Every quote request answered, and the missed ones counted.

It lands in a shared inbox and waits for whoever is free. In most offices two people answer the same request, one request gets no answer, and nobody can say which was which on Friday. A dispatcher quoting forty loads a day cannot see the three that went unanswered; neither can an accounting office in March or a brokerage at renewal time. The request that gets no reply is the one you never hear about, because the customer went elsewhere.

One page, every morning: how many requests came in, how many were answered, the median time to reply, the list of what is still waiting with the customer's name and the owner, the duplicates caught, and the oldest open request. It goes to the owner and whoever runs the desk. It is the same page discovery produces, so you have already seen one before you buy.

Count it, do not guess. Suppose 200 requests a week arrive and 15 per cent go unanswered: that is 30 requests. If you win one in four of the requests you do answer, those 30 were worth about 7 jobs. At $400 of margin a job, that is about $2,800 a week, or roughly $145,000 a year, from requests that were already in your inbox. Your numbers will differ; the calculator does the arithmetic with yours, and free discovery counts the real ones.

Four more worked examples, invoicing, document chasing, missed calls and lead follow-up.

Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes and Outlook, and Google Workspace and Gmail, for the inbox. Your quoting sheet or system for prices, so drafts can carry them. Teams or Slack for the alerts. The board itself runs in a browser; nothing is installed on staff computers.

Not until you switch it on. Every build starts in shadow mode: the system reads, sorts and drafts, and a person sends. You watch the report for a week or two, then choose which kinds of request may go out automatically, with limits you set, such as no quote above a figure without a person. Everything else keeps a person on the send button.

It will not invent a price. Drafts carry the prices from your sheet or leave them blank for a person. It will not reply to a request that needs a judgement call, such as a credit decision; it flags those. It will not read mailboxes you did not name, and it will not send anything to a customer until you have turned that on for that kind of request.

In the founder's own business. Aion Appraisals, a commercial appraisal firm in Ontario, runs its inbox this way: enquiries sorted and drafted every hour for a person to send, payments matched to invoices, and review requests stopped the moment a review arrives. It has run unattended since September 2026. We name it because a named example beats an anonymous one, and we are disclosing that it is ours.