How Estimate AI Turned a 4-Hour Quote Into a 10-Minute Win

In window and door sales, the first quote usually wins. A reseller who gets back to a customer within the hour has a real edge over one who needs a full day. Squid ERP's customers knew this. The issue was not their effort or expertise. It was the process standing in their way.

Every vendor sent quotes as a PDF. Some were four pages. Some were eight. No two vendors used the same layout. To turn any one of those files into a customer quote, a staff member had to:

• Open the PDF and read through it line by line

• Find every product name, dimension, SKU code, and price

• Re-enter all of it by hand inside Squid ERP

• Check for errors before sending anything out

That process took two to four hours. Per quote.

Every mistake made things worse. A wrong number or missed item meant fixing the quote and re-sending it. That cost time and trust. And no shortcut worked consistently, because every vendor formatted their PDF differently. There was no way to get faster without changing the entire process.

Cogent Labs started with one question: where is the most time being lost? The answer was the gap between opening a vendor's PDF and having a quote ready to send. That gap was filled entirely by manual work. Estimate AI was built to close it.

Once the PDF is uploaded, the AI handles the rest. It reads the file, pulls out all the relevant data, and builds a clean quote inside Squid ERP. The reseller can still review and adjust before anything goes out. But the hours of manual work are gone.

Because Estimate AI lives natively inside Squid ERP, there was nothing new to install or learn. The tool appeared in the same workflow resellers already used every day.

The change was immediate. Resellers who used to spend two to four hours on a single quote were finishing in under 10 minutes. A team that produced three or four quotes before noon was now hitting that number in the first 30 minutes of the day. The rest of the morning opened up for calls, follow-ups, and new business.

Accuracy improved just as fast. Because the AI reads directly from the vendor's PDF, the data in the customer quote matches the original file exactly. Manual entry errors stopped. Resellers stopped spending time on corrections and started spending it on deals.

The offer variant feature gave resellers something they had never had before: options. Presenting a customer with two or three clearly priced choices turns a yes-or-no conversation into a real discussion. Resellers who used the feature saw faster decisions from clients and higher average deal values.

Squid ERP's resellers knew their products. They knew their customers. They knew how to close deals.

What slowed them down had nothing to do with skill. It was a simple gap: no automated layer between receiving a vendor PDF and sending a finished quote. Every request had to be read manually. Every line item had to be typed by hand. That gap cost hours. Sometimes it cost the deal.

Estimate AI closed that gap. The repetitive work, reading documents and reformatting data, is now handled in minutes. What is left for the reseller is the part that actually matters: pricing, positioning, and closing.

Any business that quotes, bids, or proposes will face this same bottleneck at some point. The fix is not to hire faster people. It is to remove the manual step entirely.