Projects and tenders
Prepare, approve and send priced offers with revisions
Build a priced offer on an opportunity, send it for internal approval, record that it went to the client and the client's answer, keep revisions, and turn it into a sales quotation.
3 min readLast updated
In this article
An offer is your priced answer to a tender or an enquiry: lines, discount, tax, payment terms and a validity date. Offers keep their number across revisions, so you can send Rev 0, then Rev 1 after negotiation, and always know which one is current and what changed.
Create an offer
Open the opportunity and go to its Offers tab, then select New offer. Offers are always created from their opportunity.
Enter the Title, Currency, Offer date, Valid until and the Pre-sales engineer.
Under Lines, select Add line for each item: Item, System / category, Description, Qty, Unit price and Unit cost. Without lines, the offer is priced from its Subtotal and Cost.
Set the Discount (Amount or Percentage) and the Tax.
Write the Payment terms. Tick Non-standard terms when they differ from your company's standard; approval rules can require sign-off for them.
Select Save. The totals and the Margin are recalculated when the offer is saved.
A foreign-currency offer needs an exchange rate on or before the offer date; the rate is fixed with the offer.
Find offers
Open CRM › Projects & Tenders › Offers. The list shows the current revision of each offer, with its Offer no., Title, Opportunity, Customer, Offer date, Valid until, Total, Margin and Status. Choose All revisions to see older ones too.
Users without the permission to see margins do not see cost or margin anywhere.
From draft to the client's answer
Status | Available actions |
|---|---|
Draft / Rejected | Submit for approval, Withdraw |
Pending approval | Recall (back to draft), Withdraw |
Approved | Mark sent to client, Withdraw |
Submitted | Client accepted, Client declined, Withdraw |
Submit for approval: the offer is repriced and checked against your company's offer approval rules. It then waits in the approvers' approvals inbox. When no rule applies it is approved at once, unless your company turned on Every offer needs approval: then one approver who did not create it must sign it off.
Mark sent to client records the date you sent the approved offer.
Client accepted or Client declined records the answer. If your company turned on Accepting an offer wins its opportunity, accepting the offer also marks the opportunity won.
An approved or submitted offer is reminded to its creator 14, 7 and 1 days before its Valid until date, and becomes Expired once that date passes.
Revisions
Only drafts and rejected offers can be edited. Any other revision is locked: select Create revision to start a new draft with the same content. The old revision becomes Superseded. On the Revisions tab, select Compare revisions and choose a revision in Compare with to see the change per system and in total.
The offer page also has the Approval trail, showing who approved each step and who it is waiting for, plus Documents and History.
Create the sales quotation
On an approved, submitted or accepted offer, select Create sales quotation. The sales quotation form opens with the offer's lines. The offer's organisation must be a customer first; promote it if needed.
Common questions
Can I delete an offer? Only a first draft. A later revision is withdrawn instead, so the history stays complete.
Why does my offer go straight to Approved? No approval rule matched it and your company does not require approval of every offer. Your administrator sets the rules (margin below, discount above, total above, non-standard terms) in CRM settings.