Pipeline, costing and bill of materials as one continuous record

Pipeline lived in individual spreadsheets, so a forecast was a request to each rep for their latest file, and a rep leaving took the customer history with them.

Quoting was worse. Estimators priced from cost sheets last updated whenever someone remembered, against material costs that had moved materially since. Discounts were given verbally with no threshold and no record. Margin leaked in ways nobody could isolate, because the quote and the job that followed it were separate documents — what was priced and what was actually built were never compared. And when an order was won, the bill of materials was rebuilt from the quote by hand, which introduced errors at exactly the point they became expensive.

Leads enter one pipeline the whole team can see, with activity logged against the customer rather than the individual, so a forecast is a report and a handover is not a loss.

The costing engine is the substance of the build: materials priced off a maintained rate table, labour built up by operation and time, overhead recovered on the client's own basis, and margin applied by customer tier and product family — so the estimator makes engineering judgements rather than arithmetic ones, and a rate change updates every open quote instead of being remembered. Discounts beyond a threshold require an approval recorded against the quote. Revisions are versioned, so the argument about which quote the customer accepted has an answer. When the quote is accepted, the bill of materials is generated from the costed structure rather than rebuilt, and it hands off to the works order.