Running a job shop in 2026 - how are you handling quoting?

Been spending a lot of time talking to small shop owners lately and quoting keeps coming up as one of the biggest time drains in the business.

The typical process I keep hearing about: customer sends an RFQ, you open Excel or Word, pull your rates from memory or an old quote, calculate everything by hand, format a PDF, email it back. Maybe two or three hours if the job is complex. Meanwhile the customer already heard back from someone else.

I built something to try to fix this. It's called Quotara. The core idea is simple: you set up your parts library once with your labour rates, material costs, and markup, then building a quote is just clicking line items together. Branded PDF sent to the customer in one click. When they accept, it converts to a work order automatically.

The feature I'm most excited about is the AI import. You paste in the customer's RFQ email or upload their PDF and it reads it and builds your quote draft automatically. Customer info pulled, materials identified, labour and outside services pre-filled from your library. You review the numbers and send. Under 10 minutes start to finish.

I know this community skews toward the technical side of machining and that's great. But I'm curious whether the business side of running a shop is something people here think about and talk about too. Quoting, job costing, tracking work on the floor.

Happy to give anyone free access to try it and genuinely want honest feedback. What am I missing? What would make this actually useful for your shop?

getquotara.com if you want to poke around. 14-day free trial, no card needed.

Fast quoting only works if assumptions stay tight, shops lose time fixing numbers later anyway.

That's a fair challenge. The AI draft isn't meant to be the final quote it's meant to get you to 80% in under a minute so you're editing numbers instead of building from scratch. The assumptions it makes are visible and editable before anything goes to the customer. Where shops lose time fixing numbers later is usually because the original quote was built from memory with no documented rates the parts library in Quotara is specifically to prevent that. Set your rates once, every quote pulls from the same source. Happy to show you if you want to poke around.