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Part 4 of 7 · Quote comparer series ~5 min read

How the comparison is presented

Everything up to here is preparation. The presentation is where a comparison either changes a decision or gets skimmed for the smallest number, and the difference is almost entirely about what appears first.

Key takeaways

  • Exclusions and unclears go above the prices, always.
  • Show firm price and provisional sums separately, never just the total.
  • Attach the questions each quote raises, phrased ready to send.
  • Every figure links back to the page it came from.
  • No recommendation, no score, no star rating anywhere on the page.

What comes first

The order on the page, top to bottom

  • 1. What is unclear. Every scope item nobody can resolve from the documents, per quote, as a question ready to ask.
  • 2. What is excluded. Stated exclusions and conditions, in the supplier’s own wording.
  • 3. Provisional sums. Per quote, totalled separately.
  • 4. The scope table. Nine rows, three columns, every cell resolved.
  • 5. The prices. Last, and split into firm and provisional.
  • No recommendation anywhere, and no ordering of the columns by price.

Putting the prices last is a small decision that does most of the work. Anybody who wants the numbers scrolls to them in a second, and on the way past they have seen that the cheapest quote has four unresolved items. Putting them first means many people never read anything else, which is the behaviour every comparison spreadsheet in the world produces.

Showing the totals honestly

Three quotes shown as firm price, provisional sums and the estimated gapA stacked bar chart with three bars in pounds. Three series: Firm price as quoted in green, Provisional sums in orange, and Excluded or unclear, estimated by us and not quoted, in red. Quote A shows eleven thousand firm, no provisional sums, and a red gap of two thousand four hundred. Quote B shows thirteen thousand one hundred firm, four hundred provisional, and no gap. Quote C shows twelve thousand eight hundred firm, one thousand four hundred provisional, and a six hundred gap. A note says the red band is our estimate of the gap, labelled as ours, and is not part of the quote.£0£5000£10000£15000£20000~£13400Quote A~£13500Quote B~£14800Quote CFirm price, as quotedProvisional sumsExcluded or unclear -- estimated by us, not quotedThe red band is our estimate of the gap, labelled as ours. It is not part of the quote.
Fig 1. The three quotes with what they do not cover added on. The red band is explicitly the reader’s own estimate rather than anything the supplier said, and it is labelled that way everywhere it appears.

This is the one place the system does something that looks like judgement, and it is worth being careful about. The red band is a rough cost for the excluded items, and it is shown because the alternative — three bars of eleven, thirteen and twelve eight — is actively misleading.

The safeguards are that it is a different colour, labelled as an estimate by us rather than a quoted figure, and excluded from every total that gets quoted anywhere else. It answers “roughly how big is the gap” and nothing more.

The questions, ready to send

Each unclear cell generates a question in plain language, grouped by supplier: “Does your price include removing the existing suite and disposing of it? Does it include making good the walls after removal?” Copy, paste, send.

That is a surprisingly large part of the value. The reason unclear items stay unclear is not that nobody wants to ask; it is that writing three separate emails is a twenty-minute job at the end of a day when the quotes are already late.

The recommendation that is not there

Why the quote comparer does not recommend a winnerA horizontal row of five boxes. It could rank: the data is there. On what weights: price versus risk versus trust. Two are not in the documents. So it does not rank at all. The gaps are the output, and a person decides. A note says a ranking would apply invisible weights to a decision worth thousands.WHY THERE IS NO RECOMMENDED QUOTEIt could rankthe data is thereOn what weights?price vs risk vs trustTwo are not inthe documentsSo it does notrank at allThe gaps are the outputa person decidesA ranking would apply invisible weights to a decision worth thousands.
Fig 2. The reasoning behind the missing feature. It is technically easy and it would make the output less useful, which is an unusual combination worth stating explicitly.
  • Compute
  • App integration
  • Security & identity
  • Analytics
  • People

The pressure to add it never goes away, and the useful counter is to ask what the ranking would be used for. If the answer is “to pick without reading”, the ranking is the problem. If the answer is “to sort the list”, sorting by firm price is available and honest, and does not pretend to be a judgement.

Next: what happens when a quote will not compare at all.

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