Quotes overview: what it is and how it works

Written By Timothy Murenzi

What Quotes does

Quotes (also called an RFQ — Request for Quote) lets you ask one or more vendors to price the products you already keep in your Library. Each vendor fills in a private page; you compare their responses, accept the lines you want, push the accepted pricing back into your Library, and optionally turn accepted lines into purchase orders.

Where it lives

Quotes is in the left menu under the Management group, at Quotes. It carries a Beta tag. If you don't see it, see Article 8 — Permissions & visibility — it's hidden by default until your role is granted access.

Before you start (prerequisites)

Products in your Library. An RFQ is always built from Library items, so the products you want priced must exist there first.
Vendors on those products. Quotes groups items by each product's Vendor field. Items with a vendor whose record has an email will auto-fill; items with no vendor go into an "Unassigned vendor" group you'll complete by hand.
(Optional) Walter (AI) enabled on your account, if you want Walter to draft the request email or read vendor PDFs/replies. Everything works without it — you just do those steps manually.

The lifecycle of a quote

A quote moves through these statuses automatically as things happen:

Status	Meaning
Draft	Created but not yet emailed to any vendor.
Sent	The request email has gone out to at least one vendor.
Partial	Some, but not all, vendors have responded.
Responses In	Every vendor on the quote has responded.
Reviewing	You've started accepting or rejecting lines.
Closed	The quote has been closed and archived.

The end-to-end flow

Select items in the Library and choose RFQ.
Configure what to ask for and confirm vendor emails, then Send.
Each vendor responds on their private page (or emails/PDFs you their quote).
You review responses, accept the lines you want, and apply pricing to your Library.
You optionally create purchase orders from accepted lines.
You close the quote to archive it.