Please note: this feature is in Preview at the moment, which means we're still making a few tweaks here and there to make it even better. It also means that whilst all customers can benefit from the Quote-to-Order Workflow right now, when it's out of Preview it may be restricted to certain subscriptions.

No more vague order confirmations! Add "Approve" and "Decline" buttons to your PDF Quote documents (Word & PDFs) and/or to the covering email to get unambiguous order confirmations coming through thick and fast! These buttons take the user to the Customer Portal to action that stage of the Quote-to-Order Workflow.

Navigate to the Settings Centre by selecting System Settings in the navigation menu, and select the 'Emails & Documents' page.

Select 'Click to Configure' under the Document Templates section of the Settings Centre.

Edit the relevant templates e.g. 'Basic Email Quote' by clicking on the pencil icon alongside it. In the side panel, click 'Edit' to make changes to this template.

Note: The Company Brand theming automatically applies to the Approve/Decline Quote-to-Order Workflow Buttons added to emails and documents. Check out this guide to learn more about branding.

Now you're in edit mode, you can make changes to this template. To add the authorisation buttons, simply click on the area of the email where you'd like them to be added, and select the 'Quote-to-Order Workflow Buttons (Approve & Decline)' underneath the Additional Data section to add this merge field into the email. Once happy with your changes, click the 'Save' button.

There's also an option to use a find and replace field on your Quote documents for adding an "Approve-only" button. However, we'd strongly recommend using both "Approve" and "Decline" so that your Sales team get notified of a Decline reason!).

To add these buttons to a Word or PDF document template, make sure you have the Word Add-in installed first. Once installed, click on the Prospect CRM Word Add-in from the Home tab in Word.

Then, add the Quote-to-Order Workflow buttons to your Word document. Simply close Word when you've added these and it'll automatically update and overwrite the Word document in the CRM.

Navigate to a Quote in the CRM, and click on the Contact's email address to start composing an email.

Select the template you added the authorisation buttons to from the 'Select a Template' drop-down, and you'll notice the buttons have been added before you send the email.

The CRM will automatically change the {Authorisation.Buttons} merge field to a {Authorisation.AcceptLink} and {Authorisation.DeclineLink} field, which will be replaced with the actual buttons once the email is sent.

When the customer receives the email, they'll be able to click the 'Approve' or 'Decline' button. If they click 'Approve', they'll be taken to the Customer Portal where they can see detail about the Quote and authorise it (make sure you add your branding too).

Approve

If the customer chooses the 'Approve' button, they'll be taken to the Customer Portal (remember to add your branding to the Customer Portal if you haven't already - the examples below are branded orange and grey), where they can then add their PO reference before approving the Quote.

They'll then get a confirmation of their approval on the following page.

Decline

If the customer chooses the 'Decline' button, they'll be taken to the Customer Portal, where they can provide a reason as to why they're declining this Quote, for example - "Price too high", before then declining the Quote.

They'll then get a confirmation of this on the following page.

As a CRM user, you'll be able to see whether the customer has approved or declined the Quote by simply navigating to the Quote Entry page.

When a Quote has been declined, it changes the Current Status of the Quote to 'Cancelled'. You may wish to tweak the Quote e.g. apply some discount to a particular product, then restore it and re-send it to the customer. To do this, simply click the 'Restore' button next to the Current Status once you've made any relevant changes to the Quote itself.

Note: this will create a new version of this Quote. To see the Quote version, simply go to the Documents page under the Contact. Versions will be added immediately after the Quote Description e.g. "Quote 123 / 3" ("3" indicating that this is the third version of this Quote).

With email notification fallback behaviour in place, it'll still try to send order approval or declined notification emails to the relevant Account Manager or Salesperson, but if neither is set for a given Quote or Customer, then emails will then send to the first non-obsolete admin account (i.e. so that at least someone is notified of these actions).

“Prospect’s Quote-to-Order Workflow has been a great improvement to our operation, & I’ve been surprised by how many customers use the ‘Approve’ link. When the Approve button is selected, we receive an acceptance notification and the orders automatically appear in our accounting system, Sage 50, saving my Sales team considerable time.
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I was apprehensive about including the ‘Decline’ link at first, but this has provided us with some valuable feedback and an opportunity to revise the quotation if we wish.
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Overall, I wish we’d implemented this sooner and would recommend this to any user who is currently considering adding this to their workflow.”

- Tom Pycock l Sales Director, Brunel Engraving Company

Want to learn more about optimising your Quote-to-Order Workflow? Head to our Quote-to-Order Workflow Hub here for all our step-by-step guides!