What does writing proposals really cost you?
Enter how many proposals your team sends, how long each one takes and what an hour of that time is worth. The calculator shows the hours and money spent on quoting each year, and what you get back at a faster creation time.
Your result
- Hours on proposals per month
- 15
- Hours on proposals per year
- 180
- Yearly cost of proposal time
- 10,800
- Working days per year
- 22.5
At your target time you get back
120 hours a year
worth 7,200 in the same currency as your hourly cost
Free 15-minute call. Fixed price and timeline in your inbox within 24 hours.
How the calculator works
Hours per month is proposals per month times minutes per proposal, divided by 60. The yearly figure is that times 12, and the cost is the yearly hours times the hourly cost. Working days assumes an 8-hour day. The saving uses the same formula with the gap between today's minutes and your target.
What the numbers look like in practice
One agency we spoke to was producing 50 to 60 proposals a month at 45 to 50 minutes each: roughly 45 hours a month of skilled time spent copying old documents and rebuilding pricing tables. Their goal was 10 to 20 minutes. The time goes on the same steps in almost every team: finding the last version, rewriting scope, retyping prices from a spreadsheet and fixing formatting before it can be sent.
Where the minutes come back from
- Templates that fill from the CRM. Client, deal and contact details land in the document from the deal record. See PandaDoc template design.
- A native CRM integration. Proposals generate from the deal and status flows back, as in our PandaDoc HubSpot integration work.
- Catalog, pricing tables and approvals. Prices come from one place and discounts follow rules, covered in PandaDoc CPQ.
- A planned rollout. The full build, training and handover is our PandaDoc implementation service. For budget ranges, read how much PandaDoc implementation costs.
Proposal time questions
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How long should it take to create a sales proposal?
Teams quoting manually from Word, Google Docs or old PDFs commonly tell us 45 to 50 minutes per proposal. With CRM-driven templates, a content library and pricing tables in PandaDoc, the realistic target is 10 to 20 minutes, and often lower: one B2B team we built for went from about an hour per document to 5 to 10 minutes.
What hourly cost should I use?
Use the loaded cost of the person who builds the proposal: salary plus benefits and overheads, divided by working hours. If proposals are built by a founder or a senior account manager, use what an hour of their selling time is worth, because that is the time the quoting work takes away.
What counts as proposal creation time?
Everything between "send me a proposal" and the document going out: finding the last version to copy, rewriting the scope, rebuilding the pricing table, checking numbers, chasing an internal approval and fixing the formatting. Time spent on the sales call itself does not count.
How do I get proposal creation time down?
Three changes do most of the work: templates with variables that fill from the CRM deal, a content library of approved scope and case-study blocks, and a product catalog with pricing tables so nobody retypes a price. Approval rules and automation on deal stage take out the rest of the manual steps.
Is the saving worth paying for an implementation?
Compare the yearly cost of the hours saved with a fixed-price build. Our guide to PandaDoc implementation cost lists the ranges we quote, and a free 15-minute call gets you a fixed price and timeline within 24 hours, so you can do the maths with a real number.
Turn those hours back into selling time
Bring your numbers from the calculator to a free 15-minute call. We map what you send, where your pricing lives and what your CRM needs to drive, then send a fixed price and timeline within 24 hours.
No lock-in. No pressure. Just a clear plan.