Quotation format in 2026: what to include, a free sample, and how to make one fast

A quotation is a written price offer you send a customer before they buy. In India, a complete quotation has six parts: your business header with GSTIN, a unique quote number and date, the buyer’s details, itemised lines (description, HSN/SAC code, quantity, rate, amount), the tax shown separately (CGST + SGST, or IGST), and the commercial terms — validity, payment, delivery — with a sign-off. Get those six right and the document does more than state a price: it tells the buyer you’re organised, makes you easy to compare, and gives you a reason to follow up before it expires.

Most “quotation format in Word” and “quotation format in Excel” templates you’ll download get the stationery right — logo on top, a total at the bottom — and skip the four fields that actually win the deal. This is the working format for a general SMB, a sample you can copy, and how to send one fast.

What a quotation is — and how it differs from a proforma invoice

A quotation is an estimate at the proposal stage. You’ve had an enquiry, and you’re telling the buyer what the work will cost, on what terms, and for how long that price holds. It isn’t legally binding and it isn’t a tax document — it’s the offer the buyer weighs against other suppliers before deciding.

That’s exactly why it gets confused with a proforma invoice, and the difference matters:

• A quotation goes out while the buyer is still deciding. Its job is to be clear and comparable.
• A proforma invoice goes out after they accept — it restates the agreed price and terms, and you use it to request an advance, or hand to a bank, lender or customs office.
• A tax invoice is the only one of the three that supports GST: it’s issued when you actually supply the goods or service, and it’s what lets the buyer claim input tax credit. A quotation and a proforma invoice do neither.

The clean sequence for an Indian SMB is: enquiry → quotation → buyer accepts → proforma invoice (to collect the advance) → deliver → tax invoice (final payment). Keep those roles straight and you’ll never send a “quote” that a buyer mistakes for a bill, or a proforma invoice that your accountant tries to file in GST returns.

The anatomy of a quotation: every field, annotated

Read top to bottom, a complete quotation has these fields. The hero figure above labels the same layout on a sample.

• Business header. Your name, address, phone, email and GSTIN. This is your identity and the buyer’s first trust signal.
• The word “Quotation,” a unique quote number, and the date. The number (e.g. SE/Q/2026-087) is not decoration — it’s how you and the buyer refer back to this exact offer, and how you track your pipeline.
• Validity. A date after which the prices no longer hold — typically 7–30 days.
• Buyer details. Name, company, address, and their GSTIN if they have one (needed later for a B2B tax invoice).
• A one-line subject. What the quote is for, so anyone can grasp the job before reading the numbers.
• Itemised lines. A table with, per row: description · HSN/SAC code · quantity · rate · amount (amount = qty × rate). HSN codes classify goods; SAC codes classify services. Itemise — never quote a single lump sum.
• Subtotal, tax, total. Sum the lines, then show GST as its own line — CGST + SGST for a sale within your state, IGST for an inter-state sale — and a grand total. Tax shown separately lets the buyer compare like-for-like.
• Terms and conditions. Payment terms, delivery timeline, exclusions (what the price does not cover), and warranty.
• Sign-off. “For [Your Business] — Authorised Signatory,” and an approval line for the buyer. E.&O.E. (errors and omissions excepted) is the customary footer.

Different trades tweak this. If you do interior or fit-out work, use the interior-work quotation format, which builds the lines from a BOQ and adds explicit exclusions and a stage-wise payment schedule. This guide is the general-purpose version for any product-or-service SMB — a printer, an electrical contractor, an AC dealer, a fabricator, an agency.

A worked sample you can copy

Here’s a complete quotation for a general supply-and-install job. The arithmetic ties out — every amount is qty × rate, and the total carries GST shown separately.

Sundar Enterprises · Signage & Print · Chennai GSTIN 33ABCDE1234F1Z5 · +91 98xxx xxxxx

QUOTATION — No. SE/Q/2026-087 · Date: 22 Jul 2026 · Valid till: 06 Aug 2026 To: Anand Retail Pvt Ltd, T. Nagar, Chennai For: Storefront branding — supply & installation

#	Item	HSN/SAC	Qty	Rate (₹)	Amount (₹)
1	LED acrylic signboard	9405	1	24,000	24,000
2	Vinyl wall graphics	4911	45	180	8,100
3	Brochure printing (A4)	4901	500	32	16,000
4	Installation & labour	9987	1	6,900	6,900
				Subtotal	55,000
				CGST @ 9%	4,950
				SGST @ 9%	4,950
				Grand total	64,900

Terms: 50% advance, balance before dispatch · Delivery 7 working days from PO · 1-year warranty on signboard · Prices as above, E.&O.E. For Sundar Enterprises — Authorised Signatory

That’s the whole document. Notice what it doesn’t do: it doesn’t hide the tax inside the rates, it doesn’t leave validity open-ended, and it doesn’t quote “storefront branding — ₹64,900” as one lump the buyer can only argue down.

The four fields that make a quote convert

Every field earns its place, but four of them do the commercial work — and they’re the four most templates leave blank.

1. A validity date. Rates move — a signboard, a print run, a steel item can all cost more next month. Stating an expiry (7–30 days) does two things: it protects your margin, and it creates urgency. It’s also legally clean — under the Indian Contract Act, an offer lapses when its stated period ends, so a blank validity is a dispute waiting for the buyer who accepts three months later at your old price.
2. A unique quote number. Without it you can’t say “regarding quote SE/Q/2026-087” on a follow-up call, you can’t find the quote when the buyer returns, and you have no way to see how many quotes you sent this month versus how many closed. Sequential numbering is the backbone of a sales pipeline.
3. GST shown and split. A buyer comparing three quotes trusts the one where tax is a visible line, not a mystery baked into the rate. Show CGST + SGST (same state) or IGST (inter-state) separately, with HSN/SAC codes on the lines. It reads as competence and it makes the eventual tax invoice trivial.
4. Clear terms — and a plan to follow up. Payment split, delivery timeline, what’s included and excluded, warranty. Ambiguity here is where deals stall and disputes start. And the quote itself is your follow-up hook: a validity date gives you a legitimate reason to call back — “your quote expires Friday, shall I hold the rate?”

Common mistakes that stall quotes

• Lump-sum pricing. “Complete branding: ₹64,900” invites one reply: “make it 60.” Itemised lines move the conversation to scope, where you can trade, instead of to a single number, where you can only discount.
• No validity. The buyer returns after material rates have moved and holds you to a stale price — or the quote just drifts with no reason to ever close it.
• Missing or inconsistent quote numbers. You can’t track what you can’t reference. Two quotes with the same number, or none at all, and your pipeline is invisible.
• Tax buried in the rate. The buyer can’t tell your price from a competitor’s, and your invoice later won’t reconcile to the quote.
• No terms or exclusions. The buyer assumed installation was included; you assumed it wasn’t. Whoever wrote nothing down pays.
• Send and forget. Most quotes don’t die from a “no” — they die from silence. A quote with no owner and no follow-up before the validity date is a lead you paid to generate and then let lapse.

Stop making quotes in Word — generate and track them

A Word or Excel template is fine for your first few quotes. It stops scaling the moment you’re sending more than a handful a week, because a flat file does none of the things that actually matter: it won’t number your quotes for you, it won’t store them anywhere you can search, it won’t calculate GST without a fresh formula, and — most costly — it has no memory of the enquiry, so nothing reminds you to follow up before the quote expires.

A quotation maker fixes the mechanics: enter your header and GSTIN once, add the buyer, type the lines, and it auto-numbers the quote, calculates the tax, and produces a dated PDF you send on WhatsApp or email in a minute. But the mechanics are the easy half. The half that grows revenue is owning the enquiry — knowing who asked, being able to reach them, and following up while the quote is still live.

That’s where Leads sits. It captures the enquiry with mobile-OTP and WhatsApp verification so you actually own a reachable contact — not a fake number — and its built-in quote generator turns that enquiry into a numbered, dated, GST-ready quotation you can send and then track to acceptance. Every quote is stored, every enquiry has an owner, and the validity date becomes a follow-up trigger instead of a silent expiry. The template is the part you can copy from this page in five minutes; capturing the enquiry and chasing the quote before it lapses is the part that decides whether the format ever turns into revenue.

The short version

A quotation is a written price offer with six parts: header + GSTIN, a unique quote number and date, buyer details, itemised lines with HSN/SAC and GST, subtotal-tax-total, and terms with a sign-off. Itemise instead of quoting a lump sum, show the tax as its own line, and — above all — put a validity date and a quote number on every one, so you can follow up before the price you offered expires. Copy the sample, then generate and track quotes instead of retyping them in Word.