Type or dictate your walk-round notes in a fixed order (camera positions, cable routes, recorder, storage, signs, constraints), paste them with your own price list into an AI assistant, and ask for a draft that uses only those items. Then check the camera count, cable lengths, storage maths and every price before it goes out.
Blank quote formats are everywhere and none of them can do the useful part, which is turning what you saw on site into lines, quantities and exclusions. So take one six-camera job, from untidy notes to a checked quote. Every price below is an invented placeholder chosen to make the arithmetic easy, not a market rate, and the price list that matters is yours.
Walk-round notes in the order the quote will use
An assistant drafts better from notes that follow the shape of the quote, and you write them faster when you are not deciding what to say next. Use nine headings, in this order, and write "unknown" rather than leave one blank.
- Site and contact. Address, who showed you round, working hours and access.
- What the customer wants to be able to do. The aim for each camera, in four words from the video-surveillance standard: detect, observe, recognise or identify.
- Camera positions. One line each: location, mounting surface, height, lighting and anything in the way.
- Cable routes. The path from each camera to the recorder, its measured length, and any wall or ceiling you must pass through.
- Recorder and network. Where it will live, the mains socket, the router, free network ports and who needs to view on a phone.
- Storage. The number of days the customer asked for and whether recording is continuous or on motion.
- Signs. How many and where.
- Constraints. Landlord permission, access equipment, out-of-hours working, anything the customer must arrange.
- Photos. The numbers, matched to the camera list.
The second heading earns its place in the quote. The standard behind it, IEC 62676-4, describes the four levels by pixel density: roughly 25, 62, 125 and 250 pixels per metre across the scene, as vendor guides to the standard put them (check the edition you work to). Those figures let you check a camera against its job before you quote it, which the checks further down do.
Typed on site: the notes from a trade counter and warehouse unit
These are the notes as a fitter might actually type them, abbreviations and all. The site is an invented single-storey unit with a trade counter at the front, a warehouse behind it and a car park with a gate.
UNIT 7 - trade counter + warehouse. Single storey brick, flat roof.
Roller shutter at loading bay (side), personnel door front, fire door rear.
Cust wants: see who comes in; loading bay (pallets going missing); car park
(6 bays + gate); rear fire door (2 break-ins); aisle 3 (high value stock);
counter / till.
Cameras:
1 front door, inside, ceiling 2.7m, facing door, wants faces = identify
2 car park, front corner eaves 4m, 6 bays + gate approx 24m wide = observe
3 loading bay inside, steel frame 4m, shutter + pallet area = observe
4 aisle 3, frame 4m, looking along aisle = observe
5 rear fire door outside, 2.5m above door, wants faces = identify
6 counter, behind till, 2.4m = recognise
Cable: office cupboard has router, mains socket, free LAN port.
Runs: 1=6m, 2=18m outside along eaves + 8m inside, 3=22m via ceiling void,
4=30m trunking, 5=35m via stockroom trunking, 6=8m.
Recorder in office cupboard. 30 days, 24/7 recording. Owner + 2 staff on
phones. NO audio.
Signs: front door, loading bay, car park gate (3).
Notes: tenant, ask landlord re external cable. Eaves 4m = ladder, no scaffold.
Staff on site 8-5, warehouse work after 5 is fine. Rear cam PoE only, no
power point there. Photos 12-31.
Notice what the notes leave out: no resolution, no model, no storage size. A quote needs those, and the assistant must take them from your price list and a calculation, not from its imagination.
Dictated notes: tidying them without changing what they say
Plenty of fitters talk their notes into a phone while they walk. Dictation gets the content right and the shape wrong: camera numbers become words, lengths are occasionally misheard and the whole thing arrives as one paragraph. An assistant can reshape it, as long as you forbid it from improving anything.
Below is a dictated walk-round note. Put it under these nine headings:
site and contact; what the customer wants; camera positions; cable routes;
recorder and network; storage; signs; constraints; photos.
Do not add, remove or correct any fact. If a number looks misheard, keep it
as dictated and put [CHECK] after it. List anything you could not place.
camera one is inside above the front door about two point seven metres
looking at the door then camera two outside on the corner of the eaves
roughly four metres up it needs to see the six bays and the gate and the
cable from the cupboard is around eighteen outside and eight inside ...
The result is a note under the right headings with the doubtful items marked. Check the marked numbers against your phone's recording once. Misheard figures are the one fault you cannot spot from the text, and the headings make that single pass quick.
A prompt that keeps the draft to your notes and your prices
The prompt does three jobs. It limits the assistant to your sources, it makes missing information visible, and it asks for working on the two calculations that go wrong most often, cable length and storage.
You are helping a CCTV installer draft a quote from walk-round notes.
Use ONLY the notes and the price list below. Do not add products, features,
resolutions or services that are not in them. If a price is missing, write
[PRICE NEEDED]. If a fact is missing, write [ASK CUSTOMER].
Produce, in this order:
1. Camera schedule: ID, position, purpose, camera type from the price list
2. Cable length per camera, the total, and the total with a 15% allowance
3. Storage: gigabytes per day = cameras x bitrate in Mbps x 10.8. State the
bitrate you assumed, then the drive size needed for the retention asked
4. Quote table: line, quantity, unit price, line total, then the subtotal.
Show the addition line by line.
5. Exclusions and assumptions, drawn from the constraints in the notes
6. A list of questions I must answer before this goes out
Plain English, no marketing language.
PRICE LIST (placeholders)
4 MP indoor dome camera $85 | 4 MP outdoor IR bullet camera $95
8-channel PoE recorder $240 | surveillance drive 4 TB $120, 8 TB $190, 10 TB $260
Cat6 cable $0.70 per metre | mounts, boxes, glands, connectors $130 per job
Warning sign $8 | crew day, two fitters $560 | UPS 600 VA $150
NOTES
[paste the notes]
Keep the price list and this wording in a ChatGPT or Claude Project so every job starts the same way. Update the list when your supplier changes, and the next quote follows.
What a first draft looks like, and the six faults to look for
A first draft from an assistant, shown here as an illustration of the faults rather than a transcript, tends to look tidy and sound sure of itself. This is the quote table.
| Line | Qty | Unit | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4K indoor dome camera | 4 | $85.00 | $340.00 |
| 4K outdoor IR bullet camera | 2 | $95.00 | $190.00 |
| 8-channel PoE recorder | 1 | $240.00 | $240.00 |
| Surveillance drive, 4 TB | 1 | $120.00 | $120.00 |
| Cat6 cable, 127 m | 127 | $0.70 | $88.90 |
| Mounts, boxes, glands, connectors | 1 | $130.00 | $130.00 |
| Warning signs | 3 | $8.00 | $24.00 |
| Remote monitoring set-up | 1 | [PRICE NEEDED] | |
| Installation labour, two fitters, 2 days | 2 | $560.00 | $1,120.00 |
| Commissioning and handover, half a day | 1 | $280.00 | $280.00 |
| Subtotal as stated | $2,552.90 |
It reads well, and it has six faults you should be looking for every time.
- An invented specification. "4K" is not on the price list, which says 4 MP. A customer who reads "4K" will expect more than you are selling.
- Cable with no allowance. It used the measured 127 m, so the first awkward bend leaves you short. The prompt asked for 15% on top.
- A drive that cannot hold what was asked. A 4 TB drive does not store 30 days from six cameras; the storage section below shows why.
- A subtotal that is not the sum. The lines add up to $2,532.90, not $2,552.90. An assistant can get the addition wrong and still present the result confidently, and why AI is bad at maths explains why you add it again yourself.
- A line nobody asked for. The notes say nothing about remote monitoring. The assistant obeyed the rule about missing prices by flagging it, but it still added the line.
- Silent gaps. Nothing about the landlord's permission for the external cable, about working at 4 m by ladder, or about the router, all of which sit in the notes as constraints.
Four checks before the quote leaves: pixels, cable, storage, sums
Pixels against purpose
Pixel density is the camera's horizontal resolution divided by the width of the scene at the point you care about. A 4 MP camera is usually 2,560 or 2,688 pixels across, and I use 2,688 here (check the datasheet). At the front door, if the scene is 3.5 m wide, that gives roughly 770 pixels per metre, far above the 250 an identification job needs. In the car park, the notes put the scene at 24 m, which gives about 112 pixels per metre. That clears the observation level but not the 125 usually quoted for recognition, so the quote should say plainly that camera 2 shows vehicles and people across the bays and gate and will not read faces or number plates at the far end. If the customer wants plates, that is a separate camera and a separate line. Pixel density is a design guide, and lighting, lens quality, compression and movement all change the real result, so treat it as a check on the brief and not a promise.
Cable length
The six runs measure 6, 26, 22, 30, 35 and 8 metres, which total 127 m. With a 15% allowance for bends, tails and mistakes the total is 146 m, so order 150 m. Every run sits well inside the 100 m limit for Ethernet over Cat6 (a 90 m fixed link plus patch leads), and you still check the longest, camera 5 at 35 m, against any extra routing you add on site.
Storage
One megabit per second of video for a day is about 10.8 GB. Six cameras at an assumed 4 Mbps each, recording continuously, are 24 Mbps, or 259.2 GB a day. Thirty days is 7,776 GB, nearly 7.8 TB, so an 8 TB drive has almost no headroom once the recorder has formatted it. That is why the corrected quote uses 10 TB. The bitrate is a setting you choose and test at commissioning, so state your assumption in the quote.
Sums
Add every line yourself with a calculator or a spreadsheet, and check the printed subtotal against the result. Do it last, after any edits, because a late change is where mismatches come from. Then check each unit price against the list, which also catches an assistant quietly using a price from its own memory.
Labour: build the day count from tasks
Labour is the largest line on the quote, and it is the one an assistant cannot know. Give it your own hours per task and let it multiply them; you decide the hours. For this site, in crew-hours for two fitters working together, the build-up looks like this.
| Task | Basis | Crew-hours |
|---|---|---|
| Cable runs and trunking | 127 m over six routes, two over 30 m, ladder work on the 18 m eaves run | 8 |
| Mounting and terminating six cameras | Four at 4 m by ladder, two under 3 m | 4 |
| Recorder, network and power | One cupboard, existing router and socket | 2 |
| Travel, set-up, tidy and waste | One site visit each day | 2 |
| Installation total | Two crew-days of eight hours | 16 |
| Commissioning and handover | Six cameras, three users, written pack | 4 |
At the crew day of $560, sixteen hours is the $1,120 installation line and four hours is the $280 commissioning line. Keep one table like this per job type and update it with actual hours after each install; your own history beats any default an assistant could offer. If you later add a camera at height, the table tells you what it costs in time as well as in hardware.
The corrected quote, line by line
After the fixes the quote reads as below. The recorder's PoE budget needs one more look at this stage: add the cameras' power draws from their datasheets and compare the total with the recorder's stated budget, remembering that each port is limited by the standard, 15.4 W at the source for 802.3af and 30 W for 802.3at.
| Line | Qty | Unit | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 MP indoor dome camera (C1, C3, C4, C6) | 4 | $85.00 | $340.00 |
| 4 MP outdoor IR bullet camera (C2, C5) | 2 | $95.00 | $190.00 |
| 8-channel PoE recorder | 1 | $240.00 | $240.00 |
| Surveillance drive, 10 TB (30 days at 4 Mbps a camera) | 1 | $260.00 | $260.00 |
| Cat6 cable, 150 m (127 m measured plus allowance) | 150 | $0.70 | $105.00 |
| Mounts, boxes, glands, connectors | 1 | $130.00 | $130.00 |
| Warning signs (front door, loading bay, car park gate) | 3 | $8.00 | $24.00 |
| Installation, two fitters, 2 days | 2 | $560.00 | $1,120.00 |
| Commissioning and handover, half a day | 1 | $280.00 | $280.00 |
| Subtotal before tax | $2,689.00 |
Add the tax line your accountant specifies, and nothing before then. The assistant does not know which treatment applies to your customer.
The last item in the prompt, the questions you must answer, is worth reading before anything else. For this site a good list contains questions like these, and each one changes the quote if the answer is unexpected.
- Should camera 6 favour the staff side of the counter or the customer side?
- Is the loading bay shutter used at night, and does the customer want that covered after hours?
- Does the free router port sit on the same network the customer's office devices use, or can the cameras have their own?
- Will the two staff members have their own logins on the phones, or share the owner's?
- When will the landlord's consent for the eaves cable be in writing?
Most can be answered from your notes or a two-minute call. The point is that they are asked before the quote goes out and not discovered half-way through the install.
Exclusions and assumptions that stop arguments later
This is the part blank quote formats skip and the part a customer is most likely to argue about afterwards. Draw each item from the constraints in your notes, and ask the assistant to list any constraint it could not turn into an exclusion.
- Access. Work at heights up to 4 m is by ladder. Scaffold or a lifting platform is not included, and a different height or surface changes the price.
- Permissions. The customer is a tenant. Landlord consent for the external cable route and fixings is the customer's responsibility and is needed before work starts.
- Power. A spare mains socket is assumed in the office cupboard. No new electrical circuits are included.
- Network. The router is assumed to have a free port and enough upload capacity for remote viewing on three phones. Router or broadband changes are excluded.
- Finishes. Cable is in surface trunking. Chasing, core drilling and redecoration are excluded.
- Performance. Camera 2 is for observing vehicles and people across the car park, not for reading faces or plates.
- Retention. Storage is sized for the 30 days the customer asked for. The customer decides the retention period and is responsible for the data-protection decisions about the footage.
- Audio. No audio is recorded.
- Not included. Maintenance, remote health checks, live remote monitoring and anything not listed above. Maintenance and health checks can be added as a separate plan (the maintenance contract tutorial shows how one runs).
- Validity. This quote is valid for [number] days. Prices after that depend on supplier changes.
Optional extras, and what each retention choice costs
Put extras in a separate block, so the customer can say yes or no without you reissuing the quote. A 600 VA UPS at $150 keeps the recorder running through a short power cut. A seventh camera for the second aisle is $85 plus its cable and labour. A dedicated plate-capture camera at the gate would be a line of its own, priced from your list.
Retention deserves its own small table, because it changes the drive and the price. The figures use the same six cameras at 4 Mbps recording continuously, and the drive column keeps at least 20% spare, because with variable bitrate the real figure rises in busy or dark scenes. That is why 14 days, at 3,629 GB, moves up to the 8 TB drive rather than filling a 4 TB one to more than 90%.
| Retention | Storage needed | Drive from the list | Drive price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 days | 1,814 GB | 4 TB | $120 |
| 14 days | 3,629 GB | 8 TB | $190 |
| 30 days | 7,776 GB | 10 TB | $260 |
Offering the table is not a hint that shorter is better. It makes the cost of each choice visible and shows the customer that the number of days is theirs to decide. Data-protection guidance says footage should not be kept longer than its purpose needs, which is a reason for the customer to think about it before choosing. Your job is to size the drive for whatever they decide and note it in the assumptions.
The same method for a three-bedroom house
A domestic job uses the same headings and a smaller list. Three cameras cover the front door (identify), the driveway (observe) and the back garden (detect). The quote looks like this with the same price list, adding a 4-channel recorder at $150 and a 2 TB drive at $75.
| Line | Qty | Unit | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 MP outdoor IR bullet camera | 3 | $95.00 | $285.00 |
| 4-channel PoE recorder | 1 | $150.00 | $150.00 |
| Surveillance drive, 2 TB | 1 | $75.00 | $75.00 |
| Cat6 cable, 60 m | 60 | $0.70 | $42.00 |
| Mounts, boxes, glands, connectors | 1 | $60.00 | $60.00 |
| Warning sign | 1 | $8.00 | $8.00 |
| Installation and commissioning, one crew day | 1 | $560.00 | $560.00 |
| Subtotal before tax | $1,180.00 |
What changes is the exclusions. The notes now need to record whether any camera sees beyond the customer's own property: the pavement, a neighbour's window or a shared driveway. If one does, privacy masking and a conversation about signs and data-protection rules belong in the assumptions, and the customer should take advice before you finish. The camera placement tutorial covers choosing positions from a plan, and the signage tutorial covers the wording on the wall.
Sending the quote and following it up
A short covering message does more than the quote does. It restates the scope in a sentence, flags the two or three things you need from the customer, and says what the car park camera will not do, so nothing in the quote is a surprise.
Subject: CCTV quote for Unit 7: six cameras, 30 days' recording
Hi [first name],
Thanks for showing me round on [date]. The quote is attached. In short: six
4 MP cameras (front door, counter, loading bay, aisle 3, car park and the rear
fire door), a recorder with room for 30 days of footage, three warning signs
and half a day for commissioning and handover.
Before I can book the work I need two things from you: your landlord's OK for
the cable along the front eaves, and confirmation that the router has a free
network port.
One thing to be clear about: the car park camera is placed to show vehicles
and people across the bays and the gate. It will not read faces or number
plates at the far end. If you want plates, I can price a separate camera for
the gate.
The quote is valid for [number] days. Call me on [phone] if you'd like
anything changed.
[your name]
If nothing comes back, a follow-up after three working days and another after ten is enough. The first asks if the quote arrived and offers to reprice, for example with a shorter retention period or one camera fewer. The second asks whether the job is still going ahead. The tutorial on quote follow-ups that run themselves covers automating both, and the handover checklist tutorial continues the job once it is won.
After the install: feeding real hours back into the next quote
A quote earns its keep twice: once when it wins the job, and again when it improves the next one. A week after the install, put the quoted figures beside the actual ones. Say the crew on this unit logged 19 hours against the 16 quoted, used 138 m of the 150 m of cable ordered and fitted the drive as quoted. At $70 a crew-hour, the overrun cost $210, and the crew's note says the extra time went on the 18 m eaves run, where the old brick crumbled around the fixings.
That gives two edits. The labour table gains a line for eaves runs on old brick, roughly 1.7 extra crew-hours per 10 m, and the walk-round headings gain a prompt under cable routes: fixing surface, whether brick, block, timber or steel. The cable figure says the 15% allowance is about right, since the job used 11 m more than measured. An assistant can do the side-by-side comparison if you paste both tables and tell it to list differences only, without explaining them. The explanations come from the crew, because only they know why a run took longer. Over a dozen jobs the labour table drifts towards your real hours, and the gap between quoted and actual narrows.
Once the prompt and price list exist, the drafting is the quick part. The checks are what earn the customer's trust, and they are the part that stays with you.
Questions installers ask about AI-drafted CCTV quotes
Can AI price the job from its own knowledge of camera costs?
Don't let it. The assistant has no access to your supplier prices, your day rate or this week's stock, so any figure it offers is a guess that looks confident. Give it your price list and tell it to write [PRICE NEEDED] wherever an item is missing, so gaps are visible on the page instead of quietly filled.
How many photos should I take on the walk-round?
Enough that someone who was not there could position each camera: one wide shot of each location, one of the mounting surface and one of any awkward point on the cable route. Number them in the order of your camera list and mention the numbers in your notes, so the quote and your later handover sheet can refer to them.
What if the customer asks for audio recording as well?
Treat it as a separate decision, not a default line. Recording sound is often treated as more intrusive than recording video, and data-protection guidance tells owners to switch off functions they cannot show they need. Ask why they want it, note the answer, and suggest they take advice before you add it to the quote.
Further reads
- Tradie Apps: Quote, Schedule and Invoice Tools Compared, With AI Features — Apps that carry a quote through scheduling and invoicing.
- Air Conditioning Installation Business: Survey Notes to Quote With AI — Another survey-notes-to-quote worked example from a different trade.
- AI for Sign Companies: Quote a Shopfront Sign From Photos — Quoting from site photos, including what the photos cannot show.
- AI Camera Software for CCTV Installers: Analytics You Can Sell Clients — Analytics you can add to a quote, and what each one costs.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: a camera vendor's DORI guide citing EN 62676-4:2015 for the detect, observe, recognise and identify levels; Wikipedia's Power over Ethernet and Category 6 cable pages for PoE power levels and the 100 m channel length. All prices, rates and site details in the example are invented for illustration.