The short version: a kitchen quote in a small joinery shop is six separate jobs pretending to be one: measure, draw, take off, price, estimate labour, write it up, then revise. Four to eight hours is normal, and most of it is copying numbers from one place to another. The measure and the design conversation should stay human. The take-off, pricing, labour estimate, document and revision loop can run from one cabinet list, and that is a $4,000 to $18,000 + GST build on the Microsoft 365 a shop already pays for.
The six jobs inside one quote
| Step | Typical time | Where it lives today | Automatable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Site measure and client conversation | 1 to 2 hours plus travel | Notebook, phone photos, memory | No. This is the sale. |
| 2. Drawing and cabinet list | 1 to 2 hours | Cabinet design software, or a sketch | Partly. The software does it; the list rarely leaves it cleanly. |
| 3. Material take-off (sheets, edging, hardware) | 30 to 60 minutes | Spreadsheet, retyped from the cabinet list | Yes, from a standard cabinet library. |
| 4. Pricing (sheet, hardware, benchtop, appliances, extras) | 30 to 90 minutes | Supplier price lists, emails, last month's quote | Yes, if the price list is maintained in one place. |
| 5. Labour estimate and margin | 15 to 30 minutes | The owner's head, sometimes a rule of thumb per cabinet | Yes for the first pass; the owner adjusts. |
| 6. Quote document, send, revise | 30 to 60 minutes, then 30 minutes per revision | Word template, email, re-do steps 3 to 5 for every change | Yes. The revision loop is the biggest hidden cost. |
Those times are for a mid-size kitchen in a shop with 5 to 20 people, where the owner or one estimator does the quoting. Add them up and it is four to eight hours before a single sheet is cut, and a shop quoting three or four kitchens a week is spending a working day or more on quotes it will win maybe a third of. The losing is not the expensive part. The winning ones were quoted the same slow way, and that is.
Where the hours actually go
Not the measure. Not the drawing. The hours go into three places: retyping the cabinet list into a spreadsheet to take off materials, hunting for the current price of a hinge or a benchtop, and redoing all of it when the client changes the island. Each of those is a copying job. Step 6 hides the worst of it: a revision that changes two cabinets sends someone back through steps 3, 4 and 5, and the quote document is rebuilt by hand. Three revisions on a kitchen is not unusual. That is the pattern I see in quoting across NZ trades, and joinery has it worse because the parts list is longer.
What to automate, and what to leave alone
- Leave alone: the site visit, the conversation about what they actually want, and the final call on price. A quote that arrives from a machine reads like one.
- Automate the take-off: a cabinet library (base 600, wall 900, pantry, corner unit, drawer stack) with sheet, edging and hardware quantities per unit. The cabinet list becomes the take-off with no retyping.
- Automate the pricing: one price list, in a SharePoint list or Dataverse table, with a date on every price. Hardware, sheet goods, benchtop per lineal metre by material, extras. Update it monthly and every quote uses the current number.
- Automate the first-pass labour: hours per cabinet type, install hours per lineal metre, the owner's margin rule. The owner sees the number and moves it, rather than building it.
- Automate the document and the revision: the quote generates from the list. Change the island, regenerate, send. Revision two takes ten minutes, not ninety.
What it looks like built on Microsoft 365
A Power App on a phone or tablet where the estimator picks cabinets from the library and enters the measured sizes; a SharePoint list or Dataverse table holding the price list and the cabinet library; a Power Automate flow that produces the priced quote as a PDF from a Word template and files it against the client. The cabinet design software stays; the app either reads its export or replaces the sketch for the shops that never used one. Licences: nothing beyond Microsoft 365 if it is all SharePoint; NZ$32.40 per user per month if the price list and quotes justify Dataverse, which for one or two estimators they usually do not. The build sits in the $4,000 to $8,000 + GST band for the SharePoint version, following the same decision tree as replacing the spreadsheet that runs your business. If the shop already runs job software, the quote goes into it as a job on acceptance, the same way the quoting tools built for NZ trades do it, without paying per user for a quoting module.
The number to watch
Hours per quote, and quotes per week. If a shop moves from six hours to two on a kitchen quote and does three a week, that is twelve hours back every week for the person whose time is worth the most. What the shop does with those hours is the real return: more site visits, or fewer late nights, and either is fine. The calculator turns hours and a rate into a number if you want one before the call.
Common questions
How long does it take to quote a kitchen?
For a small joinery shop, a full kitchen quote typically absorbs four to eight hours of someone's time spread over a week or two: the site measure, drawing it up, the material take-off, pricing hardware and benchtops, estimating labour, writing the document, and at least one revision. Most of that is copying numbers between places rather than skilled joinery work.
Which parts of joinery quoting can be automated?
The take-off from a standard cabinet list, hardware and sheet pricing from a maintained price list, the labour estimate from cabinet counts and rates, the quote document itself, and the revision loop. The site measure, the design conversation and the judgement about what the client will actually pay for stay human.
What does automating kitchen quoting cost in NZ?
For a 5 to 20 person shop, a quoting tool built on Microsoft 365 (a SharePoint or Dataverse price list, a Power App to enter the cabinet list, and a flow that produces the priced quote document) lands between $4,000 and $8,000 + GST for a SharePoint version and $8,000 to $18,000 + GST if it needs Dataverse. Licences are $0 for SharePoint and NZ$32.40 per user per month for Dataverse.
Does joinery quoting software already exist?
Yes, and cabinet design packages produce cut lists and prices well. The gap is usually between that package and the quote the client sees: hardware and benchtop pricing in a spreadsheet, labour in someone's head, the document in Word, and the revision by email. Automation there does not replace the design software; it removes the retyping around it.
Want to know what your quoting actually costs you?
Tell me how many kitchens you quote a week and who does it. One free 30-minute call and you know which of the six steps is eating the hours and what it costs to fix. If it is a software-settings problem rather than a build, I will say so.