Home / Features / RFQs / Supplier Quotes / Supplier Quote Comparison
Feature
See the supplier prices together.
Put the responses side by side, so the decision is about the numbers rather than about finding the emails.
Overview
This capability is Beta / Coming Soon.
When you’re pricing a job that depends on bought-in items, you ask several suppliers and then you wait. The responses come back over a few days, in different formats, to different people — one as a PDF, one in the body of an email, one as a phone call somebody wrote on a docket.
The comparison is where the time goes. Not the asking, and not the deciding — the assembling. Getting the responses into a shape where they can be read against each other is the work, and it’s usually done in a spreadsheet built from scratch each time.
Holding the responses against the request means the comparison already exists when the last one lands. You can see what each supplier came back with, look at their attachments, and form a view without rebuilding the picture.
The other half is timing. You often can’t award anything until the client accepts your quote, so you need somewhere to record a preference that isn’t a commitment — a view about who you’d use, held until the job is actually won.
What’s inside
What you get
01
Side-by-side response comparison
See supplier responses together.
02
Supplier attachments
Open the quote files suppliers sent.
03
Preferred response
Mark the likely supplier before final award.
04
Award flow
Record the chosen supplier when ready.
05
RFQ activity
Keep the decision inside the same request history.
The reality
Why you need it
Every supplier formats their quote differently.
The supplier responses to one request, in one place, in a form you can read against each other. The work in comparing quotes has never been the deciding — it’s the assembling, and it’s usually done by building the same spreadsheet from scratch every time.
The cheapest total hides an expensive line item.
Supplier responses arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets and scanned pages. Keeping them against the response is what stops the detail living in whichever inbox it landed in
Lead time matters as much as price.
Recording who you’d use without committing to it. This is the distinction that matters, because most businesses can’t award anything until their own quote is accepted — so the analysis needs to happen while it’s fresh and the decision needs to wait.
Someone has to build a comparison spreadsheet.
When the client accepts and the job is on, the preference recorded during pricing becomes the order. The point is that the reasoning survives the gap between quoting and winning, which is often weeks.
The chosen quote gets separated from the reason you chose it.
Who was asked, who responded, and who didn’t. The non-responses matter as much as the prices — a supplier who doesn’t quote when you’re pricing work is telling you something about how they’ll behave when you need delivery.
How it works
How it works
01
Collect the responses
02
Open the comparison
03
Check the detail
04
Mark the preferred option
05
Award when ready
Capabilities
What it does
Capability
Side-by-side response comparison
The supplier responses to one request, in one place, in a form you can read against each other. The work in comparing quotes has never been the deciding — it’s the assembling, and it’s usually done by building the same spreadsheet from scratch every time.
Capability
Supplier attachments
Supplier responses arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets and scanned pages. Keeping them against the response is what stops the detail living in whichever inbox it landed in.
Capability
Preferred response
Recording who you’d use without committing to it. This is the distinction that matters, because most businesses can’t award anything until their own quote is accepted — so the analysis needs to happen while it’s fresh and the decision needs to wait.
Award flow
Record the chosen supplier when ready.
RFQ activity
Keep the decision inside the same request history.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal day
Three steel suppliers quote the same list.
Compare the responses without rebuilding the RFQ in Excel.
One supplier is cheaper but the freight is ugly.
Keep the whole response in view before deciding.
You are still waiting for the client to approve the job.
Mark the preferred supplier now and award once the job is actually won.
What you get out of it
What changes
Spend less time lining up quotes
Let the comparison start from the supplier responses.
Make the choice with better context
Keep price and supplier information together.
Keep the decision trail
Know which supplier was preferred and which was awarded.
Move from quote to order more cleanly
Keep the procurement process connected.
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Discovered their contract work wasn’t profitable.
We didn’t wanna pay 100 grand upfront for a program – but then we found WorkGuru.
Nick Mazzella, Administrator, Frontline Trays & Trailers
Fit
Will it work the way we do things?
“Our supplier quotes are never formatted the same.”
hey never are, and no system fixes that at source — suppliers will send what they send. What helps is having one place where the responses live against the request, so the work of reading them against each other happens once rather than being reassembled by whoever picks the job up.
“Price is not the only thing we care about.”
Nor should it be. Lead time, whether they’ve delivered short before, and whether they’ll actually answer the phone in week three all matter, and sometimes matter more. A comparison is there to inform the decision, not to make it by picking the smallest number.
“We do not want to award before the client accepts.”
That’s the normal sequence and it’s exactly why recording a preference needs to be separate from awarding. You want the analysis done while it’s fresh and the decision held until the job is won — otherwise you either commit early or redo the work later.
“Sometimes we only get one quote.”
Often that’s all there is, particularly for specialised items or when the timeframe is tight. A single response still benefits from being held against the request, because the question six months later isn’t “who was cheapest” but “what did they actually quote us”.
By trade
Where this gets used
Works with
Connected features
RFQs / Supplier Quotes
The comparison starts from supplier responses.
Supplier Management
Keep the supplier relationship around the response.
Purchase Orders
Move the chosen supplier into the buying workflow.
Quoting
Use supplier pricing while building the customer quote.
FAQs
Supplier Quote Comparison questions
Is Supplier Quote Comparison live today?
No, WorkGuru does not have a native “Supplier Quote Comparison” feature live today.
While WorkGuru offers a robust Request for Quote (RFQ) workflow that allows you to send purchase orders as RFQs to suppliers, edit them upon response, and save the files, it lacks a built-in tool to aggregate and compare different supplier quotes side-by-side. To achieve a comparison, users typically manage alternate pricing by importing alternate supplier pricing sheets manually or by managing multiple RFQs as drafts.
Can we compare multiple supplier responses?
Comparing responses side by side against the same request is the purpose of the feature — seeing what each supplier came back with without rebuilding a spreadsheet each time.
Can we view supplier attachments?
Yes, you can view and manage supplier attachments in WorkGuru through the Files tab on a supplier’s detail page.
Can we mark a preferred quote without awarding it?
Recording a preference without committing is the distinction that matters here, because most businesses can’t award until their own quote is accepted. It lets the analysis be done while it’s fresh and the commitment be made later.
Can we award a supplier once the job is won?
Awarding after the client accepts is the normal sequence — the preference recorded during pricing becomes the order once the work is confirmed.
Compare the quotes without rebuilding them.
See how supplier quote comparison fits into the RFQ and purchasing flow.