Quote Requests to Vendors

What it is and what it's for

Use a Quote Request whenever you want to ask several vendors for a price on the same items or services before deciding who to buy from. It's useful to:

• Email the same request to the contacts of every vendor you want a quote from.
• Record the proposal (price, specifications and notes) each vendor gives you for every item, including attribute variants if your company uses them.
• Compare at a glance which vendor offers the best price per item, with the amount and percentage difference against the lowest one.
• Generate the Purchase Order for the winning vendor directly, without retyping anything.

You can create a Quote Request from scratch, or generate it from an already-registered Purchase Request (inheriting location, department, division, item class, payment terms, currency, items, reference and notes), to follow up on that internal need until you get pricing from vendors.

How to use it

1. Open Quote Requests from the Purchases menu, or click the button to request a quote from an already-authorized Purchase Request.
2. Fill in the location and add the item or service lines with the quantity you need to get quoted (with attributes, if your company uses them).
3. On the Vendors tab, add every vendor you're going to ask for a quote, and optionally the contact the email will be sent to.
4. Save the document. The Proposals tab fills in automatically with one row per vendor-and-item combination, so you can enter the price, specifications and notes each vendor gives you.
5. If you need a reference of how well an item has been quoted in the past, use the Suggested Vendors button on the item's line: it shows its last five purchases (vendor, currency, unit and price).
6. From the detail screen, use the email button next to each vendor to send the request by email to their contact (requires the contact to have an email address on file).
7. Once you have the vendors' proposals, go to Choose Vendors. There you see, for every item, all proposals sorted from lowest to highest price (the lowest in green, the rest in red with the amount and percentage difference), along with current stock, reorder level, and the item's last ten purchases.
8. Select the proposal you want to accept for each item with the radio button and click Generate Purchase Orders: a Purchase Order is created for each selected vendor, with the chosen items, quantities and prices, inheriting the subsidiary, location, department, division, item class, payment terms, currency, reference and notes from the request.
9. To print, use the document's print button; you can choose between the predefined format or a custom HTML template configured by your company.
10. Use Reports for a summary or a detailed view of your quote requests, with additional filters by item, currency, payment terms, division, item class and transaction type in the detailed one.

Key fields

Validations when saving

• The location is required and must belong to the document's subsidiary.
• The currency is required on every Quote Request.
• The vendor and the department, if provided, must exist and be active.
• There must be at least one line with an item, service, or description; you can't leave a quantity or price on a line with no item or name.
• Each line's discount percentage, if used, must be between 0% and 100%.
• No more than 500 lines are allowed per document.
• Every proposal must match an item (and, if applicable, the attribute combination) that already exists among the document's lines; otherwise it can't be saved.
• The document number can't be changed once created, and a voided document can no longer be edited (keep it only as a reference).

Availability and permissions

• Creating and editing Quote Requests requires the Enterprise edition with the add-on Advanced Purchases module active for your company (the same module that enables Purchase Requests).
• You need the Quote Requests permission; the add, edit, delete and void levels are controlled separately within that same permission.

Tips and common mistakes