Manager can help you monitor status of your sales quotes if you use some of the program’s available features. This capability was added in version 21.4.49. Prior to that version, sales quotes were purely informational, with no linkage to other transactions. Their status could only be monitored with custom fields.
Status is displayed on the main Sales Quotes tab listing. There are 4 possible statuses:
- Active, when first created as described in another Guide
- Expired, after the expiry date has passed without the quote being accepted or cancelled
- Accepted, when linked to a sales order or sales invoice (see instructions in following paragraph)
- Cancelled by editing the sales quote itself
Sales quotes can be linked to sales orders or sales invoice in two ways:
- Using the Copy to function to create the sales order or invoice while viewing the sales quote
- Selecting the
Quote numberafter choosing a customer on the sales order or invoice:
Example
Northwind Traders used to periodically delete sales quotes if they were not successful. Since version 21.4.49, however, it has taken advantage of all the status monitoring capability Manager offers. Its Sales Quotes tab listing shows the current status summary for its international business:
Several things are notable in the example above. First, there are no expiry dates before May 2021, because the possibility of entering them did not exist. Second, as a result, there are some very old quotes still Active, because they could not be cancelled. Finally, a few quotes are listed as Accepted, because they were invoiced after introduction of the status-monitoring capability. These have changed to gray and moved to the bottom of the list, showing that they no longer require close attention. The Active and Expired sales quotes are more visible because they are both current and need resolution (either by converting them to sales or cancelling them).
Example
Continuing with the example, Northwind decides to clean up its sales quote monitoring. It takes three actions: (1) quote 5897 is cancelled but not deleted, because it expired, preserving the record; (2) quotes 4546, 2102, and 1973 are cancelled because they are so outdated; and (3) all remaining active quotes are edited (where necessary) to give them expiry dates. The list now looks like this, after sorting on the Status column:
