Help Guide › Owner

Quoting an Order Before You Commit to It

The first field on an order is This is a, and it decides what every figure below it means: a Quote or a Purchase Order.

A quote is a price a vendor has given you. It costs you nothing and holds no stock — your cash position does not move, your shelf does not move, and Total Invested does not move. Write up as many as you like while you are deciding, and your dashboard shows what you are sitting on in quotes on its own row, kept apart from money you have actually spent.

Converting it is the commitment. Change *This is a* to Purchase Order and that is the moment the stock arrives on your shelf and the spend lands in your figures. Nothing is applied before that.

Deleting a quote changes nothing, because nothing had happened yet — there is no spend to unwind and no stock to take back off the shelf.

What a quote never touches. Every one of these is about a compound, and a quote is about a price:

• Its cost per unit and its margin — a cheap quote does not make your stock look cheaper than it was.
• Its added costs — see below; a bill cannot be split onto a quote at all.
• Vendor comparison and the reorder planner — a quote is not a supplier you buy from, so it is not offered as one.
• A supplier refund on a real order, which keeps coming off exactly as it did.
• Your operating expenses, cash position, stock value, profit and units purchased.

The quote screen says the same thing at the top, and it shows no shipment status, because nothing has been shipped — in your list of orders a quote is marked Not ordered rather than carrying a delivery stage.