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A modern office meeting room with a whiteboard displaying business charts and a laptop on a table with a city skyline view.

A modern office meeting room with a whiteboard displaying business charts and a laptop on a table with a city skyline view.

Please create a linked in image; A quotation could lose money in one of three places. Not in the pricing. In the assumptions buried under it. If you’re an FD, an MD, or a Commercial Director signing off fit-out quotes, here are the three questions I’d ask before you release one. They take under five minutes and they routinely surface six-figure assumptions no one had challenged. 1. What’s the assumed split between factory and site hours — and who owns the variance when it moves? On fit-out work, the factory-to-site ratio drifts more than anything else. If the estimate says 60/40 and the job runs 45/55, somebody is absorbing the difference. Usually silently. Usually you. 2. How is retention modelled in the cash curve? Not “is there retention on the job.” Is retention sitting in your forecast as real, time-delayed cash, aged out to the likely release date, with a realistic haircut for what you’ll actually collect? If retention isn’t in the cash model, the cash model is wrong. 3. Which line items are priced off a rate card more than six months old? Timber, laminate boards, fixings, installation labour — the categories shift at different speeds. A quote built on a January rate card in May is a small bet you’re making against your own margin. None of this is about better estimating software. It’s about better estimating questions. The firms that apply this discipline don’t quote more work. They just stop losing money on the work they already win. VISUAL / IMAGE SUGGESTION Mehr sehen