Price a test job before your first real quote

Why test before a client is waiting

The first time you see a wrong price should not be in a client's inbox. A test enquiry shows you, in a few minutes, whether the rates from setup produce the price you would give on the phone. Fixing a rate now is quick; explaining a wrong quote later is not.

Make the test realistic

Create an enquiry with your own email address as the client, so nothing reaches a real client. Use addresses from a job you do every week, a real date and time, and the number of passengers you usually carry. Choose a vehicle class you have priced. A test from your own base to the nearest airport tells you more than an invented route.

Read the breakdown

Select Generate Quote and open the Quote Breakdown card. Read it in this order:

• Strategy: how the job was priced, such as Point to point or Hourly / as directed. If it is not the way you sell that job, check the service on the enquiry.
• Line Items: the base fee, the distance charge, extras and any discount, each on its own line. Check the distance against what you know the route to be.
• Warnings and Assumptions: what the engine had to assume, for example that it priced with your default class because the requested class has no rates, or that it assumed a number of hours.
• Total: compare it with the price you would have given.

When the status says Needs Details

Needs Details means the price is not safe to send. The usual causes are a route with no distance, a missing hourly or daily rate, hours not entered for an hourly job, a class with no rate card, a class priced from the default class as an estimate, a total of zero, or more passengers than the vehicle seats.

Fix the input that caused it: add the rate, enter the hours, choose the right class or vehicle. When the client left something out, Request Missing Info opens a draft email asking them for it.

The price always comes from your rates

Generate Quote runs the pricing engine on your own rates. The AI reads emails and fills in the enquiry, but it does not set prices. The same is true when you ask Carson in the Assistant for a price during a call: it uses the same engine, says when it cannot price the job instead of inventing a number, and does not include a client's negotiated discount.