The quickest way for a building-supplies or timber merchant to stop losing jobs on price is to get quotes out faster and priced right the first time — with supplier costs, freight, GST and margin already checked before the quote leaves the counter. Here's how one regional merchant did exactly that.
This is a real customer story. Details are anonymised — no company name, and every outcome is described honestly rather than dressed up with invented numbers.
The problem: quoting was slow, and margins were a guess
A regional timber and building-supplies merchant was doing what most merchants do: pricing quotes by hand. An order would come in — half of it a scribbled phone note, half an email with an attachment — and someone would work through it line by line.
Two things kept hurting them:
- Pricing lived everywhere. Stock prices were in the point-of-sale system, but the real cost of the big-ticket items — the non-standard timber, the decking runs, the special orders — lived in supplier emails and PDF price lists scattered across the inbox. Finding the current cost meant hunting.
- They kept losing big jobs on price and couldn't see why. When a customer said "the other mob came in cheaper," there was no fast way to know whether the gap was real, where it was, or whether they could have matched it without giving away margin.
The result was slow quotes and inconsistent margins — sometimes too high and losing the job, sometimes too low and winning it at a loss.
What the AI actually does
The merchant's AI now sits between "rough order in" and "clean quote out." When an order arrives — by phone note, email, or attachment — it:
- Reads the order and pulls out the line items, however messy the input.
- Prices each line against current supplier costs — including the non-stock prices buried in supplier emails, not just what's in the POS.
- Applies the right freight, GST and markup so the maths is correct and consistent every time.
- Cross-references a competitor's quote when the customer supplies one — and explains exactly where the price gap is.
- Produces a clean, editable PDF quote ready to check and send from the counter.
The person at the counter stays in control — they review and adjust before anything goes out. The AI just removes the slow, error-prone part in the middle.
The honest difference
No invented savings figures here — just what genuinely changed:
- Quote turnaround went from "work through it across emails" to minutes, ready to check.
- Margins are cross-checked before the quote goes out, not discovered to be wrong after the job's won or lost.
- When they get undercut, they can see why on the spot — and decide whether to match it with eyes open, instead of guessing.
It didn't replace anyone's judgement. It gave the team the numbers to use their judgement faster.
Why this matters if you run a similar business
If your pricing lives in more than one place — a POS for stock, supplier emails for everything else — quoting speed and margin consistency are almost always where the money is leaking. You don't need a new POS or a rebuild. You need the scattered pricing pulled together at the moment of quoting, and the freight/GST/markup maths done the same way every time.
That's the kind of specific, unglamorous process automation that actually pays back — and it looks different in every business, which is exactly why it works.
Want to know where the quoting and margin leaks are in your business? That's the sort of thing we map first, before automating anything.