The Spreadsheet Every Plumbing Business Needs (But Almost Nobody Uses)

Quick question: what’s your quote conversion rate? Not a rough guess. The actual number. How many quotes did you send last month, and how many turned into paying jobs? If you can’t answer that with confidence, you’re not alone — but you are flying blind. And flying blind in business is how good engineers end up busy, stressed, and wondering where all the money went.

The fix is surprisingly simple. One spreadsheet. Updated regularly. Tracking the numbers that actually matter. It won’t take you more than five minutes a week, but the clarity it gives you will change how you run your business.

Why Most Engineers Don’t Track Their Quotes

Let’s be honest — nobody got into plumbing and heating because they love spreadsheets. You got into it because you’re good with your hands, you enjoy solving problems, and you like the independence of running your own show. Tracking numbers feels like office work, and office work feels like the opposite of why you started.

But here’s the thing. The engineers who are consistently profitable — the ones who choose their jobs instead of chasing them — all have one thing in common. They know their numbers. Not because they enjoy spreadsheets, but because knowing your numbers is the difference between guessing and deciding.

Consider this: if you send twenty quotes a month and win six of them, your conversion rate is 30%. That’s useful information on its own. But it gets really powerful when you start asking why. Why did those six say yes? Why did the other fourteen say no? Were the losses all on price? Were they in a particular area? Were they a particular type of job?

Without tracking, those questions are unanswerable. With tracking, patterns emerge — and patterns are where the money is.

What to Track (And What to Ignore)

The mistake most people make when they start tracking is trying to track everything. They build a complicated spreadsheet with forty columns, use it religiously for a week, and then abandon it because it takes too long. Don’t do that.

In my eyes, you need six columns to start with. That’s it. Six pieces of information per quote that will tell you more about your business than any accountant’s report.

The Six Essential Columns

• Date quoted — When you sent the quote. This lets you spot seasonal patterns and measure response times
• Customer name and postcode — So you can identify geographical trends. You might discover you win more work in certain areas, which tells you where to focus your marketing
• Job type — Boiler replacement, bathroom refit, service plan, repair. Different job types have different conversion rates, and knowing which ones you win most helps you prioritise
• Quote value — The total price you quoted. Over time, this shows you your average quote value and whether you’re quoting too low, too high, or just right for your market
• Won or lost — Did they accept? Simple yes or no. This is the number that calculates your conversion rate
• Reason (if lost) — This is the gold. When a customer doesn’t go ahead, note why. Too expensive? Went with someone else? Decided not to do the work? Changed their mind? Each reason tells you something different about your quoting process

That’s your starting point. Six columns. One row per quote. Five minutes at the end of each week to update it. The insights you’ll gain from even a month of data will surprise you.

What the Numbers Actually Tell You

Once you’ve got a few weeks of data, the spreadsheet starts telling stories. Let’s explore what to look for.

Your Conversion Rate

This is the headline number. Divide the number of quotes won by the total number of quotes sent, multiply by a hundred. If you’re converting below 30%, your quotes probably need work. If you’re above 60%, you might actually have a different problem — but we’ll come to that.

A healthy conversion rate for a well-run plumbing and heating business sits somewhere between 40% and 60%. Below that, and you’re spending too much time quoting for work you don’t win. Above that, and you might not be charging enough — which brings us to an important point.

The 100% Conversion Problem

If you’re winning every single quote you send, that sounds like a dream. But it’s actually a warning sign. It almost certainly means you’re the cheapest — and being the cheapest means you’re leaving money on the table on every single job.

Think about it. If every customer says yes without hesitation, it’s because your price is so low that there’s no decision to make. A healthy business should be losing some quotes. Those losses tell you that your pricing is in the right range — high enough to be profitable, but competitive enough to win a good proportion of the work.

The spreadsheet makes this visible. Without it, winning everything feels great. With it, you can see exactly how much revenue you’re probably missing by undercharging. If you’re working on getting your pricing right for different job types, the spreadsheet gives you the data to make confident decisions instead of guessing.

Loss Reasons

The “reason lost” column is where the real value lives. After a couple of months, tally up the reasons and look for the most common one.

If most losses are on price, you have a value communication problem — your quotes aren’t showing customers why you’re worth more. That’s a quoting issue, not a pricing issue. If most losses are “decided not to do the work,” you might be quoting too early in the customer’s decision process. If most losses are “went with someone else,” dig deeper — was it price, speed, or something about how the other engineer presented themselves?

Each pattern points to a specific fix. And without the data, you’d never know which fix to apply.

Benchmarking Across Surveyors

If you’ve got more than one person doing surveys and quotes — maybe you’ve grown to the point where you have an employed engineer or a subcontractor quoting on your behalf — the spreadsheet becomes even more valuable.

Add a column for who did the survey. Over time, you’ll see whether one surveyor converts at a higher rate than another. That’s not about blame — it’s about learning. What’s the higher-converting surveyor doing differently? How are they presenting the quote? What are they saying during the survey that builds more trust?

If you’re at the stage of growing from one van to a fleet, this kind of benchmarking is essential. It lets you identify what works, replicate it, and train your team to a consistent standard. Without data, you’re relying on gut feel — and gut feel doesn’t scale.

Keeping It Simple

The most important thing about your tracking spreadsheet is that you actually use it. A complicated system that gets abandoned after a week is worthless. A simple system that gets updated every Friday afternoon is transformative.

Use whatever tool you’re comfortable with. Google Sheets, Excel, even a notebook if that’s what works for you. The format doesn’t matter. The habit does.

Set a recurring reminder on your phone for Friday afternoon. Spend five minutes going through the week’s quotes and updating the spreadsheet. That’s it. Five minutes that will give you more insight into your business than any amount of guesswork.

If you’re already using job management software, check whether it has built-in reporting for quote tracking. Many do, and it might save you the step of maintaining a separate spreadsheet. But even if your software tracks quotes, make sure it’s capturing the loss reasons — that’s the data most platforms miss, and it’s the data that matters most.

What to Do With the Data

Tracking is only useful if you act on what you find. Here’s a simple quarterly review process:

• Calculate your conversion rate. Is it where you want it? If not, what’s changed since last quarter?
• Review your loss reasons. What’s the biggest category? What could you change about your quoting process to address it?
• Check your average quote value. Is it going up, down, or staying flat? If it’s dropping, are you quoting for smaller jobs or discounting too heavily?
• Compare by job type. Are you stronger at boiler swaps than bathroom refits? Should you be focusing your marketing on the jobs you convert best?

This review takes thirty minutes once every three months. And the decisions it informs — where to focus, what to change, how to price — will have a direct impact on your bottom line. If you’re keeping an eye on your profit and loss figures, the quote tracking data helps explain why those numbers look the way they do.

A Practical Exercise

Create your spreadsheet today. Six columns: date, customer, job type, value, won or lost, reason if lost. Add every quote you’ve sent in the last month from memory — even rough data is better than no data. Then commit to updating it weekly from now on.

After one month, calculate your conversion rate. After three months, review your loss reasons. I guarantee you’ll discover something about your business that you didn’t know — and that discovery will be worth far more than the five minutes a week it costs you.

Get the Full Tracking System

This article gives you the starting framework. But the complete analytic spreadsheet — with the full column structure, the formulas for automatic calculation, the benchmarking framework for multiple surveyors, and the quarterly review process — is all detailed in The Quote Handbook. It includes a worked example showing exactly how to read the data and what actions to take based on what you find.

If you know your quoting process could be better but you’re not sure where the problems are, the tracking spreadsheet is where you start. The numbers don’t lie — and once you can see them clearly, the fixes become obvious.

Grab your copy of The Quote Handbook on Amazon here.