As a sales representative, it’s your responsibility to create sales quotes and request quotes from suppliers if your customer requests items that your company normally doesn’t have in stock. To ensure you get the item at the best price, you want to obtain quotes from several different vendors.
This can be quite a hassle, as you will have to create each purchase quote individually, each time with the same items but for different vendors. Not only does this take time, but it is also difficult to keep the purchase quotes organized so you can make a good comparison when you receive the prices. Additionally, organizing different purchase quotes per type of item, so you can ask different vendors for each item type (e.g., flooring and doors), can be challenging.
Let’s explore how this process can be simplified!
As usual, you start to create a Sales Quote.
Imagine your customer is requesting items for two different rooms they want to renovate. For both rooms they request a door and new flooring. To differentiate the two rooms on the Sales Quote, you group the Items per room in the Lines of the Sales Quote.
As you can see, there are two types of items. Therefore, we have two types of Vendors for which we want to create a Purchase Quote. To group the Items per type, we choose a Purchase Quote Code per type and fill it in the relevant column for each item.
In the Purchasing Code column you define where you would like to have the Items delivered, for example at your location or directly at the customer.
If both columns are filled, in the top menu click on Home and Create Purchase Quote.
In the window that opens, under Filter, select the Purchase Quote Code for which you would like to create Purchase Quotes.
Fill the lines with the different Vendors for which you would like to create a Purchase Quote.
In the column Primary Quote, select one Purchase Quote as the Primary Quote. Only purchase prices from this quote will be synchronized to the Sales Quote.
Click on OK.
On the notification that pops up, click Yes to see the Purchase Quotes that were created.
Go back to the Sales Quote and repeat steps 5 until 10 to create Purchase Quotes for the other type of Items or Purchase Quote Code.
After receiving the different Purchase Quotes, you have come to a decision from where to order the Items. For each Purchase Quote Code, you now set the Purchase Quote that you have picked as the Primary Quote as follows.
Go to the relevant Sales Quote and, in the Lines section, select the line with an Item with a Purchase Quote Code.
In the Lines menu, click on Quote and Show Quotes.
For each Item with that Purchase Quote Code, you can now select which Purchase Quote should be the Primary Quote by selecting the correct line and clicking on Set as primary quote in the menu.
Repeat this for each Purchase Quote Code to make sure the correct Purchase Quotes are selected as Primary Quote before changing the Sales Quote to a Sales Order.
Back on the Sales Quote, in the top menu click on Home and Make Order to create the Sales Order. You will be asked whether you want to convert the Primary Purchase Quotes into Purchase Orders in the background, which you confirm with Yes. The other Purchase Quotes are deleted, however can still be found in the Purchase Quote Archives.
Now, whenever you want to request quotes from multiple vendors, you can easily do so from a single Sales Quote. This not only saves you time but also makes it easier to keep track of the various Purchase Quotes.
