Follow a quotation after it is sent: revisions, expiration and follow-ups

The list opens on a reduced set of columns; the rest are behind the picker at the right end of the header row.

The picker adds: Delivery Date, Expected Date, Sales Team, Company where more than one is in use, Untaxed Amount and Taxes (each with its own column total), Tags, Invoice Status, Customer Reference and Expiration. Add Expiration if chasing offers before they go stale is part of your week — it is hidden by default, and that is why most people never see it. Note that Order Date is not among them on this screen: it has been swapped out for Creation Date, although you can still group by it.

Ticking rows puts a Create Invoices button in the header. That is an invoicing action, not a quotation one; leave it alone unless invoicing is your job.

There is no expired status and no revised status. Both of those are conditions rather than states, and both are described below.

When a customer comes back with changed sizes, a different glass build-up or a request for a better price, the honest answer is a new document rather than an edit to the one they have already seen. Create Revision in the quotation header does that in one press.

The button is only offered while the document is a Quotation or Quotation Sent. Press the equivalent on a confirmed order and you are refused with "Only draft or sent quotations can be revised." — a message that appears in English even in the Arabic interface, because it is not among the module's translated strings. A confirmed order that has to change is a variation or an amended order, not a revision.

Both the original and every revision stay in the list as separate documents, and every one of them adds its value into the Total at the foot of the column. A job quoted three times is counted three times. Keep that in mind before quoting a figure from the bottom of this screen — and see Total your own quotations in the pivot and graph for what that does to the reporting.

The field is called Expiration and it sits with the order details on the quotation, above the pricelist. It is filled in for you when the quotation is created: today plus the number of days set on the company, which on this system is 30. Change it freely while the document is a quotation; it is locked once the order is confirmed, and it disappears from the form entirely at that point, because a confirmed order does not expire.

What expiry actually does is narrower than most people assume.

Everything the customer says about a quotation belongs on the quotation. The chatter at the foot of the document holds the messages sent from Send, any note you log after a phone call, and the completion notes of activities as they are finished. That record is what makes a price objection or a promised deadline findable months later, and it is the only place any of it is kept — none of it is a field.

The next step is scheduled the same way as on a deal: Activity in the chatter, pick a type, write what the step actually is, set the date and the owner. What you write in Summary is what appears in the Activities column of the list and in the cell on the activity board, so write the step rather than the type.

This screen has a deliberately short filter list, and it is not the one on the Sales app's own orders screen.

The search box additionally matches on Order (number, customer reference or customer), Customer, Salesperson, Sales Team, Product, Activities of, Activity type and Campaign. Group by is limited to Salesperson, Customer, Order Date and Payment Method.

Two absences are worth knowing. There is no Late Activities, Today Activities or Future Activities here, unlike the My Activities queue — sort the Activities column or use the activity board instead. And there is no To Invoice or To Upsell; those live on Sales › Orders › Orders, which is the same model with a different search view.