Quotes, Sales Orders & Price Lists

Customer quotes live under Sales → Quotes, and the row of links at the top of that screen also reaches Sales orders, Price lists, Customer portal, Invoices and Recurring invoices. A quote names a customer, a quote date and, optionally, a valid-until date. Each line is either an item and a quantity, or a typed description and price for a service or one-off charge. These are the quotes you send to customers; the quotes suppliers send you are a different record, kept under Procurement.

The single habit that matters most when writing lines is to leave the price blank. A blank price is decided by the customer’s price list, then your default list, then the item’s own selling price. A typed price always wins and stays on the line. A discount is an amount off the whole line and cannot take the line below zero. Tax comes from each item’s own treatment: a tax-exempt customer is quoted without tax, a free-typed line is taxed at your standard rate unless you tick it as tax-exempt, and a tax-inclusive price has its tax extracted so the net figure never carries it. Saving gives the quote the next number in your quote sequence, starting with QUO-, as a draft.

In practice: a sales rep at a Nairobi building supplier quotes Kilele Hardware for 120 roofing sheets and 40 ridge caps. She leaves both prices blank. Kilele is on the Contractors 2026 list, which prices sheets at KES 940 from 100 upwards, so the sheet line comes to KES 112,800. The list has no row for ridge caps, so they fall through to the item price of KES 500, or KES 20,000. With VAT at 16% on top of KES 132,800 the quote totals KES 154,048. The rep never looked up a rate — and the figure is fixed on the quote from the moment it is saved.

Quote approval is on by default. While it is on, a draft must be approved by someone with permission to approve quotes before it can be emailed, have an answer recorded against it, or be converted. The approver and the time are kept. An approval covers the figures that were approved, so editing an approved quote returns it to draft — and with approval on, editing a sent quote also returns it to draft and closes the customer’s link until it is approved and sent again. An expired quote cannot be approved until its valid-until date is moved. A team that trusts its writers to send directly can switch approval off under Settings → Sales & POS → Sales Defaults.

Sending emails the quotation PDF with a link to view, accept or decline online, with no account needed; the quote moves to sent. The link expires with the quote: at the end of its valid-until day, or 30 days after sending when there is no end date. An answer can come three ways — from that link, where the customer types their name and accepts or declines with an optional reason; from the customer portal, recorded under the portal user’s name; or recorded by your staff after a call. A quote can be answered once, the quote’s author is notified, and the answer goes into the audit log. Every night, draft, approved and sent quotes past their valid-until date are marked expired, and an expired quote cannot be answered, sent or converted.

In practice: the Kilele quote is approved by the branch manager on Monday morning and sent at 10:00 with a valid-until date of Friday. On Wednesday the rep spots that the ridge-cap quantity should be 50, edits the quote, and it drops back to draft — Kilele’s buyer now finds the link no longer works. The manager approves again, the rep re-sends, and on Thursday the buyer types “J. Mwangi” and clicks Accept quote. The rep’s bell shows the acceptance with a link to the quote. Had Friday passed with no answer, the nightly run would have marked it expired and a fresh quote would be needed.

A quote converts once, by one of two roads, and a declined or expired quote cannot be converted at all. Create sales order is for goods that ship over time or may be short: you choose the warehouse (and optionally the shelf) to ship from and record the customer’s PO or reference, and the new order is a draft carrying the quote’s lines exactly. Invoice directly is for a job done in one go: the quote’s lines become a draft invoice at the accepted prices, due in 14 days unless you set a due date.

The direct road is guarded. Before the invoice is created, stock is checked at the chosen warehouse after other orders’ reservations, and if anything is short the invoice is refused item by item, showing what was wanted and what is available. That refusal is deliberate — the sales order exists for exactly that case, because it holds what is on the shelf and backorders the rest. Either way, a line is priced and taxed once, when the quote is saved, and copied forward: the order carries the quote’s lines and every invoice carries the order’s, so a price-list change after the customer said yes never reaches their invoice.

In practice: Kilele accepted 120 sheets, but only 80 are free in the Nairobi warehouse — another 40 are on a lorry from the factory. The rep tries Invoice directly and is refused: roofing sheet wanted 120, available 80. She converts to a sales order instead, choosing Nairobi and recording Kilele’s reference KH-PO-2231. A week later Kilele asks for a one-off site visit, which she quotes at KES 6,500 as a typed service line and invoices directly — no stock is involved, so nothing can be short.

A sales order carries the customer, an order date, an optional expected date, the warehouse and shelf to ship from, and the customer’s reference. You can create one directly with New order or convert one from a quote. Only a draft can be edited, and only a draft with at least one line can be confirmed. Confirming reserves each stock line at the order’s warehouse — as much as is free — and backorders the rest. Reserved stock cannot be taken by the till, another invoice, a stock transfer or a manual check-out, and as stock arrives backorders are filled oldest first. If a line has lost its reservation, for example because someone released it from the reservations screen, Reserve stock holds it again and backorders anything still short.

Invoice this order raises either everything outstanding or a quantity per line, with an invoice date and due date you can set. The order tracks what is left to invoice on each line and moves to part invoiced, then invoiced when nothing remains; asking for more than is left is refused with the quantity remaining. A part-invoiced line carries its discount in proportion to the quantity billed, so the invoices add up to the order, and the customer’s reference prints on each invoice. When an invoice raised from the order is checked out, that much of the order’s reservation moves onto the checkout. Cancel order works on a draft or confirmed order and releases what it held; once any part has been invoiced, you cancel or credit the invoice instead.

In practice: the rep confirms Kilele’s order. Nairobi reserves 80 sheets and backorders 40; the 50 ridge caps are all free and reserved. A walk-in at the till who wants 30 sheets can only buy from what is not promised. The sheet line carried a KES 2,400 discount, so when she invoices 80 sheets and all 50 caps now, that invoice carries KES 1,600 of it. The lorry lands on Tuesday, the 40 backordered sheets are reserved for Kilele before anyone else can take them, and the second invoice for 40 sheets carries the remaining KES 800 and takes the order to invoiced.

A price list is a named set of selling prices, found from the Price lists link on the Quotes screen. When a line has an item and no typed price, the price comes from the customer’s own list if it has a price for that item at that quantity, then your default list if one is marked default and has a price that applies, then the item’s selling price. A list is only used while it is active and, when it has dates, between its valid-from and valid-to dates — checked against the document’s date, not today’s. All lists price in your organization’s base currency; there is no per-list currency. The same rule prices quotes, sales orders, typed invoices, recurring invoices and the point of sale, and the mobile app asks it too.

Within a list, a row applies from its from-quantity upwards, and the row with the highest from-quantity not above the quantity being sold wins. A row is either a fixed price or a percentage on the item’s selling price — from -100% to +1000%, never both — and a percentage row moves when the item’s price moves. Results round to your currency’s own precision. A list can follow each item’s tax setting, include tax or exclude it. Each customer has one list at a time, so adding a customer to a list moves them off any other, and only one list can be the default. The list flags a break that charges more per unit than a smaller quantity, and an item whose lowest break starts above 1.

In practice: Contractors 2026 runs 1 January to 30 June and prices roofing sheets at KES 1,050 from 1, KES 990 from 50 and KES 940 from 100, with a -10% row on gutters. A quote for 60 sheets is priced at KES 990, and 40 sheets at KES 1,050. When head office lifts the gutter price from KES 800 to KES 900, the list price follows from KES 720 to KES 810 without anyone touching the list. A quote dated 1 July falls through to the default list or the item price, because the list is out of date on the document’s date — and quotes already saved in June keep their June prices.

Three documents print from this flow. The quotation, from a quote, shows its valid-until date and, once sent, the customer’s accept link. The order confirmation, from a sales order, shows the expected date and the customer’s reference. The proforma invoice prints from a quote or an order, numbered from its source with a PF- prefix and headed as not a tax invoice — for a customer who must pay in advance or approve spend internally. A proforma never takes an invoice number and is never filed to eTIMS, because nothing has been supplied yet; the tax invoice is the one raised from the order or the quote, and it files at issue where eTIMS is switched on.

Quotes, orders and proformas post nothing to the ledger. The books move when the invoice they produce does: an invoice with stock lines books its revenue and cost of sales when its stock is checked out, and an invoice of service lines books its revenue when it is approved. Permissions are split. Viewing, creating, editing, approving and deleting quotes are separate; sending a quote and recording an answer need the edit permission. Viewing sales orders is separate from managing them, which covers creating, editing, confirming, reserving, cancelling and converting a quote into an order. Invoicing an order, or invoicing a quote directly, needs the permission to create invoices. The mobile app applies the same rules and opens all three PDFs.

In practice: a county water project asks Kilele’s supplier for a proforma before releasing a KES 154,048 payment. The rep downloads it from the sales order — PF-SO-0418 — and sends it. Nothing reaches the ledger and nothing files with KRA. When the money arrives and the sheets are checked out against the invoice raised from the order, that invoice books revenue and cost of sales, and it is that invoice — not the proforma — which files to eTIMS. Only a draft quote can be deleted, and it goes to the trash where it can be restored; an unwanted sent quote is left to expire or has a decline recorded.