Industries · Electrical supply
AI quoting for electrical supply: wire, breakers, copper prices
Short answer: On an electrical distributor's list it had never seen, run once with no tuning, Staffbox scored 30 of 40, and 2 of 15 on messy requests. Per-foot wire, contractor price levels and trade shorthand are not handled yet.
Electrical counters get takeoff lists by email: panels, breakers, wire by the foot, fixtures by catalog number. On 14 October we built a fictional electrical distributor and scored the worker once, unchanged. It refused wire it stocked, quoted list price to contractors and priced special-order items: 8 wrong prices in 55 answers. Your list's units and price levels decide whether it fits, and the free score shows that before anything is installed. Send up to three requests your counter already answered; drafts come back within 2 business days.
Updated 14 October 2026
Free 30-day pilot, then $595 a month at founding sites (first 100) for as long as the box is live (draft pricing). No customer install yet.
End any time. Unit 101 onward pays $695 a month plus $1,800 onboarding. Before a counter pilot, we score 30 of your past wire, breaker and fixture quotes; it goes live only on a pass.
On an electrical list it had never seen, it scored 30 of 40 and made 8 wrong prices in 55
The test company is Ponce Electric Supply, an invented Atlanta distributor: 90 parts with house codes, wire priced per foot from reels and coils, a 12% contractor price level, an 8% copper surcharge, a cut charge and eight special-order items. Nothing in the worker was changed for it, each set ran once, and every answer is published as it came out.
What broke, notes plus quote action, all 55 answers
| Cause | Misses | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Ordered wire or conduit length read as a reel or stick size, so a stocked item was refused as unstocked | 7 | Per-foot units with reel, coil and cut rules; feet to sticks |
| Trade shorthand not matched ("12-2 nm-b", "sp 20a", "2p 30a", "recepts"), so it refused | 7 | Trade synonyms for each part family |
| Contractor price level not applied: list price quoted (wrong total) | 4 | Price levels by account |
| Special-order item priced instead of declined (wrong total) | 3 | Read the stock column |
| 300 wire nuts priced as 300 boxes (wrong total) | 1 | Pieces to boxes conversion |
| Right queue, extra words after it | 1 | Tighter answer format |
23 misses in 55: 10 on the standard 40, 13 on the messy 15. Refusals are safe, since a person sees them, but each one counts as a miss. Answer times from this run are not valid: another job shared the GPU.
Contractor account: price 500 feet of W-NM12-3 at contractor level.
The request asks for 500 feet of W-NM, which is not on the price list (we stock: NM-B 14/2 copper with ground, 250 ft coil; […] NM-B 12/3 copper with ground, 250 ft coil; […]). A different item is never substituted.
| 500 ft (two 250 ft coils) W-NM12-3, $1.12 a foot list, 12% contractor level, 8% copper surcharge | $532.22 |
What this means for you
- Your list decides fit. If you sell wire by the foot, price contractors off a level, or get requests in shorthand, today's worker will refuse or misprice those lines. Parts sold each at list price fared better: 8 of 8 right, against 0 of 5 wire quotes and 0 of 3 contractor quotes on the standard set.
- The free score shows it first. We run 30 of your past quotes before anything is installed, and it goes live only on a pass you agree. On a list like this one it would not pass, and we would tell you so.
- These gaps are product work we have not shipped: per-foot units, price levels, trade synonyms and stock flags. When we fix them, we will score a blind plumbing & HVAC set it has not seen, since this one is now known.
- It will not take off quantities from plans, post to your distribution system, or check stock and promise delivery. See what Staffbox does not do and every miss we have published.
Wire sold by the foot, coil or reel is where an electrical total goes wrong first
An electrician or contractor sends a list, often copied from their own takeoff. The parts are easy to name; the units are not. 500 feet of cable may be two coils on your list, a cut length with a charge, or a per-foot price, and the draft has to apply your rule, not invent one. In the 14 Oct test this is where it failed first. The drawing marks what has to be read in one made-up counter request.
The common request patterns, as we read the trade (the 14 Oct test covered the first three):
- Wire and cable by length. "500 ft 12/2 NM-B, two reels of 10 AWG THHN." The price is per foot or per reel, and the cut-length rule matters.
- Breakers and panels by brand and rating. "Twelve 20 amp single-pole, two 40 amp two-pole, a 200 amp 40-space panel." Brand and rating decide the row.
- Catalog-number lists. Fixtures and devices where the customer already has the manufacturer part number.
- Job packages. A kitchen remodel or a service upgrade sold as a set of lines.
- Rush for tomorrow morning. The price may be right while the stock or the pickup time is a separate question for a person.
Copper-linked prices make the list date your safety check
Copper-linked products are repriced often; that is common knowledge in the trade and our read, not a measured figure. Every Staffbox draft states the date of the list it priced from. If your desk reprices wire every week, a draft that cites an older date shows on the page before anyone approves it. That is the safety valve we can honestly offer. Staffbox does not watch a metals feed, and we have not tested weekly repricing.
Two list structures are worth fixing before a test. Many supply houses keep a book price from the manufacturer and apply a multiplier by product class or by customer. If that logic sits in someone's head or in a spreadsheet formula, write it in plain words in the brain, with the contractor tiers named. Today the quote action does not apply a price level, even when the notes state it: in the 14 Oct test, contractor lines came back at list. And if one family of parts has a unit of measure that differs between the list and the way customers ask, say so. "A box of 25" against an "each" price is where wrong totals come from.
Thirty past counter quotes, graded by your own estimator, are the test
The score uses your list and your history, not our demo companies. For an electrical house, the useful mix is:
- The price list your counter really uses, with its date, plus the multiplier sheet if you keep one.
- 30 past requests. Include at least five wire or cable requests and five with a brand and rating but no catalog number. Those are the harder shapes.
- Which of the 30 had a contractor discount, and what rule you applied.
- We keep 10 back. Your estimator grades them without seeing our grade.
Nothing is installed for this. We run the requests on our own Mac mini in Atlanta, delete the files within 14 days of sending your results (per our draft data policy), and agree the pass bar with you first; a refusal counts against us.
Related: distributors (the general case for price-list quoting) · plumbing and HVAC supply (similar counter, different part families) · all industries · price list lookup · models · the free 30-quote test.
Questions
Does it handle wire sold by the foot or by the reel?
Not yet. In the 14 Oct electrical test it refused 7 length-based requests for wire and conduit it stocked. The free 30-quote test should include several wire requests so you see this on your own list.
Will it know when my copper prices changed?
It cites the date of the price list it used on every line. It does not watch a market feed.
Can it enter quotes into my distribution system?
No. It writes draft replies into a folder, and a person sends.
Sources
- How we measured: fictional Ponce Electric Supply, Qwen3 8B on our Dell RTX 3090 test box, 14 Oct 2026, each set run once, graded by code (standard set, messy set). Earlier companies: Fieldstone IT and Peachtree Cabinet Works, 30 Sep to 6 Oct 2026. No customer has run Staffbox yet.
- Scores, test sets and every graded answer: Staffbox scorecard on Hugging Face and github.com/Staffbox-ai/staffbox (evals/results). Staffbox claims on this page come from our public scorecards (huggingface.co/spaces/staffbox/scorecard) and the open repo (github.com/Staffbox-ai/staffbox).
- For a dated comparison with a hosted distributor quoting platform, see Staffbox vs Mercura.
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