Stop chasing subcontractor quotes by hand
On a small job, getting three subcontractor prices is ten minutes of judgement wrapped in three weeks of chasing. Send the enquiry, wait, phone twice, get one price back, extend the deadline, then compare whatever arrived against whatever else arrived. The judgement, who to ask and whose number you trust, was never the slow part. The slow part is mechanical, and mechanical work is what automation is for.
There is a second prize behind the speed. A system that sends, chases and logs enquiries leaves an audit trail: who was asked, what they were sent, when they replied and what they said. That record is worth nearly as much as the time, because it answers every awkward question a quote comparison raises six months later.
And there is a third prize behind that one. Subcontractors talk to each other. Firms that send complete enquiries, chase politely, share answers with every bidder and tell the unsuccessful ones the outcome become the firms good subcontractors actually want to price for. A fair, fast enquiry process is a competitive advantage dressed up as admin.
Why does getting three quotes take three weeks?
Walk the cycle honestly and the delay is nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.
Day one: you write the enquiry, attach the drawings you have to hand, and send it to four groundworkers. Day three: one of them asks a question about the retaining wall; you answer him that evening and forget to copy the other three, who are now pricing a different job. Day eight: silence, so you phone two of them from the van and both promise Friday. Day twelve: one price arrives as three lines in an email. Day fifteen: you chase again. Day nineteen: a second price lands, excluding the muck away the first one included. Day twenty-one: you compare them in your head, place the order, and never reply to the fourth firm, who quietly notes it.
Nothing in that sequence needed a human except the retaining wall answer and the final decision. Everything else was memory and repetition, done in the evening after the actual work.
Which parts of the cycle should a machine do?
| Step | By hand | Automated |
|---|---|---|
| Sending the enquiry | Rewritten each time, attachments vary with memory | One template, one document set, identical for every bidder |
| Bidder questions | Answered one to one, so bidders price different jobs | Answer logged and circulated to all bidders |
| Chasing | Happens when you remember, usually too late | Polite reminders at set intervals, without fail |
| Logging prices | Retyped from emails into a comparison, eventually | Captured into one register as each reply lands |
| Closing out | Unsuccessful bidders often never hear anything | Everyone told the outcome the day the order is placed |
The pattern is the one described in zero-click automation: the automations that pay are the ones that run without anyone prompting them. A reminder that fires only when you remember to fire it is just a to-do list with extra steps. The reminder at day five and day ten has to happen because the enquiry exists, not because someone thought of it.
Note what stays human: choosing who to ask, answering the technical question, judging whether the cheap price is cheap because something is missing. The machine does the sending, the waiting and the writing down.
Does automated chasing put subcontractors off?
The fear is that a scheduled reminder reads as a robot nagging. In practice, subcontractors judge main contractors on two things above almost everything else: whether their estimating time gets wasted, and whether they get paid on time. The Small Business Commissioner exists largely because the second of those is such a persistent problem, and the Construction Leadership Council has spent years pushing for fairer, faster supply chain practice for the same reason. Against that backdrop, a firm whose enquiries are complete, whose deadlines are real and who replies to every bidder is not annoying. It is conspicuous.
Honesty is the one rule. A reminder should say plainly what it is: a scheduled note from the contractor's system, with a named human to call. Bodies like the CIOB frame professionalism as consistency and candour rather than polish, and that is exactly what a well-run enquiry process signals to a supply chain. The subcontractor who gets a straight process and a straight answer prices your next job keener, because pricing for you costs him less.
What does the audit trail buy you?
Three things, each of which normally surfaces at the worst moment.
First, comparison quality. When every price sits in one register with its exclusions logged on arrival, the muck away gap between two groundworks prices is visible on day one, not discovered in a variation in month four. Second, defensibility. When a director, a client or a QS asks why the cheaper firm was not used, the register answers: asked on the 4th, chased on the 9th and 14th, declined to price. Third, memory. The reasoning behind a procurement decision usually lives in a phone call and evaporates; captured as it happens it becomes part of the project record, the same effect that makes meeting notes quietly valuable.
None of this asks your subcontractors to adopt anything. They still reply by email or WhatsApp; the system does the filing. This is the sort of workflow automation AI Metric builds for small contractors, and the honest pitch for it is modest: the enquiry cycle gets shorter, the record builds itself, and the good subcontractors notice they are dealing with a firm that does not waste their time. On small margins, being the contractor the best subbies answer first is worth more than the hours saved.