How to Quote a Kitchen Faster (Without Guessing)
The quote is the part of the job nobody pays you for. A customer wants a price for twelve carcasses and a run of wall units, and somewhere between measuring up and sending the PDF there is an evening at the kitchen table with a calculator, a sheet price list and a strong suspicion you have forgotten something. Quote too slow and the job goes to whoever answered first. Quote too fast and you eat the mistake.
Why does quoting a kitchen take so long?
Quoting a kitchen is slow because the pricing work is really layout work. You cannot price the sheet material until you know how many sheets the job takes, and you cannot know that until you have broken the kitchen into parts and laid those parts out on boards. So every serious quote hides a full cut list and a rough optimisation inside it, done on paper or in a spreadsheet, for a job you have not won yet.
That is why so many shops fall back on guessing. A price per carcass, a price per linear metre, a round number that felt right last time. Guesses are fast, but they leak: the awkward kitchen with the odd-sized larder unit takes an extra sheet of 18mm birch ply you never priced, and the margin you thought you had walks out the door with the offcuts.
How do you quote a kitchen faster?
The fastest honest quote comes from doing the layout once and reusing it. Break the kitchen into parts, run the cut list through an optimiser to get a real sheet count, price those sheets plus hardware and labour, add your markup, and send it. When the customer says yes, the same cut list goes straight to the saw. There is no second, more careful version of the work to do after the handshake, because the quote was built on the cutting layout all along.
A few habits speed this up regardless of what software you use. Standardise your carcass sizes so most jobs reuse parts you have already drawn. Keep a current price list for your usual boards, because a quote built on last winter’s sheet prices is a quiet pay cut. And always price from the sheet count including waste, never from the parts’ bare area: the customer is buying whole boards, and so are you.
What should a kitchen quote include?
A kitchen quote should cover materials at their real yield, hardware, labour, and your markup, presented so the customer can say yes to a single number. Materials at real yield means the sheet count from an actual layout, with waste in the price, not a square-metre rate that assumes boards come in exactly the shapes you need. Hardware is hinges, runners, handles and edge banding, small lines that add up across twelve carcasses. Labour is your call on hours and rate, but it belongs in the quote as a line you decided, not a leftover.
Presentation earns its keep too. A branded PDF with your name on it, itemised sensibly, reads like a shop that will still exist when the warranty matters. It also survives comparison: when a customer holds your quote next to a competitor’s text message, the PDF wins jobs at the same price.
How does CutZilla turn a cut list into a quote?
CutZilla builds the quote from the same cut list and layout you will cut from. You enter the parts, CutZilla lays them out and tells you how many boards the job needs, then prices the materials, adds your labour, markup and tax, and produces a branded PDF quote for the customer. The layout work you had to do anyway becomes the quote, which is the whole trick: the evening at the kitchen table collapses into the few minutes the optimiser was already saving you. The full walk-through is on the cabinet quoting software page, and the pricing shows what is in the free tier today.
For shops that quote in versions, a good, better and best option for the same kitchen, CutZilla’s multi-quote handling keeps each version’s cut list and costing separate under one project, so when the customer picks a version, that version’s cut list is the one you cut from.
Try it free. CutZilla turns your cut list into a real sheet count and a branded quote in the browser. Start free. Want multi-quote and inventory? Join the Pro waitlist.