Prepare and send a quotation

Personas: Sales rep (composes and sends the offer; My Quotations or the CRM group), Sales group member (follows up the open offer from the Inbox) · Modules: Quotations You put a priced offer in front of a customer: line items from your catalog, a validity date, terms. You track the answer — accepted, declined, or quietly expired — and when the customer says yes, one click turns the offer into a sales order.

Before you start: the customer and the products must exist; for My Quotations, an Employee record whose Username equals your login. Offers created from an opportunity (see Work an opportunity pipeline) arrive here pre-filled with the customer, currency, owner and the opportunity back-link.

1. Compose the offer — Sales rep

1. Open Quotations (CRM group) or My Quotations (Personal shell), click New Quotation — or open the DRAFT the opportunity's Create Quotation made for you.
2. Fill in the Date, the Customer (required), a Valid Until date (how long the offer stands — this drives the automatic expiry), the Currency, the Payment Method (Bank transfer by default) and free-text Conditions. The Opportunity field ties the offer into the pipeline when there is a deal behind it.
3. Save. The offer is numbered QT… at once and sits in DRAFT.
4. Add the line items: pick a Product — its price, unit and tax rate fill in from the catalog (all editable) — then the quantity and an optional discount. Each line's net / VAT / total compute as you save it; the document totals footer keeps the sums.
5. Print renders the offer document to send to the customer.

2. Send it — Sales rep

1. Click Mark Sent (available only in DRAFT). Status: SENT. The clock on Valid Until is now meaningful — a SENT offer that outlives it expires by itself.

3. Follow up — Sales group member (Inbox)

1. From the moment the offer was created, a Follow Up Quotation task sits in the Inbox for anyone in the Sales group. Its form is a read-only snapshot: number, date, valid until, total, customer, status — with a single Done action.
2. Complete it with Done when you have closed the offer out yourself. You usually don't have to: the moment the deal resolves — Accept, Decline or Generate Sales Order — the follow-up is cancelled automatically and leaves the Inbox, disarming the expiry timer with it.

4. Record the answer — Sales rep

1. Customer says yes: Accept (from SENT) → ACCEPTED.
2. Customer says no: Decline (from SENT) → REJECTED.
3. No answer in time: when Valid Until passes, a still-open offer flips to EXPIRED by itself. Mark Expired (from SENT) remains as the manual override.
4. To turn the offer into an order, click Generate Sales Order: the header (customer, currency, company, payment method, conditions) and every line item (product, name, quantity, price, discount, unit, tax) are cloned into a new Sales Order — its own SO… number, starting DRAFT in its own confirmation flow — and the quotation flips to ORDERED. ORDERED is never set by hand.
5. A revised offer? Duplicate copies the quotation — new QT… number, back in DRAFT.

What happened behind the scenes

• Number series Quotation (QT); the generated order drew from the sales-order series.
• Status path: DRAFT → SENT → ACCEPTED / REJECTED / EXPIRED, plus ORDERED via the convert only. If the offer came from an opportunity, generating it had already flipped the deal to PROPOSAL.
• The follow-up flow is armed per offer: its expiry timer re-reads Valid Until — editing the date moves the deadline; an offer with no date never auto-expires. Resolving the deal (ACCEPTED, REJECTED or ORDERED) aborts the whole flow, so an answered offer can never expire afterwards.

Variations and refusals

• Lifecycle buttons refuse outside their statuses: no Accept/Decline/Mark Expired on a DRAFT, no Mark Sent twice.
• Generate Sales Order does not carry the Owner onto the order — assign responsibility there if your process needs it.
• Accepting first is not enforced before converting — Generate Sales Order is the step that sets ORDERED regardless; use Accept when you want the answer on record before ordering.

See also

• Quotations — the module reference
• Work an opportunity pipeline — where the offer comes from