How IntelliQuote works
IntelliQuote is your AI Job Coordinator inside TradesOps. This article covers what happens when you reply to Telegram (or type into the desktop) with your site-visit notes and IntelliQuote drafts the quote.
The input
You send IntelliQuote a block of free text. Something like:
Job is a re-roof on a 3-bed semi. Two of us, about 5 days. Need to strip the old cedar shingles, replace two rotten deck boards, refit new cedar shingles with felt underlay and battens. Ridge tiles OK, guttering needs replacing. Customer said scaffold's already up from another job so we can use that. Not doing any interior work.
Plus IntelliQuote already knows:
- Your business profile (trade vertical, VAT status)
- Your VAT rate and (optional) minimum callout fee
- Your standard assumptions and exclusions
- Your default payment-schedule preset
- The customer's original enquiry (what they wrote when they first got in touch)
The output
A structured quote draft:
- Scope of work — a customer-facing 60-80 word summary.
- Labour — a natural-language description ("Two of us on site for about 5 days, stripping the old cedar shingles and refitting new") and a single price in pounds.
- Materials (optional) — same shape as labour, or
nullif the job is labour-only or the trader's quoting a single lump sum. - Duration — natural-language, taken from your phrasing where possible ("about a week", "roughly 5 days").
- Assumptions — a shortlist for the customer.
- Exclusions — same.
- Payment schedule — proposed stages that sum to 100% of the total.
- Notes for you (the trader) — anything you should sanity-check before approving. Not shown to the customer.
The four rules IntelliQuote must follow
Hardcoded into the drafter's system prompt:
- Never invent items you haven't mentioned. If your notes don't say "guttering", it doesn't add guttering to materials just because it's common on roofing jobs.
- Never override your saved rates. Your VAT rate, min callout, and standard assumptions/exclusions are taken as-is.
- Never expose an hourly rate to the customer. The customer only sees a single labour figure — never hours × rate.
- Percentages in the payment schedule sum to exactly 100. No rounding drift, no negative stages. Enforced in code and at the database level.
How IntelliQuote picks a payment schedule
Rough rules of thumb baked into the prompt:
- Under £500: single payment on completion.
- £500–£2,000: 50/50 (deposit + final).
- Above £2,000, or jobs with material deliveries: 25/25/50 (deposit / interim / final).
Your default preset (Settings → Payment schedule) always takes precedence. If you've set "always 50/50" as your default, the AI uses that even for £3,000 jobs. The £-thresholds only kick in if you haven't set a default.
What if your notes are too vague?
Sometimes IntelliQuote can't confidently produce a quote — the notes are too short, or too ambiguous ("Need to sort the leaky roof"). In that case it returns scope_of_work prefixed with "More information needed:" followed by what's missing.
On Telegram this comes back as "I couldn't draft the quote from those notes. Try adding a bit more detail…" with a prompt to reply again.
On the desktop the draft still saves but the missing-information warning is shown at the top of the edit page. You can add more detail and edit the draft directly, or cancel and redraft.
Which model does it use?
Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.6 by default. TradesOps uses the same model for:
- Enquiry extraction (turning the customer's raw message into a summary)
- Customer reply drafting
- Quote drafting (this article)
- Job-date parsing (turning "next Tuesday afternoon" into an actual date)
We stay on Sonnet unless a specific task genuinely needs a stronger model. It's ~40% cheaper than Opus and the quality is more than good enough for these tasks.
Cost per quote
A typical quote costs us about 1-3 US cents in Anthropic API charges. TradesOps absorbs that cost — it's included in the £9.99 subscription. Even a very heavy month (a trader drafting several quotes per day) costs us under £5.
Can I see how much AI has been spent on my account?
Yes. Each enquiry page shows an IntelliQuote cost section with a table of every AI call, its model, input/output tokens, and cost in US cents.