Builders merchant quoting software for the lists builders actually send

What a builder's list looks like

A single storey extension list rarely arrives tidy. It mixes heavyside and lightside in one message and leaves half the details to the merchant:

• 2,000 facing bricks, "to match", no name
• 150 concrete blocks, 100 mm, and 60 of the 140 mm
• 25 bags of cement and 4 bulk bags of sharp sand
• 2 lintels, 1,200 and 1,800
• 30 lengths of 4x2 treated, no length given
• a roll of DPC, wall ties, a box of frame fixings

On the trade counter someone then searches the range line by line, picks the account price, writes the quote and phones the builder about the bits that are missing.

I do the searching and the copying. The lines that are clear go straight onto the draft with your product code and price. The lines that need a person, like the brick "to match" or the lintel with no load or type, are flagged with the question that needs answering, so your colleague spends the time on the decisions, not the typing.

Bags, pallets, lengths and loads

Builders merchants sell the same product in very different units. A brick can be sold singly or by the pack, sand by the bulk bag or by the loose load, timber by the length or by the metre. Getting the unit wrong is the fastest way to send a quote that is wrong by a factor of 500.

So units are kept apart. The quantity on the list is read with its unit, and when that unit does not match the unit in your catalogue the line is flagged instead of converted on a guess. "30 lengths of 4x2" with no length stays open until someone confirms 3.0 m, 3.6 m or 4.8 m. The draft never invents a size, a grade or a pack quantity.

Account prices, quantity breaks and price dates

Most builders on your books are on their own terms. The price on each line follows a fixed order: the customer's own price first, then the customer group price, then your general list price. Quantity breaks and valid from and until dates in your price file are applied, so a price that expired last month is not used. A category discount applies to list prices only, and an explicit surcharge field in your data is added as set.

If two prices tie, or no valid price exists, the line is blocked and flagged. It is never guessed. That matters on heavyside, where a wrong price on 2,000 bricks is a real loss, not a rounding error.

If you include a stock export, each figure carries the time it was taken, and a figure older than 24 hours is treated as stale by default, so the draft does not promise bricks that left the yard yesterday.

The handwritten list at the counter

Plenty of builders still write the list on the back of a drawing or in a notebook and send a photo. I read photographed and scanned lists, PNG or JPG, line by line with text recognition. Uncertain lines are flagged for a person to check. Handwriting is the hard case: a 7 that looks like a 1 on a block count matters, so a line that cannot be read with confidence is shown next to the original for your colleague to decide.

Next to the system you already run

Builders merchants run systems such as Merchanter, Merlin, Kerridge K8 or Epicor BisTrack. I do not replace any of them and there is no native connection to them. You export your catalogue, customers and prices as CSV, Excel or TSV. The approved quote comes back as an A4 PDF with your logo for the builder, plus a UTF-8 CSV of the approved lines. Whether your system can import that CSV for quotes or orders is checked during the pilot; otherwise the approved lines are keyed in from the draft.

Pricing

• Full rollout, 1,500 requests: £3,900 a month for up to 1,500 requests and 30,000 line items.
• Full rollout, 500 requests: £1,290 a month for up to 500 requests and 10,000 line items.
• Team: £790 a month for 3 users, up to 200 requests, no setup fee.
• Starter: £390 a month for up to 20 requests, no setup fee.

The full rollout has a one-off onboarding fee of £5,950, which includes the £1,490 paid pilot. How the paid pilot works ↗

Frequently asked questions