Most small businesses treat a quote as an administrative chore. Write down the price, send it, wait. Then they wonder why half of them go unanswered.
A quote is doing two jobs at once. It is a legal document with required content, and it is the last piece of sales material a client sees before deciding. Getting the first part wrong creates risk. Getting the second part wrong loses work.
What French law requires
A devis becomes a binding contract once the client accepts it. Certain mentions are mandatory, and a quote is compulsory in several situations, including most home repair and improvement work above a set threshold, and for services where the price cannot be determined in advance.
The mentions to include:
The date the quote is issued and its period of validity
Full identity and address of your business, plus SIREN and legal form
The client's name and address
A detailed breakdown of the work or goods, with unit prices
Quantities and units where relevant
Total price excluding VAT, the VAT rate and amount, and the total including VAT
Travel and callout charges, if any
Payment terms, including the late payment penalty rate and the €40 recovery indemnity
Whether the quote itself is chargeable
If you are under the franchise en base and do not charge VAT, the exemption mention is required instead. From 1 September 2026 the reference changes to the Code des impositions sur les biens et services, with a tolerance period until the end of 2027 during which the old Article 293 B reference remains acceptable.
The payment terms point catches people out. Those mentions are not decorative. If your quote and invoice never stated a penalty rate, claiming penalties later is harder, and their absence exposes you to a fine in its own right.
What actually makes a quote convert
The legal minimum produces a document that satisfies an inspector and persuades nobody. A few additions change the response rate.
Send it fast. This matters more than almost anything else in the document. A quote that arrives the same day competes against nothing. One that arrives eight days later competes against two quotes the client already read.
Break the price down. A single number invites a single question, which is whether it is too high. A breakdown moves the conversation to what is included. It also makes it possible for a client to remove something rather than reject everything.
Say what is not included. Counterintuitive, and it works. It prevents the dispute later, and it signals that you have thought about the job rather than guessed at it.
Give three options where you can. Basic, standard, comprehensive. This changes the client's question from whether to buy to which to buy. It works in trades, in services, in consulting.
Put a validity date on it. Required anyway, and it creates a reason to decide. Thirty days is normal.
Make accepting it easy. A quote requiring the client to print, sign, scan and email will sit in an inbox. Electronic signature removes that friction entirely, and in France an eIDAS-compliant signature through a provider like Yousign carries proper legal weight.
Follow up. Most small businesses send a quote and wait. A short message five days later asking whether anything needs clarifying is not pushy, and it recovers a meaningful share of quotes that would otherwise expire in silence.
The reason quotes get sent late
Almost always because writing one from scratch takes an hour, and the hour is not available on the day the enquiry arrives.
That is fixable. A template with your standard clauses, mandatory mentions and payment terms already in place turns an hour into fifteen minutes. Tools that generate quotes from a description do more of it. Mirage Cloud generates quotes, invoices and contracts as send-ready documents and connects to Yousign for signature, which closes the gap between the enquiry and the signature.
The document quality matters less than the speed. A good quote sent the same day beats an excellent quote sent next week, most of the time, because the client has usually decided by then.
One thing to check on every quote
Whether the client can tell, from reading it alone, exactly what they are getting, what it costs, when it happens and what to do next.
If any of those four requires a phone call to establish, the quote is doing half its job, and some proportion of clients will not make the call.
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