Quote Generation in Trading Companies: From Hours to Minutes

Putting together a quote with more than 1,000 line items is still genuine manual labour at many trading companies: looking up prices in a spreadsheet, recalculating volume discounts one by one, and finally pouring everything into a Word template. At a mid-market trading company we built a quoting tool for, producing a single quote like this used to take several hours. Today the same calculation is ready in 20 minutes, and the automation saves the sales team roughly 90 hours of manual work every month. What changed in between is the subject of this case study.

Starting Point: When Quotes Become a Bottleneck

The trigger was a recurring situation. During pricing campaigns and assortment changes, sales had to send new quotes to several hundred customers at once. Each one was assembled by hand from Excel price lists and Word templates. For a single campaign like this, the team was tied up for days, not selling but copying and pasting.

The core problem was scale. A typical quote in this market segment doesn’t cover a few dozen items; it covers more than 1,000 individual line items: item numbers, variants, volume tiers, customer-specific discounts. Every line had to be transferred and checked by hand. A single misplaced digit in a discount column was enough to send out a wrong quote, with real consequences for margin or customer trust.

A second problem compounded the first, one that’s easy to underestimate in day-to-day business: there was no central overview. Quotes sat scattered across personal inboxes and local Word files. Anyone who wanted to know whether a customer had already received a quote, or where a negotiation stood, had to ask the colleague responsible and hope they had time to answer.

Why Excel and Word Reach Their Limits

Excel and Word aren’t badly suited to this task in general; they’re built for single, manageable documents. But once hundreds of line items, several price lists, and shifting customer terms come together, any manually maintained document runs into a capacity limit that no amount of diligence can offset. Formulas shift when copied, discount tiers fall out of sync with the current price list, and formatting drifts between templates. The process barely scales: every additional campaign adds roughly proportional extra work hours.

The Solution: A Quoting Tool with SharePoint as Its Backbone

Rather than patching the existing Excel templates further, we built the client a dedicated quoting tool that integrates deeply into their existing Microsoft environment. Technically, the solution runs on Python for the calculation logic, the SharePoint API together with Microsoft Graph for document and permission handling, and Azure Functions for serverless execution in the background. The deliberate choice was not to introduce an entirely new platform, but to automate on top of the systems already running in the business.

Pulling Data Instead of Retyping It

Customer data and terms are no longer entered by hand; they’re pulled automatically from the CRM. As soon as a sales rep opens a new quote, the tool retrieves company details, stored discount tiers, and the most recently agreed terms directly from the existing system. The most error-prone step of the old workflow, manually transcribing customer data, disappears entirely.

Template-Driven Quotes Without the Manual Work

For the actual calculation, the tool draws on stored templates and price lists and computes every line item, including volume pricing and discounts, automatically. Whether a quote has 20 or 1,200 positions barely changes how long it takes to produce. The calculation logic now runs in the background instead of in a manually maintained spreadsheet formula that had to be re-checked every time a price list changed.

Approval as a Built-In Safety Net

Automation without oversight would have been a real risk in sales. That’s why quotes that deviate from the stored standard terms, larger special discounts, for example, go through an approval step with the sales manager before they’re sent. The tool flags these cases automatically based on stored rules and holds the quote until a responsible person signs off. Most quotes never need that extra step and go straight through.

One Central Store Instead of Scattered Inboxes

Every quote the tool generates lands automatically in a structured location in SharePoint, organised by customer, date, and status. A dashboard shows in real time which quotes are open, sent, accepted, or declined. The question of where a particular customer’s quote stands can now be answered in seconds, without anyone digging through a colleague’s inbox.

How the Rollout Happened

The tool wasn’t switched on for everyone on a single cutover date. It first ran in parallel with the existing Excel process, for a limited set of customers and product groups, so sales and accounting could check the calculated prices against the familiar spreadsheets before relying on the new calculation completely. Only once these samples had held up consistently for several weeks did the rest of the catalogue get migrated in stages. That caution stretched the rollout out a little, but it removed every source of doubt before the tool became the only way quotes were produced.

Results: The Numbers After Rollout

The effect showed up quickly and was easy to measure.

Metric	Before	After
Producing a quote with 1,000+ line items	several hours	around 20 minutes
Manual sales effort per month	baseline	around 90 hours saved
Quotes with full tracking	occasional, not systematic	100%

Ninety saved hours a month add up to more than half a full-time role, now available for customer conversations instead of price lists. The client’s head of sales summed up the result this way: “What used to take a week, we now get done during a coffee break.”

The second effect started as a side benefit but turned into one of the tool’s most-used features: complete traceability. Because every quote is created and stored in the same system, its status is available on demand at any time, for the sales team itself as much as for management asking how much quote volume is currently open in the market.

Lessons That Transfer to Other Trading Companies

The Real Problem Rarely Lives in the Tool Itself

Quotes at this level of complexity were simply too large for a format designed for single documents. Before reaching for a new tool, it’s worth asking exactly where in the process effort grows in proportion to volume. That’s where the automation lever sits.

Tracking Tends to Fall Out of Good System Integration

Nobody asked for a tracking dashboard at kickoff. It emerged because quotes were consistently created and stored in one place with one structure. Anyone planning a similar automation should design for a central store of results from day one; the reporting benefit tends to follow almost on its own.

Approvals Belong Inside the Process, Not Around It

A common objection to automated quoting is the fear of losing control over discounts and special terms. The fix is rarely to halt the automation; it’s to build approval thresholds directly into the workflow. That keeps the final call with people while letting most of the volume move through without delay.

The Business Case Is Made in Time Saved, Not Software Cost

In this project, the economic lever was freed-up sales time, not lower licence fees. For businesses with similarly heavy but standardisable quoting processes, in wholesale, distribution, or technical sales, this approach transfers with manageable effort, because it builds on systems most companies already have in place: CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft 365.

A Parallel Run Takes the Edge Off the Transition

Anyone planning a comparable automation shouldn’t switch off the old process on day one. A time-boxed parallel run costs extra time but builds trust within a team that already has to adjust to a new way of working. When numbers flow directly into customer-facing quotes, that patience pays off in the first few weeks.

Conclusion

If your sales team is still assembling quotes from Excel price lists and Word templates today, it’s worth taking a sober look at the time hidden behind that process. The savings potential is often larger than it appears at first glance, especially when quotes carry many line items, variants, or special terms. We’re happy to talk through what a process like this could look like for your business, and you can find more projects on our projects page.