A quote goes out with last year's price on page three. A contract names the customer's old company name. A delivery date falls on a Sunday. None of these mistakes is serious in itself, but the customer notices them, and the first thing they conclude is that your company is careless. In a small company a mistake in a quote or contract also costs money: you either honour the wrong price or spend a week renegotiating something that was agreed.
This article covers one narrow step: the last read before a document addressed to a specific customer leaves the company. It is not a general quality check of finished work; for that, see a final quality check before work leaves the company. It also does not cover how to write a good proposal, which is described in writing a one-page proposal for a small client.
Why the author misses the mistakes
When you write a document, you read what you intended to say. The brain fills in the missing word and ignores the wrong number because it knows what the number should be. This is why mistakes survive three readings by the same person. The fix is not to read harder. The fix is to change how the document is read and who reads it.
Read it in a different way
Before you send anything, change the conditions of the read:
- Print the document, or at least switch to a different view such as the PDF preview. A different layout makes your eyes slow down.
- Read it from the end to the beginning, paragraph by paragraph, for numbers and dates. You will not follow the story and so you will look at the figures themselves.
- Wait a little. Even thirty minutes between writing and checking helps. If the document is due today, do other work first and read it last.
Check four things against the source
Do not check names, numbers and dates from memory. Open the source and compare.
Names. The customer's company name exactly as it appears in the registry or their last email, the contact person's name and title, and your own company details. Check that the name is the same on every page, including headers and the signature block. Copying a document from a previous customer is the most common source of a wrong name, so search the whole file for the old name before sending.
Numbers. Prices, quantities, totals, tax and discounts. Recalculate the total by hand or with a calculator rather than trusting the formula you wrote. Check that the currency is stated, that the price is clearly with or without tax, and that the figures in the text match the figures in the table. If the quote was agreed on a call, compare it with your notes from that call.
Dates. Start dates, delivery dates, validity of the offer and payment terms. Check each date against a calendar: is it a working day, is it in the right year, does it fall in a public holiday week? Check that the dates are in a logical order, because a delivery date earlier than the start date is a surprisingly common mistake.
Scope. What is included and what is not. Compare the description with what the customer asked for in writing. If the document promises something that was never discussed, remove it or confirm it with the customer before it is sent.
Read it as the customer
After the checks, read the document one more time as the customer would, with no background knowledge. Is it clear what they are buying, what it costs, when it happens and what they need to do next? Are there internal abbreviations, project names or comments left in the text? Are there tracked changes or hidden comments in the file? Export to PDF where possible, and open the exported file, not the editable one, to see what the customer will actually see.
Ask a second reader
A second person catches what you cannot. Make this easy:
- Send them the document and a short list: names, numbers, dates, scope. Five minutes is enough.
- Tell them what is new in this document compared with the last similar one, because that is where mistakes hide.
- Ask for a reply of two kinds only: "ok" or a specific correction.
In a company of five to ten people, the second reader is whoever is available and not involved in the deal. For larger contracts or anything with legal weight, choose someone who knows the topic, and agree in advance who that is. If nobody is available, the fallback is the delay from earlier in this article and the print-out; it is weaker, but it still works better than a single quick look.
Do not let the second reader fix the document themselves. Corrections go back to the author, so that one person stays responsible for the final version and the file does not end up in two versions.
Keep one line of record
When the document is sent, write one line in a shared place such as the customer folder or the deal in your CRM: the document name, the date, who checked, and what was corrected. For example: "Quote v3, 23 October, checked by Anna, changed the delivery date and the customer's name on page 2." This takes thirty seconds. After a few months it shows which mistakes repeat, and you can add the repeating ones to your list. It also helps when a customer disputes what they received, because you can find the exact version that was sent.
Save the sent version as a PDF in the same folder, with the date in the file name, and do not edit it afterwards.
When the mistake is found after sending
Sometimes the customer finds the error first. Reply quickly, say what was wrong and send the corrected document, clearly marked as replacing the earlier one. Do not argue about whose mistake it was. Then add the mistake to your list so that the next read-through looks for it.
What to do this week
Take the next quote or contract you plan to send. Before you send it, search the file for the previous customer's name, recalculate the total, check each date in a calendar, and ask one colleague to read it for five minutes with the four items above. Write one line in the customer folder. If it caught anything, keep the routine; if not, you have lost ten minutes.