Your price book, wherever it lives
A spreadsheet in SharePoint or Google Workspace, a product list in the CRM, or the accounts system's items. The proposals go out from your mailbox in your template. Up to three systems in a First Agent.
Sales · AGT-02 Proposal Builder
Quote and proposal automation from your own price book, never from thin air.
A quote takes an afternoon because the pricing lives in three spreadsheets, the last similar proposal is somewhere in somebody's sent items, and the covering note has to be written from scratch every time. The delay is the cost: the prospect who waited four days for a price has usually had one from somebody else.
Proposal Builder drafts the quote from your price book and your approved wording, writes the covering note in your voice, and holds the whole thing for a person to check and send. It cannot invent a price, a discount or a promise.
01 / The workflow
Read the request, pull the prices, assemble, draft the note, hold for approval, version it.
The price book is the single source. If a product, a term or a discount is not in it, the draft says so and leaves a gap for a person, rather than filling it with something plausible.
01
Read the request
An email, a form, a note from a call. What they asked for, how many, by when, any constraint they mentioned. Anything unclear is listed as a question at the top of the draft, not guessed.
02
Pull the prices and terms
From the price book you maintain: products, options, unit prices, the terms that go with them, the discounts a person is allowed to apply and the ones that need sign-off. Read only. The book is never edited by the agent.
03
Assemble the quote
Lines, quantities, totals and the standard terms, in your template. The arithmetic is checked twice and shown. A line the book cannot price is marked, in red, for a person.
04
Draft the covering note
In your house voice, from your approved paragraphs, referring to what the prospect actually asked. It reads like the last good proposal you sent, because that is what it learned from.
05
Hold for approval
A person opens the draft, changes what needs changing, and sends. A quote above the value you set, or carrying a discount above the limit you set, goes to the second approver you named before it can go anywhere.
06
Version and record
Every draft, every amendment and every sent version is kept, numbered, with who approved it and when. When the prospect comes back asking what changed between version two and three, the answer is one click.
02 / The boundaries
What it cannot do
Four things Proposal Builder will never do on its own authority.
- It does not invent a price. Every figure is traced to a line in the price book, and the trace is shown. A product with no price gets a gap and a flag, never an estimate.
- It does not send. Every proposal waits for a person. Above your value or discount limits it waits for two.
- It does not promise. Delivery dates, lead times, guarantees and exclusions come from the approved wording only. Where the request asks for something the wording does not cover, the draft says a person will confirm.
- It does not edit the price book. It reads. A change to a price is a decision, and decisions are made by people in the book itself.
Anything outside those rules waits for a named person.
03 / A test run, labelled as one
Test scenario, not a customer result
One request, start to finish, against a test price book we built for the purpose.
We do not yet have a permissioned customer case to publish for this agent, so here is the next most honest thing: a test we ran ourselves, with the inputs stated. When a client agrees to be named, their measured hours per quote will replace this.
The test request, a Tuesday morning
Inputs: an email asking for 40 units of two products with installation, a price book of 120 lines, 12 approved paragraphs, discount limit 10 per cent
- 09:14:02 Butler Read the request: 2 products, quantities, a site address, a date six weeks out One question raised: the email did not say which of two installation options applied.
- 09:14:20 Butler Priced 5 lines from the book, 1 line left open Installation option unresolved, so both shown with the question above them. No figure invented.
- 09:14:48 Butler Assembled the quote in the template and drafted the covering note Totals shown with the working. Note built from 4 approved paragraphs, referring to the six-week date.
- 09:14:49 Hardy Held for approval, and flagged for a second approver Reason recorded: quote value above the single-approver limit set for the test.
- 10:05:30 A person Resolved the installation question, approved as version 1, second approver signed, sent Named in the ledger. Fifty-one minutes from request to a sent quote, of which four were the agent's.
A test request and price book we assembled for the purpose, run on 5 September 2026. It shows the format and the division of labour. It is not a measurement of any customer's quoting, and the timings are not a forecast of yours.
Measured on, when it is live for you: hours of a person's time per quote, days from request to sent proposal, and quotes sent with a figure not in the book, which should be zero and is checked. The audit sets the baseline before anything is built.
04 / Fit
One price book and a dozen good paragraphs
The prices in one place that somebody owns, and your best past proposals so the wording can be approved once and reused. The audit usually finds that consolidating the price book is the real first job, and says so.
When we would advise against it
Bespoke work priced from scratch every time, where there is no book to read. Fewer than a handful of quotes a week. A book nobody keeps current, because the agent will quote from it faithfully. We will tell you either in the audit.
The audit first, then a fixed price
A £1,500 two-week audit, credited in full against the build. Proposal Builder is normally a First Agent at a fixed £6,500, live in three to four weeks, then from £450 a month to run and watch it, plus £40 to £200 a month paid directly to the providers. Not VAT registered, so no VAT is added. The full price list.
05 / Next step
Tell us how long a quote takes today, and why.
Roughly how many a week, where the prices live, and who writes the covering note. That is enough for a first conversation, and we will tell you whether Proposal Builder is the right first agent or whether another one is.