Sales Quotation best practices

[norber...@multimageweb.com]

hi,

i know idempiere has in order window sales quotation and propsal well. in our experience this quite confuse our customers. we have create a new window Sales Quotations - and has - hidden - flag "Sales Proposal" - this way we are simple able to split real orders to Sales Order and Sales Quotation to another window. So users working with 2 windows. Meanwhile i have opportunity to improve - setup more details proposal tracking i need to setup - something like: 

Valid Until - The last date of validity of this Quotation. - can be reported later in reports

Status (HERE im confused - it is same as Document status - only improve values - or it is another status. )

   - Open - When you first enter a Quotation, it will be marked as Open

   - Accepted - When the Customer agrees to go ahead with a Quotation, you should mark it as Accepted. The Probability (below) will be changed to 100%, and the current date will be placed in the Decision Date field.

   - Rejected - When the Customer decides not to go ahead with a Quotation, you should mark it as Rejected. The Probability (below) will be changed to 0%, and the current date will be placed in the Decision Date field. You cannot create Orders from Rejected Quotations.

Probability % - Use this field to record the percentage probability that an Order will result from the Quotation.

I know this could be overlapped by CRM process - however some companies doesnt like or SFA process not affordable - so like better proposal/quotation tracking. 

My Questions  are

- Is this something would be interesting make it better in core ?  (2 windows and new fields )

- any suggestion - new status could be implemented or its better to handle by existing maybe with Workflow Combination ?

norbert bede

[HansAnton Riess]

Hi Norbert,

We also work in the area of sales quotation and think it would be nice if we do not have the restrictions of a normal sales order.

Example:

Quotation will be sent via mail. At this moment it is not absolutely necessary to have all the data for this "future" customer like shipping adress. E-mail could be enough.

At the moment we have to use a workaround to overcome these restrictions, which are ok for sales order or binding offers but IMHO some mandatory fields are not needed in this step.

Regards
Hans