Sales Engineer for fabrication
Quote made work from the enquiry you were sent, not the one you retype.
Paste the enquiry or the cutting list exactly as it arrived and Kabaido sets out every line with its material, grade, section or thickness, size, length, quantity, process and finish, each value tied to the words it came from. You do not need a product catalogue. The lines arrive set out and you put your own prices on them.
The job as it stands
The enquiry is never a line sheet
It is a paragraph, a list pasted into an email, a scan of something handwritten or a spreadsheet whose columns nobody agrees on.
A fabrication enquiry arrives as prose. Six lengths of box section in S355, two of them galvanised, cut to the sizes on the list below, a bit of plate work off the drawing, and can you do it for the week after next. Nothing in it is a part number. There is no catalogue row to look any of it up in, because you do not sell a catalogue. You sell material plus labour plus finishing, priced for that job.
So the estimator retypes it. Line by line into a spreadsheet, working out which grade belongs to which item, which figures are cut lengths and which are overall sizes, what is a quantity and what is a dimension, and what the customer has not said at all. That retyping is not estimating. It is the hour before estimating starts, and it happens again on every revision.
The skill is knowing what the job takes. The hour before it is typing, and typing is the part a machine should be doing.
That is what this is for. It reads the request you were actually sent, sets the lines out with every value tied back to where it appeared, asks about the things the enquiry does not say, and hands you a quote with the lines already on it. What each line is worth stays your judgement, and your rates stay yours.
What it takes off the enquiry
The values you would have retyped
Each one is captured with the slice of the customer's own text it came from. A value the request never gave is left empty with a question against it rather than filled in.
Material and grade
The family and the designation as the customer wrote it. A grade is identity, so it is carried word for word and never converted into another designation on your behalf.
Section, thickness and form
Plate, sheet, flat, round, box, angle, channel or tube, with the thickness or the section size the enquiry stated and units normalised to millimetres.
Sizes and cut lengths
Lengths, widths and diameters, with the original wording held beside the normalised figure so a cut length is never quietly read as an overall size.
Quantities and the batch
How many, in what unit, and the call-off pattern where the enquiry gives one. A quantity the enquiry never stated stays unstated rather than becoming one.
Process and operations
Cutting, folding, welding, drilling, tapping and deburring where the enquiry names them, with any drawing reference carried through untouched.
Finish and treatment
Galvanising, powder coating, painting, blasting, linishing or self colour, captured as stated so the finishing line is priced against the right operation.
A line nothing matches is still a line. It arrives set out, cited and unpriced, waiting for your figure.
No catalogue required
Made work has no part number, so nothing is matched to one
Almost every quoting tool aimed at industry assumes you have a product list. A fabricator does not. There is no stock code for a 2.4 metre post in 316, or for forty brackets to drawing 4417 revision C, and there never will be one.
Kabaido resolves each line in a fixed order and only claims a product when one genuinely fits. Where nothing in your data matches, and with nothing imported nothing can, the line does not fail and it does not get a guessed price. It arrives on the quote as a line of its own, carrying the description it was read from and the quantity that was stated, waiting for your figure.
You price it in the quote grid the way you price anything: a unit rate, a discount where the account has one, the VAT treatment and a lead time. The line total, the subtotal and the margin follow from that. The part the machine did was the reading and the setting out, which is the part that was costing you the hour.
The cutting list
Send it in the state it arrived
A cutting list turns up as a block of text in an email body, as a spreadsheet, as a table inside a PDF or as all three in one thread. None of them need tidying first.
- Text, exactly as sent
- Paste the email body straight into a new request. Line breaks, abbreviations, mixed units and the customer's own shorthand all survive, because the reader works from the raw text rather than from a template you have to fill in first.
- The enquiry as a PDF
- Attach it as a PDF, up to 4MB. Pages that are scans rather than text are read as pages, so a list that was printed, marked up and scanned back still comes out as lines.
- Spreadsheets and tables
- A spreadsheet or a CSV arriving at a connected inbox is read as a table, one row to a line, with the headings kept so a size column is never taken for a quantity column.
- Units normalised, the original kept
- Millimetres unless the value is inherently something else, with the customer's own text held beside every figure. An imperial value is converted and the wording it came from stays visible.
- A quantity nobody stated
- Held as unstated rather than assumed. A line that reaches a quote that way arrives unpriced and says on its face that no quantity was given, so someone has to fill both in before it can go out.
- The rest of the thread
- A follow-up message is read as a refinement of the same request rather than as a new one, so an answer that arrives three emails later lands on the line it belongs to.
When the enquiry is short
It asks. It does not fill the gap in.
The rule the whole platform runs on is cite or abstain, and on a quote that rule is worth money.
Every value carries the span of source text it came from, and a value that is not in the source is not produced. In practice that means a thin enquiry produces a thin line with questions against it rather than a confident line that is wrong. A missing attribute renders as missing, in its own colour, with nothing behind it.
The questions are specific and they sit against the line they belong to. Which grade. Which thickness. Is that a cut length or an overall size. Galvanised after fabrication or self colour. Is there a drawing, because the message refers to one and nothing came with it. They come back as a list you can send straight on to the customer, so the chase email more or less writes itself.
Where the platform does put a value forward, it says so plainly. A proposed value is drawn as a recommendation with the engineering reason behind it. A value it has had to assume so a line can carry a price at all is drawn as an assumption, with its basis, and you can correct it in place or turn it back into a question with one tap. Neither is ever dressed up as something the customer said.
What it refuses to do
Six places a plausible guess would cost you money
A quote is a commitment. At each of these the honest answer is to carry the customer's words or to ask, so that is what happens.
It never converts a grade
The designation the customer wrote is the designation that is carried. Where a trade name has a standard equivalent, the relation is surfaced as an alternative for you to accept rather than swapped in underneath you.
It never turns a call-out into a number
A thermal cut quality class, a general tolerance class and an execution class are captured word for word. They change the price and the paperwork, so they are carried, never interpreted into a tolerance the drawing did not state.
It never invents a drawing reference
A drawing number and its revision are identity. Where the enquiry refers to a drawing that is not there, it says the drawing is missing and asks for it instead of proceeding without one.
It never computes a bend
No press tonnage, no bend allowance, no developed length, no minimum flange and no die clearance. Those come from the machine and tooling maker's charts and from the drawing. Where a drawing cites a bend allowance standard the call-out is kept and nothing is calculated from it.
It never guesses a gauge
A legacy gauge number becomes a thickness in millimetres only where the customer stated the equivalence themselves. Otherwise it asks, because the answer differs by material and by table.
It never invents a price or a quantity
No rate, no unit price and no quantity is produced out of nothing. An unpriced line waiting for your figure is an honest line. A plausible one is a liability with your name on it.
Being straight about it
Three things this is not
Worth knowing before you send anything, because a landing page that leaves them out is one you find out about later.
It is not CAD and it does not read geometry. A DXF, a DWG, a STEP file or a photograph of a drawing is not interpreted as a model: nothing is measured or priced from one. The pipeline reads requests, not drawings, and an image that arrives is reported back as not read rather than quietly skipped. What it does read is the request document itself, including a PDF whose pages are scans.
It is not an estimating engine that knows what your shop costs. There is no built-in library of labour rates, material prices or finishing rates, and there is no benchmark telling you what a job ought to be worth. The prices are yours, entered by you, and the arithmetic runs on them.
It is not a structural or a manufacturing check. Nothing here decides whether a section is adequate, whether a weld procedure suits the joint or whether a part can be formed on your brake. Those judgements stay with the people who already carry them.
From enquiry to order
Where the reading sits in the day
- In the inbox, if you want it there
- Connect a Gmail or Microsoft 365 inbox and new enquiries are read as they arrive, with the reply drafted in your branding on the original thread. Review mode is the default, so nothing goes out until you say so, and mail that arrived before you connected is never touched. How the email agent works
- The quote, the order and the customer in one place
- An accepted quote becomes an order without anything being re-keyed, and the customer, the history and the paperwork sit alongside it rather than in three different folders.
- The item you make again and again
- A made item you configure once can be saved, and a later enquiry for the same thing resolves to it carrying its configured price and its drawing. See the Design Engineer
Against the spreadsheet
Where it helps, and where it does not
A spreadsheet that works is a real answer. This is what changes and, just as usefully, what does not.
| Task | Spreadsheet and inbox | Kabaido |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the enquiry | You | Read for you |
| Retyping the lines | By hand, every time | Set out from the source |
| Checking a value against the customer's words | Scroll back through the thread | Every value shows its source text |
| Spotting what the enquiry does not say | If you notice | Listed as questions per line |
| Mixed units and shorthand | Converted in your head | Normalised, original kept |
| Grades and standard call-outs | Retyped, sometimes wrong | Carried word for word |
| Material, labour and finishing rates | Yours | Yours |
| Deciding what the job is worth | You | You |
| Producing the quote document | Typed again | Generated, branded, with a portal link |
| The revised enquiry next week | Redo the take-off | Read again against the same lines |
| Reading geometry out of a CAD file | Your CAD | Your CAD |
Getting started
Test it on an enquiry you have already quoted
No card at signup, and the free plan is not a trial.
Sign up and open a new request
There is nothing to import and nothing to configure first. The request screen is the first thing you see.
Paste one you know the answer to
An enquiry you quoted last month, in the state it arrived. Compare the lines it sets out against the ones you typed.
Price the lines and send it
Put your own rates against them, generate the PDF and send the portal link. If the reading missed something, tell us what it missed.
On the call we run one of your own enquiries through it with you, and you keep whatever comes out of it.
Questions
What fabricators ask first
- Yes, and that is the case it was written for. Reading the request and setting the lines out needs nothing from you at all. Each line resolves in a fixed order, and when nothing matches, which is what happens with nothing imported, the line comes back as a line of its own with the description it was read from and the quantity that was stated. You add the price in the quote grid. Importing a catalogue is what turns matching and automatic pricing on, and it is optional.
- Paste the text of the enquiry into a new request, or attach it as a PDF up to 4MB, including a PDF whose pages are scans. Connect a Gmail or Microsoft 365 inbox and the wider set of things customers really send arrives with it: spreadsheets, CSV files, documents and forwarded messages, each parsed into the same lines. Images are not read, and you are told so rather than left with a silent gap. A CAD file is not read as a model either: nothing is measured or priced from one, so send the written request alongside it.
- No, and it will not pretend to. It reads requests, not geometry, so a DXF, a DWG, a STEP file or a photograph of a drawing is not interpreted. What it does do is read what the request says about the drawing: the drawing number and revision are carried word for word, and where the enquiry refers to a drawing that was not attached it asks for it. Configuring a custom product from real geometry is the Design Engineer's job rather than this one.
- As identity. The designation the customer wrote is the designation that is carried through to the line, and it is never converted into another one on your behalf. The same holds for a thermal cut quality class, a general tolerance class, an execution class and a material certificate call-out: each is captured word for word because each changes the price and the paperwork, and none of them is interpreted into a value the enquiry did not state.
- You get a short line and a specific question rather than a full line that is wrong. A value with nothing behind it in the source is shown as missing, and the questions sit against the line they belong to, so they read as a list you can send back to the customer as it stands. A quantity nobody stated stays unstated: if such a line reaches a quote it arrives unpriced and says on its face that no quantity was given.
- Yes. A cutting list is just a request in a tighter format. Paste it as text and each row becomes a line with its material, size, length and quantity set out and cited. A spreadsheet or a CSV arriving at a connected inbox is read as a table, one row to a line, with the headings kept so a size column is not taken for a quantity column.
- No. Pasting an enquiry into the app is the whole flow and it needs no connection at all. Connecting an inbox is what lets the reading happen without anyone copying anything, and an organisation admin does it with full OAuth. Review mode is the default, so every draft goes to an address you choose until you trust it to reply directly, and mail that arrived before you connected is never touched.
- No. Your commercial data is not used to train models and the AI provider is configured for zero retention, so what you send is used to answer you and nothing else. Every row is isolated by database-enforced row level security, hosting is in the UK, and the detail is set out on the security page along with the data processing agreement.
- The Free plan carries the whole reading flow with one seat and no card at signup, and includes 25 credits a month. A credit is one resolved request line, so a line read and structured is one credit. Scanned pages are the one allowance the plan caps: two a request on Free and twenty on a paid plan. Manual work costs nothing: pricing a line, editing a quote and sending it are never metered. Starter is £149 a month and lifts the seat and product limits.
Send us the enquiry you are quoting today
Paste it in as it arrived and watch the lines come back set out, cited and ready for your prices. Free, no card, and it works before you import a single product.