Your quote conversion rate is counting two different groups of quotes

What the number is supposed to mean

The useful question is: of the quotes I sent in March, how many became work. That is a cohort, fixed by sent date and followed until nothing is undecided. One month of a two-truck shop is a small sample, so the trend across a few months is the signal.

The six statuses and which side they sit on

There are six quote statuses.¹ Deciding where each belongs is most of the work.

Pick Approved or Converted and never mix them. Converted is what Jobber’s own metrics use,²⁴ and it sticks even if the job is later deleted,¹ so work you cancelled still reads as a win.

Where the numbers live

The quotes list shows the status overview, the conversion rate, and sent and converted quotes, with dollar values given as after discounts and tax.²

The quotes report answers the real question. Insights, then Reports, then Quotes Report under Work Reports. It needs admin access or the View all quotes, View all reports and Show pricing permissions.³ Add the Drafted, Sent, Approved, Converted and Archived date columns, then export to CSV.³ One row per quote with its dates on it is a cohort.

One month, four different answers

Same quotes, a spread from 38 to 75. None of the four is a lie. They answer different questions, and people repeat the highest one.

What bends the number

Open quotes at the cut-off. The eight in Awaiting Response are not losses, they are unfinished. Call them losses and the rate sinks; drop them from the denominator and it jumps to 75. Report won, lost and still open.

Archived quotes. Archiving erases nothing; the report carries an Archived date column.³ But counting by hand off the status filters, Archived is the pile you stop opening, and an automation can move quotes there on its own after a set number of days.⁶ Deleting is worse: the list deletes in bulk,² and a deleted quote is gone from next quarter’s export.

Late conversions. A quote sent in February and converted in March lands in March’s numerator against February’s denominator. A quote can also be converted without ever being sent or marked as sent,³⁷ so it never joins the sent side at all.

Drafts. A draft was never offered to anyone, so it cannot be a loss. Jobber keeps drafts out of the sent count, but the help centre’s spreadsheet method divides by all quotes in the report, drafts included,³ which hurts most when an automation drafts one from every request.⁶ At the other end, sending and marking as sent count the same,³ so sent means not a draft any more, not that the client got it.¹

One big job. Twenty quotes is a small sample. One re-pipe landing or not moves the rate five points.

Count the money as well as the quotes

Counting quotes treats a $400 faucet swap and a $31,000 drain line replacement as one each. Your bank does not.

Those 20 sent quotes were worth $96,000 and the nine converted ones $52,000: 54% by value against 45% by count, which reads like you win the bigger work. Pull out the one $31,000 drain line and the other eight wins are $21,000 of a remaining $65,000, or 32%.

Run both, on the same rows. The report’s Total column is before taxes and discounts,³ while the list figures are after discounts and tax,² so mixing them produces a gap that is arithmetic, not sales.

What to do with the answer

The instinct after a bad number is to rewrite the quote. Measure how long you take to send it first.

Add the Drafted date and Sent date columns and subtract. Drafted date is when the quote was created, not when it went out.³ Sort by the gap and see where the losses sit.

In most small shops the rate is set by the two days a quote sat in Draft while you were on a roof. By then the homeowner had two other prices. A quote that goes out the same evening competes against nobody.

Quote follow-ups chase what is already out, a set number of days later, in the same channel, on the Connect plan and up. Quote reminders do the manual version on any plan.⁵

Do not chase an industry benchmark. Nobody counts this the same way twice. Count your own the same way every quarter and watch the line.

Where we come into it

We build software that groups your quotes by the month they were sent, follows each to a settled state, and reports won, lost and still open, by count and by value. It only reads your account.⁸

You do not need us. It is one CSV export and a pivot table, and the method is above. What we sell is not redoing it every quarter. If you want the first one done, read it once, free.