Quotes that never read the cost
A design-led renovation company in Singapore that prices every job in a costing workbook, with cost and mark-up beside every client price.
/work/quote-beautifierCame in under strain
- System
- Quotations and documents in the house style
- Symptom
- Costing workbooks pasted into AI chat, cost and margin included.
- Region
- Singapore
The piece Seventeen layers for seventeen releases. Five channels open, four sealed.
- 17releasesby end of September 2026
- 5columnsread
- 4columnsnever read
- Offlineruns in the browser
The ask
Quotations and documents in the house style. Its software couldn't produce them, and its templates couldn't hold how jobs were priced.
The real problem
The team had started pasting the costing workbook into an AI chat, sending confidential cost and margin figures outside the company.
The output changed from run to run, so every quote needed a line-by-line check.
What leaves the building
- Idle
- Live
- Strain
- Fail
BeforeThe whole workbook went into an AI chat outside the company, cost and margin included.
AfterThe tool runs in the browser and reads five columns. Cost and mark-up are never read.
What we built
Two tools in the company's house style. The quotation tool turns the costing Excel into a client quotation PDF, and the Word beautifier re-sets documents such as handover guides.
Both run entirely in the browser, offline, with nothing uploaded and no AI anywhere in the document path.
How we made it hold
The same workbook always produces the same quotation. A missing value prints in red as "Check Excel Master", and any section that doesn't reconcile is flagged before saving.
Backstage The decisions behind the build, and the hardest problem
Stack, as stated
Excel in, PDF out. Word documents re-set with the house cover, typography, header and page numbers. Everything runs in the browser, offline, with no AI in the document path.
Decisions
Run entirely in the browser.
Nothing is uploaded, it works offline and there is no AI anywhere in the document path.
Find columns by their headings, wherever they sit.
It reads number, description, quantity, unit and client price, and never category, supplier, unit cost or mark-up.
Follow how the office already prices a job.
Package prices on headings, options struck through, TBC for figures not ready, a fill colour that keeps a price off the page, revisions on a new tab.
Ruled out
An AI chat in the document path.
It sent cost and margin outside the company, and it rounded, reworded or dropped lines from run to run.
The hardest problem
The costing master changed layout in September. The tool was updated to read both the old layout and the new one, so older workbooks still produce the same quotation.
The difference
- Seventeen releases shipped by the end of September 2026, each answering something the team ran into.
- Reads both the original and the new costing layout.
- No hand-built front page, no copy and paste, no deleting cost columns before export.
