool. The honest truth is that most manufacturers aren't losing money because their formulas are wrong — the formulas are usually fine.
The loss comes from the five emails it takes to get a quote approved, the production drawing that was re-drawn from memory, and the dealer who bought elsewhere while your engineer was on holiday.
A napkin model of the hidden cost
Here's the rough arithmetic we run with finance teams on a first call:
Average quote touches : 6 peopleAverage delay per handoff : 1.4 daysQuotes per month : 220Engineer time per quote : 45 minutes---Fully-loaded cost per engineer : ~€75k/yearTime lost to quoting : ~€40k/year per engineerWin-rate lift from faster SLA : 8–14 points
The four costs that never hit an invoice
- Handoff latency. Every email is a day. Every day is a deal drifting sideways.
- Redrawn drawings. Production re-draws from memory because the quoting file wasn't trustworthy.
- Missed dealer hours. Distributors quote at 9pm. You reply at 10am. They've moved on.
- Knowledge walking out the door. The senior engineer who knows the rules doesn't scale — and eventually retires.
Why it feels harder than it is
Leaving Excel feels like a big project because the spreadsheet works. Nothing is broken. But the cost isn't in the spreadsheet — it's in everything around it.
We didn't stop using Excel because it was wrong. We stopped because it was invisible. The second we had a single system, we saw how much of our week used to be translating between files.
If you want to put your own numbers into the model above, the ROI calculator is a good 5-minute exercise. You'll recognise the answer.