“Leave it with me, I’ll price it,” says your office manager, about every job that comes in. Your pricing rules live in her head.

The problem shows up when you try to hand part of that to an AI tool, or to anyone. The price list says one thing and she does another. The regular customer gets a standing discount. Rush jobs get an extra charge. Small orders carry a delivery charge.

Until those rules are written down, every quote waits for her, and when she’s on holiday customers ring the next firm. A tool fed only the price list will quote confidently and wrongly. This article shows you how to get her rules onto one page in an afternoon.

Why the written price list isn’t the job

Your firm probably has something in writing about how a job runs. A price list, a checklist, a page in a handbook from the last time someone tidied up. It describes the job on a good day, when the enquiry arrives complete and nothing unusual happens.

Your office manager’s value sits almost entirely in the other days. She knows which enquiries look routine and aren’t. She knows the difference between an order that has to go out today and one that can wait for Thursday. None of that is on the price list, because nobody writes down what they no longer notice themselves doing.

Hand the price list to someone who has never priced a job, perhaps a colleague from another team or your newest starter. Ask them to talk you through how they’d price yesterday’s enquiries. Every time they stop and say “it depends”, you’ve found a rule that exists only in her head.

Look for rules in exceptions, corrections and habits

The person who holds these rules won’t call them rules. Ask your office manager for the rules of pricing and you’ll get the price list back, because to her the rest is just knowing the work.

So look for the rules in what she does, not what she says. They hide in three places.

The exceptions are the enquiries she pulls out of the queue and handles differently, and whatever marks those enquiries out. The corrections are what she quietly fixes in other people’s quotes, such as a colleague’s quote that forgot the delivery charge on a small order. The habits are her always and never decisions: the regular customer who always gets the standing discount, the quote that never goes out without the delivery date confirmed.

Each of those is a real rule with a real reason behind it. The firm depends on them every day and keeps them nowhere except in one person’s memory.

Sit down with 10 real jobs, not memory

The method is short. Book an afternoon with her and bring 10 real quotes from last month, not a blank page. Include two or three you know were awkward, and at least one she priced well above the list.

Go through them one at a time and ask how each was priced and why. Memory answers a general question with a general answer, which is how you end up with a page of good intentions. A real quote in front of you both does the opposite. It surfaces the decision she made, and the reason for it, because she can point at the line.

Every time the price differs from the list, stop and ask what prompted the difference. That prompt is the rule. Write it down in her words first and tidy it later.

An afternoon is normally enough for one job. If it isn’t, the job is probably bigger than one job. Pricing standard orders and pricing rush jobs may turn out to be two separate jobs, and that’s worth knowing before any tool gets involved.

Write each rule as condition, action, reason

How you write the rules down decides whether anyone can use them. Each rule needs three parts: the condition that triggers it, the action it requires, and the reason it exists.

So not “be careful with big orders”, which tells a new starter nothing and a tool even less. Instead: when a quote is above your sign-off level, it waits for your approval. The reason is that a pricing mistake at that size is expensive to unwind. Condition, action, reason.

Or: when a customer needs the job within 48 hours, add the rush charge, because it means moving other work and paying for overtime. That rule is now something a new starter, a colleague covering holiday or a tool can apply.

I believe the reason matters more than the rule. A rule without its reason can’t be challenged or retired, so it hardens into folklore. A rule with its reason can be checked against the firm as it is now.

Retire the rules that no longer earn their place

Not everything that comes out of her head should survive onto the page. Expect two kinds of rule you don’t want to keep.

The first is the workaround that outlived its problem. Say she adds a margin to one supplier’s parts because they once invoiced late and wrong. If you changed supplier two years ago, that margin is now just a higher price. The second is personal preference dressed up as a rule: a layout or an order of lines that exists because that’s how she likes it, with no consequence behind it.

This is why the reason sits next to every rule. When the reason has gone, or was never there, you can retire the rule on purpose rather than paying a tool to repeat it. Deciding which rules survive is a judgement call, and it belongs to whoever owns the job, not to whoever types fastest. Here, that’s probably you, with her in the room.

Test the page on jobs she didn’t see

Before you treat the page as finished, test it the same way you built it. Take 10 more finished quotes, different ones. Ask someone who doesn’t price jobs to say what each should have cost, using only the written rules and the price list.

Where their answer matches what she charged, the page works. Where it differs, one of two things is true. A rule is missing, or a rule is written too loosely to apply. Both are cheap to fix now. Both are expensive to find after a tool has been making the same wrong call every day for a month.

You won’t catch everything, and you don’t need to. A page that covers the common jobs and says clearly when to stop and ask her is a better starting point than one that pretends to cover it all.

Why an AI tool needs this page

An AI tool follows the rules it’s given and improvises where the rules run out. The improvising is the part that causes trouble, because it sounds every bit as confident as the rest. A written rule becomes something the tool applies or flags. An unwritten rule becomes a confident quote that’s wrong in a way only one person in the building would spot.

The page you’ve just made does for the job’s judgement what preparing documents for AI does for its paperwork. It also feeds straight into the standard you set when you agree what good looks like. Together, those three pieces of quiet work decide whether a first job succeeds.

None of this writes your office manager out of the job. The point is that she stops being the only route to a price. If a tool drafts the routine quotes, she checks them in minutes, and the hours she gets back go on the awkward jobs only she should price.

Book the afternoon and pull 10 quotes

This week, ask your office manager for 3 hours on a quiet afternoon, and tell her why: you want her knowledge on paper so quotes don’t wait for her. Before the session, pull 10 quotes from last month, including the awkward ones.

In the session, work through them one at a time and write every rule as condition, action and reason. The following week, give the page and 10 fresh quotes to someone who doesn’t price jobs, and spend an hour fixing the gaps it shows.

Say you do all that and never buy a tool. You still come out ahead. The job can be covered when she’s away, and a new starter learns it in weeks. The firm owns how its prices are set, instead of hoping she never hands in her notice.