Get your price list ready so an AI agent can quote

Your price list exists. It's in a PDF from eighteen months ago, in a spreadsheet only your business partner can read, and mostly it's in your head: the discount you give the customer you've had for a decade, the surcharge when there's no lift, the call-out minimum you charge some weeks and waive others. When you quote, all of that happens in two seconds without thinking. When you ask an AI agent to quote for you, that invisible knowledge is exactly what's missing.

This is for owners who've already decided they want to hand off the simple quotes and don't know what to prepare. By the end you'll know what every line of your price list needs to contain, which unwritten rules have to come out of your head and onto paper, and how to put it together in an afternoon without buying anything.

Your price list isn't wrong — it's incomplete

A normal price list isn't a pricing document. It's a memory aid for someone who already knows the business. That's why it works for you and fails for anyone new: an employee in week one, a summer temp, or an AI agent.

Take any line:

New lighting point ............ 45 €

You read that and you know it's 45 € per point, labour only, VAT on top, two-point minimum per visit, surcharge for surface-mounted conduit. The agent reads 45 € and stops there. So when a customer asks "how much to put a socket in the kitchen?", the agent says 45 € — a real number and a bad answer, because it's neither what you'll charge nor what the customer will pay.

That's not the agent's fault. You handed it a memory aid instead of a price list. The good news: fixing this isn't a technical project. It's writing down what you already know.

Five questions every line has to answer

Pick one line and test it against these. Any question left unanswered is either something the agent will guess at, or something it'll have to ask the customer in a way that makes you look disorganised.

1. What's included and what isn't. Materials, labour, waste removal, permits, warranty. Anything you don't state, the customer assumes is included.
2. What the price depends on. Per unit, per square metre, per band, hourly with a minimum charge, by zone. If it varies, say so and say on what.
3. What you need to know from the customer before you can quote. Almost nobody writes this down, and it's the highest-value item on the list — it becomes the agent's question set before it gives any number.
4. How long the price holds. Fifteen days, thirty, "subject to stock". Without an expiry you're honouring quotes from eight months ago.
5. VAT, minimums and travel. If your prices exclude VAT, it belongs on the line itself, not in a footnote the agent can miss.

Same line, finished:

New lighting point (chased into wall)
Price: 45 €/point + VAT. Excludes fitting and materials.
Minimum: 2 points per visit.
Surface-mounted conduit: +12 €/point.
Travel: included within the city; 0.45 €/km beyond.
To quote I need: number of points, wall type (stud / brick / concrete),
whether there's a suspended ceiling, and the town.
Valid for: 30 days.

One line became seven. It looks like more work, but you only do it once, and from then on that service quotes itself. The same block works just as well for the new starter as it does for the agent.

The rules that only live in your head

A well-written price list covers maybe 70% of cases. The rest is rules: the things you apply on instinct that have never been written anywhere.

There's a quick way to get them out. For one week, every time you give a price, note in your phone which rule you just applied. Five days gets you a surprisingly complete list. It usually looks like this:

• Discounts. Who gets them, how much, and how far the agent can go without checking with you. A blunt ceiling ("up to 10%, anything more comes to me") beats an elegant policy.
• Urgency. What actually counts as urgent, what the surcharge is, and when you waive it anyway.
• Special customers. The list of accounts on agreed rates. Skip this and your best client gets quoted street prices.
• When "it depends" is the right answer. Not everything has a fixed price, and an agent that can say "this needs someone to look at it — does Thursday work?" is far better than one that fires off a number.
• What you don't do. The jobs you turn down as a matter of course. Saves everyone time and avoids the worst outcome: accepting work you didn't want.

Write it in plain language in a separate document. No structure needed — a modern agent has no trouble with "monthly maintenance clients never pay a call-out fee".

When the agent should not be quoting

Preparing the material properly doesn't mean the agent quotes everything. Some jobs shouldn't produce an automatic number, and it's worth deciding which ones up front:

• When someone needs to see the site. Renovations, work in older buildings, anything where photos flatter reality. There, the agent's job is to collect details, photos and availability, and book the visit.
• When being wrong is expensive. If a 20% error on a large quote eats your margin for the month, you review that band yourself. A value threshold is the easiest rule to apply: under X euros, automatic; over it, your approval.
• When the price depends on a third party. Suppliers with variable stock, commodity materials, subcontractors. The agent can give a range and say you'll confirm.
• Tenders and formal procurement. No price list survives those.

In all these cases the agent is still doing real work: qualifying, asking the questions, assembling the file and leaving it ready for you. It just doesn't put the number on it. You approve, it executes.

Building it in an afternoon (and keeping it alive)

Don't rewrite the whole price list. Do this instead:

1. Pull your last thirty quotes or price enquiries and look at which services repeat. It's almost always six to ten lines generating most of the questions.
2. Rewrite only those against the five questions. A long hour.
3. Add the rules document. Another half hour.
4. Test it cold: take ten real enquiries you've already answered and check what the agent would have said. This is where the gaps show up — not before.
5. For the first week, review the quotes before they go out. You'll correct two or three things and it's tuned.

To keep it alive: one file, one owner, and a visible last-reviewed date. When prices go up, you change one place, not five. If the price list lives in three versions, the agent will use the wrong one, and that one really isn't its fault.

Where to start

Start with the service you get asked about most and enjoy answering least. Write it out in full, all five answers, and test it. If that one works, the rest is repetition.

Once the material is ready, a sales agent can take the heavy part: asking what's missing, applying your rules, and leaving the quote drafted so all you have to do is hit send.