MaidBossPro Blog — Quotes & Pricing

Tracking Cleaning Estimates: Sent, Approved and Gone Quiet

Ask a cleaning company owner how many quotes are out right now and the honest answer is often a shrug. Some are in the sent folder, some were texted, one is on a sticky note by the phone, and a couple were promised but never actually sent. You cannot win quotes you have lost track of, and you cannot improve what you cannot see.

Why Tracking Matters

Follow-up emails, covered in Cleaning Estimate Follow-Up Emails for Quotes That Went Quiet, handle the reminders. Tracking is the step above that: knowing, at any moment, what is out there and where each quote stands.

Tracking does three jobs. It makes sure no customer who asked for a quote is forgotten. It tells you how much work is likely coming, so you can plan teams. And over time it shows which kinds of quotes you win and which you lose, which is the information you need to change your prices or your process.

The Stages Worth Watching

Keep it simple. Every estimate is in one of a few places:

• Requested. A customer asked, through the website request form, a sign-up or a phone call, but no quote has gone out yet.
• Sent. The estimate is with the customer and waiting for an answer.
• Approved. The customer approved online, and the estimate has become the scheduled job.
• Lost. The customer said no or never answered after follow-up.

The dangerous stage is the first one. A request that never got a quote is the most expensive lost lead there is, because the customer was ready and you simply did not answer.

Keep Everything in One Place

Tracking only works when every quote lives in the same place. In MaidBossPro, estimates are built and sent from the office, website requests and sign-ups land in Form Responses, and approved estimates become jobs. Nothing lives in an inbox, a text thread or a notepad alone.

That one change fixes most tracking problems by itself. When every estimate is in the system, the office can see what has been sent and what has been approved without asking around.

A Simple Weekly Review

Set aside fifteen minutes a week, the same day each week, to look at your estimates. Go through them in this order:

• Form Responses. Any request or sign-up not yet answered? Answer it today.
• Sent estimates. Any large or valuable ones waiting more than a week? Consider a personal call or text.
• Approved estimates. Has every approved job been put on a team's day?
• Lost estimates. Anything unusual about this week's losses?

Fifteen minutes a week is enough for most small cleaning companies. Larger ones may want a short daily check of new requests.

What to Watch For Over Time

After a couple of months, your estimates start to tell a story. Look for patterns rather than single quotes:

• Do you win most first deep clean plus recurring quotes, but lose most one-time deep cleans?
• Do quotes sent on the call get approved more often than ones sent the next day?
• Do website requests convert differently from phone calls?
• Are move-out quotes being lost on price, or on how fast you can get there?
• Are office bids taking much longer to decide?

You do not need a spreadsheet of numbers to spot most of these. A few months of looking at the same list will make the patterns obvious. Reports in MaidBossPro help with the bigger picture.

Who Owns the Quotes

In a company with more than one person in the office, decide who is responsible for quotes. It might be one office manager, or the owner, or a split by job type. Office user roles let you give the right people access to the right parts of the system. What matters is that every request has an owner, and that person checks Form Responses every day.

Keep the review honest. It is easy to leave a quote marked as waiting long after the customer has clearly gone elsewhere. If a quote has had its follow-ups and no reply, call it lost and move on. A short, accurate list is far more useful than a long one full of quotes that are never coming back.

Tracking Leads to Better Quotes

Tracking is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the feedback that tells you whether your prices, your speed and your quotes are working. Keep every estimate in one place, review them weekly, and watch for patterns. When a pattern shows up, the next guide, Why Cleaning Quotes Get Lost, and What to Change, looks at what to do about it. For how tracking fits with the rest of your estimating, visit the house cleaning estimate software page.