How Long Should a Quotation Hold Its Price — Why 30 Days Is the Thai Standard, and Why the Expiry Date Is the Closing Tool Everyone Overlooks

This article covers trade practice and internal risk management. It is not legal advice — the binding terms of any quotation are whatever that document says.

The validity period is an insurance policy you write yourself

The line "prices valid for 30 days" at the bottom of a quotation is not a ritual — it is a declaration of how many days you are willing to carry cost risk on the customer's behalf.

Between the day you quote and the day the customer agrees, your costs can move the whole time: raw material prices, freight, and — for imported goods — the exchange rate, which moves daily with the market (pull up the Bank of Thailand's historical reference rate and you'll see that swings of several percent within a month are entirely normal). A quotation with no expiry date is an open-ended risk insurance policy written for the customer free of charge — and the customer who resurfaces six months later to accept the old price is the one filing a claim on it.

The rule for setting validity is therefore simple: the more volatile the cost, the shorter the validity — stable-cost work can hold 60–90 days · ordinary work follows the 30-day custom · imported goods, chemicals, and metals whose prices ride world markets should be cut to 7–15 days, and any individual quote can always be set shorter than the business's standard.

The expiry date is a closing tool, not just a term

Most salespeople treat the validity date as back-office fine print, when it is in fact the most legitimate reason there is to call a customer:

• The near-expiry window (around 5 days left) is the golden moment — you call to state a fact ("this quote holds its price until the …"), not to demand an answer. A customer who intends to buy gets nudged into moving the paperwork; a customer who won't buy usually uses this moment to tell you the truth — and both outcomes beat silence.
• A deadline declared in advance does its psychological work without pressuring anyone — it is the politest scarcity mechanism there is, because it is a commercial fact, not a manipulation technique.

A good system therefore has to raise the "validity expiring soon" flag by itself, ahead of time — the golden window is only a few days wide, and once missed it does not come back.

An already-expired quote: crisis or opportunity, depending on the conversation

A quotation past its validity date whose customer has only just come back to accept is a situation salespeople fear unnecessarily, because there is a way out where both sides win:

• Costs unchanged: issue a fresh quote confirming the same price — the customer feels looked after ("we've extended it for you"), and you have legitimately reset the validity clock.
• Costs moved: you have a fully referenceable reason why the new price differs from the old — the hardest conversation in sales, "the price went up," becomes explainable, because the deadline was declared on day one.

The one thing both exits depend on is knowing which quote expires when. A quote that expires into mutual silence is a quote that died for nothing: the customer keeps your old price to benchmark other suppliers against, and you don't even know you are being used as the reference price.

Three numbers that belong on every quotation

1. The date sent — the starting point of every clock (both validity and follow-up cadence).
2. The validity expiry as an explicit date — not just "30 days," which invites an argument about which day the count started from. Write it out: "prices valid until 23/9/2026."
3. The conditions the price is tied to — especially for imported goods: state that the price is based on the exchange rate on the quotation date, so that adjusting the price when the rate runs hard is a conversation held on an agreed term, not a broken promise. (One more local trap for foreign readers: Thai documents often carry Buddhist-era years — 2569 rather than 2026, a 543-year offset — so an explicit, unambiguous date protects you twice over.)

The tool that does all of this in one file

Quote Register + Win Rate is an Excel file that turns price validity into a system: set your standard validity once, override it per quote where needed, and the system computes every quote's expiry date, raises a 🟠 light ahead of expiry (with a lead time you set yourself) and a 🔴 light once expired, each with the recommended next step — the chase-today screen automatically sorts expired and near-expiry quotes to the top, alongside the full status register, monthly win rate, and the lost-reason table, all in one file. One purchase includes both the Thai edition and the English (Thailand) edition.

→ See the product