Quoting tools price the work. They do not cost it.
Most firms can produce a handsome proposal in twenty minutes and cannot say what it earns. The price is in the quoting tool, the cost rates are in finance, and who is free is in someone's head. The margin is assembled afterwards, if at all.
Four kinds of tool, each holding a different half of the answer.
Proposal tools own the document, the template and the signature, and hold no cost model at all. Quoting inside a CRM puts line items on the deal and cannot show what they earn. Configure-price-quote software has the pricing rules, and was built for catalogues of products, which is why a staffed engagement fights it rather than fits it. Services platforms do hold rate cards and cost, and treat quoting as one module among many. Each is reasonable on its own terms. None of them is the thing a services firm actually needs at the moment of commitment.
So the margin gets assembled by hand, in a spreadsheet, from three systems, once the deal is nearly closed. It answers the question late, and it answers it once. Nobody rebuilds it when the staffing changes in the last week of negotiation, which is exactly when it changes.
One row per person, with the cost that person actually carries.
In Profitdrive the deal model sits on the opportunity itself. One row per person or open role, each with a grade, a date window, an allocation, a day rate and a daily cost. The cost is not a separate quoting assumption: it resolves from the same salary, contractor rate, grade and employer on-cost history the forward P&L uses, dated to the month the work falls in. A summary line carries total revenue, blended contribution margin, and the variance against the margin target your firm holds to.
Because the cost is resolved rather than assumed, the margin moves while you are still negotiating. Swap a senior for a mid-level and the number changes as you do it. Push the start date into a month where that person's rate steps up and it changes then too. The question stops being what we should charge and becomes what this shape of team, on these dates, actually leaves.
On the last deal you signed, when did you know what it would earn?
If the answer is after it was priced, or after it was delivered, that gap is what this page is about. The evaluation guide sets out where a services platform or a quoting tool is stronger, and where Profitdrive is. The demo runs on a firm where the margin is visible on every deal in the funnel. It is free and ready to use.