How to Turn a Supplier PDF Into a Customer Quote Without Retyping

The problem: a long supplier PDF and a lot of manual retyping

Bathroom showrooms receive supplier quotation documents in PDF format. A typical document covers a single bathroom specification and runs to several pages: a bath, a shower enclosure, taps, a basin, tiling, ancillaries. The supplier lists their trade prices; you need to produce a customer-facing quote with your own pricing, your branding, and your payment details.

The manual process looks like this. Open the supplier PDF. Open your quoting spreadsheet. For each line item, find the matching product in your catalogue, apply your margin, enter the quantity and customer price, and move to the next line. Once every line is in, check for errors. Then reformat everything into a customer-presentable document, add your logo and contact details, and save to the right folder.

Every line item takes its own few minutes, so a long specification adds up quickly. Across a busy week of quoting, that is a lot of time spent on data entry — before the customer has seen a single number.

How does IBIOS Quote Studio work?

The process in IBIOS starts by opening a job record and uploading the supplier document. The file can be a PDF or an image. IBIOS passes it to the AI extraction engine, which reads every page and identifies line items: product descriptions, quantities, and supplier prices.

For each extracted line, the engine attempts to match it against your product catalogue. You import your own catalogue into IBIOS — for example, the ranges from the suppliers your showroom stocks — and it stays private to your company. Products already in your catalogue are matched automatically and given a confidence score. A high-confidence match is added to the quote draft immediately. A low-confidence match — or a product the engine cannot identify — is flagged and held in the review queue.

You work through the review queue, confirming or correcting each flagged item. When the queue is clear, the quote is ready for approval. At that point you can adjust quantities, apply promotional pricing, or add items that were not in the original document.

Approved quotes are version-controlled. If the customer asks for a revision, you create a new version rather than overwriting the original. Every version is stored against the job record so you always have a complete history of what was quoted and when.

The role of your imported catalogue

The 60-second figure covers reading the supplier document into quote lines; how quickly the quote is ready after that depends on how many of those lines match your catalogue. Importing your own catalogue — with specifications, SKUs, and trade pricing for the ranges you stock — means that for a specification built from those ranges, a large proportion of line items will match automatically with high confidence.

For jobs that include products not yet in your IBIOS catalogue, those lines go to the review queue. The time saving depends on how many lines require manual review. A job where every product matches automatically needs little or no review. A job with many unknown products takes longer because you need to confirm each one.

The catalogue grows over time. Every product you confirm in the review queue is added to your catalogue, so future jobs with the same products match automatically. The more quotes you process through IBIOS, the better the match rate becomes for your specific product mix.

What does the customer receive?

Once you approve a quote in IBIOS, you can generate a customer-facing Word document at any point. The document is formatted with your company branding, the customer name and job reference, all line items with customer prices, totals, and any notes you have added.

At the bottom of the document is a QR code. The customer scans the QR code with their phone and is taken to a Stripe-hosted payment page where they can pay a deposit or the full amount immediately. No separate payment link needed, no chasing required — the payment route is embedded in the document itself.

This means the workflow from receiving a supplier PDF to sending a fully-formed customer quote with a payment mechanism can be completed in a single IBIOS session, and quickest of all for a well-catalogued job.

What does the 60 seconds actually cover?

The 60-second figure deserves a direct caveat. It covers reading the supplier document into quote lines, before those lines are matched to your own products. When every product in the document already exists in your IBIOS catalogue and the AI assigns those matches with high confidence, there is little to review after that.

Complex jobs — those with many non-catalogue products, specialist items, or handwritten annotations on the supplier document — will take longer. The review queue requires your attention for each flagged item. This is intentional: IBIOS will not add a low-confidence item to a quote automatically, because an incorrect product on a customer quote creates more work than a brief review step.

The realistic comparison is not against a theoretical ideal but against the manual process. Even a quote where many items need review avoids retyping every line by hand, because the matched lines are already in place. That saving compounds across every quote the showroom produces.