Quotes in Excel: when switching to electrical contractor software pays off and what you take with you

Excel is enough for quotes as long as a firm writes few of them and one person knows them all. It reaches its limit when quotes have to be followed up, changed and compared with reality after the job: who accepted, who did not, what does the variation cost, what was the margin? From there, electrical software does not replace the spreadsheet but the manual work around it. Your customer and article lists come with you from Excel.

What Excel does well — and why it lasts so long

An Excel quote is a spreadsheet used as a template: items, quantities, prices, total, letterhead, and a PDF or printout when it is sent. There are reasons for that which have nothing to do with convenience. The template belongs to the firm, every cell is free, and adapting it costs nothing. A firm writing five quotes a month needs no extra software for it, and this article does not argue otherwise.

So the question is not whether Excel is «bad», but where the firm spends more time on what surrounds the quote than on the quote itself.

Five signs the spreadsheet is reaching its limit

1. Nobody knows which quotes are open. The answer lives in folders, emails and heads. Follow-up happens when somebody remembers.
2. A price change has to be carried through every file. The hourly rate or a material price sits in twenty templates; you cannot tell from the file which is current.
3. The quote and the Rapport are two different worlds. What was quoted is compared by hand, at the end, with what was actually billed.
4. Variations appear as «Quote_v3_new.xlsx». Which version applies is decided by memory — and in a dispute with the client, by the file date.
5. The invoice is retyped from the quote. Every figure entered a second time is a possible deviation.

If two or three apply, the surrounding work costs more than software would. If none applies, stay with Excel.

What electrical software does differently

Electrical software runs quote, order, Rapport and invoice as stations of one thing instead of four files. With elektro.box that means, concretely:

• A quote is a Beleg. Quote, Rapport and invoice are Belege of the same system; what is in the quote does not get retyped into the invoice. How to judge trade software overall is in «Trade software for the electrical contractor».
• The validity period is a setting, not a sentence updated by hand in every template. The same goes for the document-number prefix, the covering text and the standard text above the items, which can be freely changed in any single document.
• The customer discount applies by itself. If a discount is stored for a customer, it is carried into that customer's new quotes and invoices.
• The customer accepts online. The accepted quote sits in one place with signature, chosen options and signed PDF, instead of as a photo of a signed page in an email.
• Follow-up is a setting you switch on. It is off until you turn it on. Once on, elektro.box emails the customer when a sent quote stays unanswered, with the link to the same quote, first after 1 to 90 days depending on the setting. It stops as soon as the quote is accepted, declined, returned for changes, expired or replaced by a newer one. It can be switched off for a single customer.
• The order value is the original quote plus approved variations. How a variation arises and when it is better run as Regie is in «Quote variation, Regie or fixed price».
• The quote knows its margin. On the order, the quote's margin (net) stands beside the hours and costs actually recorded — where you used to lay two files side by side.
• A quote can be split into Rapporte, by stage, floor or day, when a job is not done in one piece.
• Items come from the article master and, where you hold the licence, from the Steiger catalogue. On the role of the NPK: «NPK costing for the electrical contractor».

What belongs to it when quote software becomes business software is set out in «ERP and CRM for electricians».

What you take with you from Excel

For the switch you need no database, only your lists:

• Customers. Under «Import customers» you upload a CSV or Excel (XLSX) file, at most 5 MB and 5,000 customers. The first row counts as the header. You map the columns to fields — customer number, company or name, address, phone, email, contact person, object —; elektro.box proposes the mapping from the column names and you save it as a template. At least one column must hold the name or company.
• Articles and prices. If you keep material prices and hourly rates in a spreadsheet, you create them in the article master; the «Import from Schoch» function reads only a master-data sheet in the old Schoch Excel format (.xls) and is not a general Excel interface. For your own price list, the article master is where it stands cleanly, once.
• Open quotes. They do not come across automatically. What is still running at a cut-off date you close out in Excel; what runs beyond it you create anew in elektro.box.

The sequence of a switch — cut-off date, articles, hourly rates, customers, open quotes — is described in «Switching from Schoch» for a different starting point and applies in the same spirit to Excel. If you have accounting software such as bexio, you keep it: «bexio for electricians».

Switching in four steps

1. Go through the five signs. If only one applies, better filing is often enough.
2. Pick the best template. Prices, texts and validity become the basic settings; everything else is ballast.
3. Bring customers and articles over, hourly rates first — they affect every quote.
4. Start with a real quote, not a trial one: one that has to be written anyway.

What else elektro.box does is on Features; where it connects, on Integrations.

Common questions

Is it wrong to write quotes in Excel? No. For a few quotes that one person oversees, it is a sensible choice. It only becomes expensive when quotes have to be followed up, changed or compared with the Rapport.

Can I bring my customers from Excel into electrical software? With elektro.box, yes: a CSV or Excel (XLSX) file of at most 5 MB and 5,000 customers is read, you map the columns to fields and save the mapping as a template.

Do I have to transfer all my old quotes? No. You create open quotes anew; finished ones stay in your filing. From a cut-off date, new quotes are written only in the software.

What is the biggest difference from an Excel template? That the quote is not the end of its road: it leads to the order, the Rapport and the invoice without anyone entering the figures again.

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Sources: the statements about elektro.box come from the product's feature set — Belege, quote settings, follow-up, customer import, article master, splitting into Rapporte — and from the pages Features and Integrations, as of 6 October 2026. This article makes no statements about other providers' software or prices and no legal statements. «Excel» is the name of the respective provider.