The vocabulary, defined the way the trade uses it
Catch-all inbox
A single address like quotes@yourcompany.com where all RFQs land regardless of which salesperson a customer knows. Paired with automatic classification, it keeps requests out of personal inboxes where they stall when someone is on vacation, and gives the quoting desk one auditable queue.
Division 8
The CSI MasterFormat division covering openings: doors, frames, windows, hardware, and glazing. Door and window subcontractors bid Division 8 scopes, which on a dense multifamily project can run to thousands of openings across schedule, plans, and legend.
Door schedule
The table in an architectural drawing set listing every door opening: mark, size, type, material, fire rating, and hardware group. The schedule is one of three sources of truth for a door count, alongside plan symbols and the legend, and discrepancies between them are where missed openings hide.
ERP write-back
An integration that creates real documents, quotes and orders, inside the distributor's ERP system, rather than exporting a spreadsheet someone retypes. Write-back is the difference between automating the quoting desk and adding another tool the desk has to babysit.
Human Edit Rate
The percentage of AI-drafted quote lines that a human reviewer corrects before sending. Quoting.ai measures and displays it continuously per desk, because it is the honest metric for deciding when AI-drafted quotes can be trusted with less review, unlike a vendor's claimed accuracy number.
Omission detection (4 Eyes)
Cross-checking the schedule count, the plan symbol count, and the legend against each other to surface openings that one source lists and another misses. Quoting.ai Takeoff runs this check automatically, because an uncounted opening is not a counting error, it is installed cost the bidder eats months later.
Order entry automation
Turning inbound purchase orders into ERP sales orders without hand-keying. In distribution, order entry is the highest-volume clerical task on the desk, and the reason owners consider hiring rounds of inside salespeople whose day is mostly retyping.
Plan set (drawing set)
The complete package of architectural drawings for a project: floor plans, elevations, schedules, legends, and details, often hundreds of sheets for multifamily work. Estimating from partial sets is how scope gets missed; Quoting.ai Takeoff reads the full set in the browser.
Price levels
Customer-specific pricing tiers in a distributor's ERP: the same SKU sells at different prices to different accounts based on contracts, volume, and relationship. Applying the right price level automatically is most of what makes an AI-drafted quote usable without rework.
Quote turnaround time
The elapsed time from receiving an RFQ to the customer holding a priced quote. Distributors we talk to average about 30 minutes of desk work per quote, but real turnaround stretches to hours or days once clarifications and availability checks pile up, and contractors give the order to whoever answers first.
RFQ (request for quote)
A customer's request for pricing on a list of items, sent to a distributor by email, PDF, WhatsApp, fax, or phone. In building materials distribution an RFQ can be two lines or two hundred, and the desk that answers fastest with accurate line items usually wins the order.
Rollout modes (Assist, Guarded, Autopilot)
The three trust levels for AI quoting at Quoting.ai. Assist: every quote is drafted by AI and reviewed by a human. Guarded: quotes that clear rules the distributor sets go out automatically, the rest wait for review. Autopilot: routine quotes send themselves. Teams move between modes based on their measured Human Edit Rate, not on faith.
SKU matching
Resolving a customer's free-text request, a 10 watt light, 40 sticks of 2 inch copper, a model number with a typo, to the exact item in the distributor's catalog. Good matching works from the distributor's own item file with cross-references and aliases, and flags low-confidence lines for a human instead of guessing.
Submittal
The documentation package a subcontractor submits for approval before fabrication and installation: product data, shop drawings, and schedules. For door scopes, submittals need openings numbered the way the building reads, like 1A01 for unit 1A's first door, which is why takeoff output with random IDs creates rework.
Takeoff
The process of measuring and counting materials from construction drawings to build a bid: how many doors, how many windows, how many linear feet of wall. Traditionally done by hand in tools like Bluebeam or on paper, at 5 to 20 hours per dense multifamily job depending on trade.
Definitions are the easy part
The product behind them is live: AI quoting for distributors, AI takeoff for subs, humans in command.