Paving quote template and example

A quote for block paving has to be legible and credible: who is offering, to whom, what exactly, and for how much. Below is what belongs on it and a worked example of the line items. Your own version, as a PDF with your logo, takes a few minutes in the app — with nothing retyped into a spreadsheet.

• You: name or trading name, address, company number if you are a limited company, VAT number if you are registered, phone and email.
• The customer, and the site address if it is not where they live.
• Quote number, date issued and a valid-until date.
• Line items: description, quantity, unit price, line total.
• Net amount, VAT at 20% if you are registered, and the total.
• Scope: what the price assumes and what is excluded — muck away is the usual one.
• How to pay: bank transfer with sort code, account number and a payment reference.

Those five lines plus £150 delivery come to £4,750 on a 50 m² drive — £95/m². The rates are illustrative; the quantities (blocks with waste, aggregate, sand, kerb runs) are worth checking in the paving calculator, and in the app they carry straight through into the quote. Whether VAT sits on top of that total or inside it depends on whether you are registered, so say which on the document.

An invoice has contents the law expects. A quote does not, and that tempts people into a one-line text with a number in it. But the quote is the document that gets pulled out when there is a disagreement, and anything missing from it is very hard to prove afterwards.

Three things turn a figure into an agreement: the validity date (how long the price holds), the scope (what is and is not in the price) and the unit rates (what extra work will be charged at). Without them, every change during the job is a negotiation from scratch.

On paving, the scope should answer at least four questions: is muck away included, are the kerbs priced with their concrete haunching, how many cuts are allowed for, and what happens if the subgrade will not take the load. Four lines that save four phone calls.

The word on the top of the page counts too. A quote is a fixed price for that scope; an estimate is a guess that can move. Pick one deliberately — the customer certainly will.

Your customer is usually at work and will not get to a signature for a week. So it pays to send the quote in a form that can be accepted in one click and that leaves a record of what they accepted and when.

For that, an email with a link beats an attachment. An attachment can be edited and nobody can say which version was read; a link always shows the current document, and once the customer accepts it you have the date and the status. Keep the PDF as the archive copy, not as the main channel.

A quote with your logo, a number and a proper layout reads as a business rather than as a bloke with a van, and that changes how the price is received. Put your bank details and the payment reference on the same page, so that when the customer says yes, the next step is already in front of them. Less friction, fewer days between yes and the deposit landing.

See how to price a paving job, how to put a quote together and the sample invoice for paving work.