A customer asks for a quote on Tuesday afternoon. Your salesperson opens the last quote they sent to somebody vaguely similar, changes the company name, changes three numbers, and sends it. The rate on line four is eleven months old. The discount at the bottom is one somebody approved once, for a different customer, for a reason nobody wrote down. Nobody notices until the job is delivered and the margin is gone.
This is what happens when a business has no rate card. Not a price list buried in a PDF that nobody opens. An actual rate card: a structured library of line items, each with a unit, a standard rate, and a rule about how far it can move.
What a rate card is, and what it is not
A rate card is not a brochure. It is not the number you print for the customer. It is the internal source of truth your team quotes from, and it has four parts.
- A line-item library. Every billable thing you sell, named consistently.
- A unit for each item. Per piece, per hour, per square foot, per month, per seat.
- A standard rate, and where it applies.
- A discount band, with the point at which somebody senior has to say yes.
Miss any one of the four and the rate card stops working. A library without units gives you two people quoting the same item on different bases. Rates without discount bands give you a document everybody overrides. Discount bands without an approval threshold give you a rule with no enforcement.
A rate card also does not fit every business perfectly. If your work is genuinely bespoke every single time, a rate card built from finished deliverables will feel wrong. Build it from inputs instead: hours by grade, materials by unit, site visits, licence pass-throughs. Then the quote becomes an assembly of known inputs, which is still faster than starting from a blank page.
Build the line-item library from quotes you already sent
Do not start by designing a taxonomy. Start by pulling the last forty quotes you sent, across all your salespeople, and reading the line items out into one long list.
You will find three things immediately.
The same item written five ways. “Installation”, “Site installation”, “Installation and commissioning”, “Comm + install”, “Fitting charges”. These are one item, or two, and someone has to decide which.
Items that are actually bundles. “Annual maintenance” hides four site visits, a spares allowance, and phone support. If it stays a bundle, its price can never be defended when a customer pushes back. Split it.
Items that exist once. Somebody quoted a one-off in 2023 and it has been copied forward ever since. Those go in the archive, not the library.
Now group what remains. Most SMBs land on somewhere between forty and a hundred and fifty live line items, organised into six or eight categories. If your library runs past three hundred items, you have almost certainly kept variants that should be one item with a variable quantity.
Name every item so that a new salesperson in their second week can find it by typing the word a customer would use. Internal jargon is what sends people back to copying an old quote.
The description field is part of the rate
Each line item needs a standard description, one or two sentences, written once and reused. This matters more than it sounds. Half the arguments about scope after a job starts come from a line item that said “training” and meant something different to each side.
Write the description so it states what is included and, where it matters, what is not. “Two half-day sessions at your premises, up to fifteen attendees, materials supplied” is a description. “Training” is a liability.
Units are where rate cards quietly break
Pick one unit per item and never allow a second. This is the least interesting rule in this article and the one that causes the most damage when it is broken.
A fabrication shop quotes some jobs per kilogram and some per piece. A design agency quotes some work per hour and some per deliverable. Both are defensible in isolation. Both become unusable the moment you try to compare quotes, forecast capacity, or work out whether last quarter’s pricing held.
Set the unit at the level you actually track cost. If your factory floor records output in pieces, quote in pieces. If your timesheets record hours, quote in hours, even for fixed-price work, and then present the total. The customer sees the total. Your rate card sees the units.
A few unit rules worth writing down:
- Time is quoted in one grade unit, not mixed. Either hours or days across the whole card.
- Anything recurring carries a period. Per month, per quarter, per annum. Never bare.
- Pass-through costs, licences, travel, statutory fees, are separate line items at cost, flagged as such.
- GST treatment is attached to the item, not decided at the end by whoever is building the quote.
That last one saves a specific kind of embarrassment. When the tax rate lives on the line item, a mixed quote covering goods and services computes correctly without anyone thinking about it.
Discount bands, not discount discretion
Most businesses have an unwritten discount culture. The salesperson knows roughly how far they can go. Roughly is the problem, because roughly drifts, and it drifts downward.
Replace it with three bands per item or per category.
Band one: standard. Zero to five per cent off the card rate. Anyone can apply it, no note needed. This is the everyday courtesy discount that closes a small deal on a Friday.
Band two: earned. Five to twelve per cent. Allowed, but the salesperson has to attach a reason from a short fixed list. Volume above a stated threshold, a multi-year commitment, a repeat customer in good payment standing, a competitive situation you already knew about. Free-text reasons are not a reason.
Band three: exception. Beyond twelve per cent. Requires named approval before the quote goes out, not after.
The percentages above are illustrative. Set your own from your actual gross margin per category, because a twelve per cent discount on a trading line with thin margin is a very different act from twelve per cent on a consulting line. Some categories will have almost no band two at all. Say so on the card.
One more rule that is worth the argument it will cause: discount applies to the line, not the total. A blanket percentage on the footer of a quote hides which item you gave away. When it applies per line, you can see six months later that your team keeps discounting installation to zero and holds firm on hardware, and you can price accordingly.
The approval threshold that actually gets used
An approval gate works when it is fast, singular, and hard to skip.
Fast means measured in hours, not days. If approvals take two days, your team will find a way around them, usually by quoting inside band two and negotiating the rest on the phone. The same logic applies to proposals, where three separate waits turn a two hour job into a four day one.
Singular means one approver per threshold, named, with one named backup. Two approvers means each assumes the other has looked.
Hard to skip means the quote cannot be issued without it. If the gate lives in the quoting tool, this is automatic. If it lives in a WhatsApp group, it does not exist.
Define the threshold on more than percentage. A useful set:
- Any discount in band three, on any line.
- Any quote where blended margin falls below your floor, even if every line sits inside band two.
- Any payment terms beyond your standard. Ninety day terms are a discount, they are simply not labelled as one.
- Any non-standard line item, meaning something not in the rate card at all.
That last trigger is what keeps the library honest. If a salesperson has to seek approval for an off-card item, they will ask for it to be added properly. Your library then grows from real demand rather than from a planning meeting.
Keep the card alive
A rate card that is not reviewed becomes the eleven month old rate on line four. Put it on a cadence.
- Monthly, fifteen minutes: review every off-card line item quoted that month. Add, reject, or merge.
- Quarterly, one hour: review discount usage by band and by salesperson. You are looking for the person who lives in band two, and for the item that is never quoted at card rate.
- Annually: reprice against input cost. Materials, salaries, licence renewals.
When rates change, the quotes already sitting with customers do not change with them. That is a versioning problem, and it deserves its own discipline, covered in how to handle numbers you have already put in writing.
Start with forty quotes and one spreadsheet
Do the extraction first. Forty recent quotes, every line item in one column, unit in the next, rate charged in the third. It takes an afternoon. The duplicates and the drift will be visible before you finish.
Then agree units before you agree rates, because the unit argument is short and the rate argument is long. Set bands per category, not per company. Name one approver.
Only then move it into wherever your team actually builds quotes. In BizvoraOne, the rate card sits behind the Quotations module so line items, units and approval thresholds travel with every quote, and the quote carries its own history. The tool matters less than the decision, though. A rate card your team can find and trust beats a beautiful one nobody opens.
