The need for QuoteWerks

Creating price quotes is the initial step towards making a sale. Yet, this necessary step can be tedious and time consuming; researching product, pricing, and details from multiple vendors. You may even need to create several different quotes for one specific client. And, after all the time used to create the perfect quote, the customer may decide not to place an order. Since the creation of price quotes requires an investment of time, and since not all quotes are converted into orders, it quickly becomes important for users to streamline the quoting process in order to realize a tremendous time savings.

Before QuoteWerks, users would have to use a spreadsheet or similar software to put together all the aspects of a quote such as part numbers, their cost, markup, the customers price, the vendors they will purchase from, etc. Manually tracking all of these elements and performing calculations manually leaves much room for error, and wastes much of the users' valuable time. Plus, there was little or no consistency in the design of the quote that was delivered to your customers and prospects.

Shortcomings of spreadsheet software and word processing software

Quotes can be created in some accounting software packages.  There are some shortcomings involved with using your accounting software to do your quoting.

When most business professionals are first asked to create a sales quote for a customer, naturally they use the tools that they are already familiar with such as a spreadsheet (like Microsoft Excel) or a word processor (like Microsoft Word).  Using a spreadsheet program or word processor program at first glance is a quick way to create a quote.  After they have been creating quotes on spreadsheets for a while they quickly become aware of it's shortcomings.

Accuracy issues
Errors can very easily be introduced into the quote when using a spreadsheet to create quotes.  All it takes is a user to change a totaling formula by accident, or move a cell in the spreadsheet, and now you have a calculation error which may be difficult to track down.

Inconsistency issues
Using a spreadsheet makes it difficult to give all of your quotes the same consistent look and feel.   As the quote spans across pages, etc you will need to spend time cutting and pasting descriptions, and re-applying border lines, etc.  Using a spreadsheet, you will need to manually keep track of a unique quote number sequence, and if you make a mistake, you will then have two quotes with the same quote number.  This shortcoming is especially prominent in an office where there is more than one sales person creating quotes. 

Lack of specialized quoting features
Using a spreadsheet, you do not have an easy way to lookup and add a product or service to the quote.  Using a spreadsheet, makes it impossible to do a search for an existing quote unless you know the quote number.  Using a spreadsheet, makes it impossible to generate a list of the quotes that you have done for any one customer.  Using a spreadsheet, makes it impossible to create reports based on all of the information in the quotes.   For example, you have no way to report on how many quotes each salesperson is creating each month,  how much potential income these quotes represent, how many of the quotes are getting converted to orders, how many of XYZ product are quoted, and how many have you sold, what prices has the XYZ product been sold for over the last 4 months, etc.

There are more shortcomings to using spreadsheet software to create quotes, but you get the idea...

Do any of these quoting difficulties sound familiar?  QuoteWerks can overcome all of these difficulties!

Shortcomings of accounting software

Quotes can be created in some accounting software packages.  There are some shortcomings involved with using your accounting software to do your quoting.

Part Number and Inflexibility issues
Most accounting software requires that the part numbers that you are quoting are already setup in your accounting software.  This is a problem for several reasons.  Whenever you need to quote a part that is not already in your accounting software you will need to create an entry for it including description, cost, price, GL accounts, etc.  Then, you can add the part number to your quote.  Not all quotes result in orders, so you will end up with a lot of part numbers in your accounting software that have never actually been sold.  To make matters worse, many accounting packages do not allow you to delete items once they have been entered into the accounting software, so that part number that you have never used will be stuck in your accounting software forever.

Administrative issues
Who is going to create these part numbers in the accounting software?  Are all the salespeople in the company going to have the security rights to add part numbers to your accounting software?  Of course, you could have your accounting person add these part numbers for your salespeople every time they create a new quote, but that would be a tremendous waste of your accountant's time.

Pricing and Security issues
Using accounting software to create quotes is for larger offices that have many sales people, poses even more challenges.  First accounting software licenses are typically more expensive than quoting software licenses.   Secondly, requiring sales reps to have access to your accounting software raises many security related issues.  Your accounting software should only be used by the people who are well trained in accounting and the use of your accounting software.

Lack of specialized quoting features
Not all accounting software packages can track commissions (since commission calculations are usually complex).  Quoting software is more flexible in terms of tweaking profit margin, pricing models, links to other software such as contact managers etc.  Quoting software also includes much more flexibility in your ability to create reports to retrieve information about your quoting and ordering.  QuoteWerks stores it's data in an industry standard database format that you can use any software (including QuoteWerks) to retrieve information from, whereas accounting software usually stores their data in proprietary database formats that only the accounting software can read.  If you have remote sales reps in the field, accounting software does not have the ability to let the sales rep. create a quote on the accounting software installed on a laptop, and then send it back to the main office where it can be imported into the office installation of the accounting software.

There are more shortcomings to using accounting software to create quotes, but you get the idea...

Do any of these quoting difficulties sound familiar?  QuoteWerks can overcome all of these difficulties!