Automated Supplier Quote Comparison
Buyers collect three or four quotes for a purchase and then eyeball them in a spreadsheet someone rebuilds every time — different vendors quote in different units, some bury freight and setup fees in a footnote, and payment terms are rarely typed anywhere the buyer will remember to check. Under deadline pressure, the lowest headline number usually wins even when a competitor quote with a 60-day payment term and two-week-shorter lead time is worth considerably more to the business. Nobody's a bad buyer for missing this — the quotes just aren't in a comparable shape when the decision gets made.
STARTING PRICE
From €299
Standard tier · Multi-step workflow with AI extraction/decisioning and 2-3 integrations.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 4-6 hrs per sourcing event.
How the automation works
We build a pipeline that pulls quotes from email, PDF or supplier portals and normalizes them into one structured comparison: unit price rebased to a common quantity and currency, freight and setup fees pulled out of line items, and payment terms and lead time captured as their own fields rather than left in free text. Each quote gets a landed-cost figure that accounts for terms, not just sticker price, plus a flag on any quote missing information needed to compare it fairly. Buyers see a ranked table with the trade-offs visible instead of a pile of PDFs, and can override the ranking with a documented reason when non-cost factors matter.
Process flow
- 01
Quotes arrive trigger
Supplier quotes are pulled in automatically from email attachments, portal exports, or forwarded RFQ responses as they come in.
- 02
Extract quote line items ai
Unit price, quantity, currency, freight, setup fees, payment terms and lead time are extracted from each quote regardless of format or layout.
- 03
Normalize to common basis ai
Prices are rebased to a common currency and quantity, and freight or setup fees are separated out so headline numbers are actually comparable.
- 04
Calculate landed cost ai
A landed-cost figure is calculated per quote that factors in payment terms and lead time, not just unit price, so a cheaper quote with worse terms doesn't win by default.
- 05
Rank and flag gaps output
Quotes are ranked by landed cost with any missing or ambiguous fields flagged, so buyers know exactly what still needs confirming before deciding.
- 06
Log comparison for audit integration
The comparison and final decision, including any override reason, are logged to procurement records for audit and future benchmarking.
Inputs
- Supplier RFQ responses (email, PDF, portal export)
- Prior purchase price history
- Currency exchange rates
- Approved supplier list
Outputs
- Ranked quote comparison table
- Landed-cost figure per quote
- Missing-information flags
- Decision audit log
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- Comparing headline unit price alone misses non-price terms — payment terms, lead time and freight — that can make the cheaper quote genuinely more expensive once landed cost is worked out; the comparison has to fold these in, not footnote them.
- Quotes quoted in different currencies or unit quantities look comparable at a glance but aren't — a per-case price from one vendor and a per-pallet price from another need explicit unit conversion before they can be ranked against each other.
- Some suppliers quietly move cost into freight, packaging or minimum-order surcharges rather than the line item price — the extraction needs to catch these fees specifically or the ranking silently favors quotes that hide cost outside the headline number.
- A quote missing a field (no stated lead time, ambiguous payment terms) should be flagged for follow-up, not defaulted to a favorable assumption — silently filling gaps with best-case guesses produces a ranking that doesn't hold up when the supplier's actual terms come back.
Frequently asked questions
Can this handle quotes that arrive as scanned PDFs or photos?
Yes — OCR extraction handles scanned and photographed quotes, though a clean digital PDF or portal export extracts more reliably than a low-resolution scan.
How does it handle quotes with different quantities or packaging?
Line items are rebased to a common unit and quantity before comparison, so a per-case quote and a per-pallet quote from two different vendors are compared on equal footing.
Does it factor in supplier performance history, not just this quote?
It can weight past on-time delivery and quality data into the ranking if you provide it, though the default comparison is built from the quotes themselves plus stated terms.
Can buyers still override the automatic ranking?
Yes — the ranking is a recommendation with the trade-offs visible, and any override gets logged with a reason so the decision is auditable later.