UK Quotation Template (VAT)

A quotation is a fixed price. An estimate is a considered guess. In the UK that is not a matter of house style: Citizens Advice tells your customer outright that “a quote is a fixed price” and that “after you say yes to a quote, it’s a binding agreement between you and the trader, whether it’s written down or not.” Build the document above and the wording it produces says which of the two you have just sent — with the VAT handled properly, and a date it runs out.

Send a quotation when you can define the scope

The word at the top of the page is doing legal work. Once the customer accepts a quotation you have a fixed price, and Citizens Advice sets out only three routes to charging more: they ask for extra work that was not in the quote, you tell them extra work is needed and they agree to pay for it, or you made a genuine mistake writing down or calculating the price. Everything else is on you.

An estimate is the honest document when the scope genuinely is not knowable — a drainage job, a roof you have not opened up, a rewire in a house of unknown vintage. But it is not a way of leaving the price open. Trading Standards guidance for traders is that where a price is not agreed beforehand it must be reasonable, “judged against the prices that other similar traders might have charged.” An estimate buys you room to move, not a blank cheque — which is usually an argument for defining the scope tightly and quoting it.

If you also work in the US market, the same decision runs differently there: the label carries less weight and what binds you is whether the customer could read the document as an offer. That comparison, and where a bid fits, is in the estimate vs quote vs bid guide. The US-facing twin of this builder is the contractor estimate template.

The VAT decision comes before the numbers

Fill in labour, materials and anything else — travel, skip hire, waste carriage, plant. On a rubbish or house-clearance job it is usually faster to work out the number before you quote it and carry the total across rather than build it line by line here. Either way, answer one question before you look at the total: are you VAT registered? Registration is compulsory once your taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or you expect to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days. Below that a great many sole traders and small limited companies are not registered, and their quotations should not carry a VAT line at all.

Three things follow from getting that answer right:

• Registered, standard-rated work. VAT at 20% on the net. Most trade work sits here. The optional turnover field flags the £90,000 threshold if you want to keep half an eye on it; nothing you type is sent anywhere.
• Registered, but this job is not standard-rated. There is a 5% reduced rate and a 0% zero rate for specific goods and services. Check which applies to this job before you use either — and note that zero-rated work done by a registered trader is a different sentence on the quotation from work done by a business that is not registered at all. The builder writes them differently.
• Not registered. No VAT, and the document should say so in words. A zero VAT line reads like a mistake; “No VAT is charged — this business is not VAT registered” reads like someone who knows their position.

The Excluding VAT / Including VAT switch decides which way the arithmetic runs. Type net figures and VAT is added on top; type the numbers you already quote to homeowners and the VAT is backed out of them, so the total the customer sees never moves.

The price a consumer reads must include VAT

This is the part US templates have no field for. Trading Standards guidance is that price information given to consumers must be “clearly legible, unambiguous, easily identifiable and inclusive of VAT and any other taxes.” So on a domestic quotation the headline figure is the gross one — the number they will actually pay — with the net and the VAT shown underneath for their records. Quoting a homeowner “£1,200 plus VAT” and expecting £1,440 on acceptance is how a fixed price turns into an argument.

Commercial customers are the mirror image: they recover the VAT, so they read the net figure as the price and the VAT as bookkeeping. Same document, different emphasis — which is another reason to show all three numbers rather than one.

Put an expiry on it, because the price is fixed

There is no statutory validity period for a UK quotation. It is commercial practice, and it exists precisely because the price is fixed once accepted: your merchant pricing, your subcontractor availability and your own diary all move, and the quotation should not outlive them. Thirty days is the trade default and the field starts there; shorten it when you are quoting off a supplier price with a shorter shelf life, and say so on the document.

If you quoted at their kitchen table

Most trade quotations are accepted away from the trader’s own premises — in the customer’s home, at their workplace, on the driveway. That makes it an off-premises contract, and Trading Standards guidance sets out what follows: a 14-day cancellation period for a service contract, “starting the day after the day on which the contract was made”, and a model cancellation form you must give the consumer before the contract is concluded.

The trap is starting work inside those 14 days. You may only do so where the consumer has expressly requested it in a durable medium and acknowledged that they lose the cancellation right; begin without that request and a customer who cancels pays nothing for what you have already done. Tick the box in the builder and the wording block picks this up, so the notice is on the page rather than in your head. This is a document you fill in and hand over, not legal advice — for anything substantial, use a written agreement and take proper advice.

From accepted quotation to invoice

Once it is signed, the quotation is your scope of record. For recurring or higher-value work, turn the accepted quote into a signed agreement rather than working from the quotation alone, and dispatch the visit itself on a job sheet so the crew has the same scope on paper that the customer accepted. Carry the same figures into the contractor invoice template to bill it. When the customer changes their mind mid-job — a different tile, an extra socket, a wall that has to move — that is one of the three routes to charging more, and it belongs in writing: log it with a change order before the work, not in an argument at the end. If you want line-by-line control over a longer document rather than the three-line summary above, the quote generator builds the itemised version. Every other form the job needs sits in the templates and forms library.