Create and send a quote
Quotes is where a job gets priced and sent to a customer before it's booked — a repair quote, an equipment replacement bid, or a rental quote. A quote starts as a draft, moves to sent once you send it to the customer, and lands on approved, declined, or expired.
Create a quote
Start from New quote, pick the customer and site, and build the scope from the Price Book. A quote can carry more than one tier — a good/better/option set the customer chooses between — instead of one fixed price. You can also start a quote directly from a job's inspection deficiencies; see Manage inspections.
If your org requires internal approval before a quote goes out, mark it internally approved first — see Money topics.
When the company has an active surcharge, each option shows Add surcharge. Choose one and add it. The amount is calculated for you: a percent of that option's items and discounts, not of other fees, before tax, or the flat dollar amount from Price Book → Surcharges. The line is badged Surcharge. The control is hidden when no surcharge is active. An approved, declined, or expired quote refuses a new one. A percent on an option with nothing to charge says "Surcharge base must be positive."
On a draft, Becomes on approval can be Project. Each line you edit then has Phase. Lines with the same phase become one project phase when the quote is approved. Leave Phase blank to group those lines under General. The phase name shows beside the line description.
Send it and track the response
Send moves the quote from draft to sent and makes it visible to the
customer on its share link (/p/<token>) and in the portal. The office
preview at /proposal/[id] requires staff access and is read-only; use the
customer share link for approval. See
Quote customer view (office preview) for the
document layout and the differences in access, signing and validity.
From the sent quote:
- Send a reminder if it's gone quiet.
- Request a deposit if the job needs one before work starts. This creates a deposit invoice with a separate pay link; approval does not itself collect payment. If a deposit is mandatory, the customer cannot approve until the required deposit invoice is paid.
- The customer accepts a tier with Approve and sign, which moves the quote to approved, or the quote can be marked declined. Signing is optional unless an owner sets Quote to Required to approve under Settings → Signatures. That switch starts off.
- Valid until is the date on the quote card. The customer can approve through the end of that day in your company's time zone. After that, their page drops Approve and sign and says the quote expired on that date, and to contact you for an updated quote. On your record, a sent quote whose Valid until date is already before today's UTC date badges Expired with that date. The status can still read Sent.
When a quote is approved
An approved quote is ready to become real work — the tier the customer picked is what carries forward. Duplicate a quote to reuse its scope on a similar job, or archive one that's no longer relevant.
Money topics
- A quote only becomes billable work once it's approved with a tier chosen. Advancing straight to "approved" without a tier selected would leave nothing priced — the UI won't let you skip that step.
- Internal approval, if your org requires it, is separate from the customer's approval — it's a draft-stage gate before the quote can be sent at all, not something the customer sees.
Reference
- Quote status values — draft, sent, approved, declined, expired.
- Who can reach Quotes — Owners and Office users. See Roles & permissions.