All kinds of businesses furnish 'quotes' to potential customers in order to earn business. You might be a small contractor, or a major manufacturer, you could be a retailer of specialty products, or even a consultant proposing a project. In each of these cases you may provide a quote so your potential new customer or client knows exactly what they can expect if they give you an order, make a purchase, or authorize a project.
Xero introduced Quotes last week allowing their users to easily create, send and manage quotes all the way through a workflow from quotation to customer acceptance, and beyond. By making it easy to create quotes, Xero users can quickly respond to an opportunity, anytime anywhere, keeping their business moving forward. Agreeing on a price and terms reduces ambiguity and ensures that that everyone is clear on the work to be done, when delivery is to occur, and when payment will be due. This is the foundation of Xero's new Quote feature.
Until now Xero users had to rely on something, other than Xero, to provide these quotes but with the new feature the process from Quote, to acceptance, to invoice can all be managed within the Xero platform. This new feature allows Xero users to rapidly respond to business opportunities; quotes can be created fresh, or they can even be copied from a previous quote. This streamlined process means that you improve the likelihood of winning new business, it also means you have more time to work on tasks, by eliminating duplicate work, thus adding value to your business. One Xero user said, "I love the new Quote feature in Xero, it will be a great addition for all us trades people out there..."
You can access and create quotes from Xero's Sales Dashboard where you can also see a summary of your quotes in progress including quotes still in draft, quotes sent, quotes accepted and expired quotes. This makes it easy to monitor each quote through it's lifecycle, allowing for easy follow-up on outstanding quotes, and when the job is won, and the work is completed, you can simply convert the quote into an invoice. Another Xero user told us, "Xero now has quotes, life just got easier..."
Similar to the way Xero invoices work, the look of your quotes can be tailored by creating customized branding themes and email templates. But that's not all, I mentioned that you can easily use an existing quote and copy it to a new one; but you can also mark a quote as invoiced and set up reusable quote terms to suit your business if you need to be consistent. On the other hand if you want to change the specifics of a saved quote on the fly to suit a particular job, that's simple enough to do as well. One Xero user put their feelings about the new feature this way,"Beautiful Quotes have arrived on the Sales Dashboard in Xero..."
While 'Beautiful Quotes" may have arrived, there is one thing you can count on at Xero, the fact that they never stop innovating, even when a feature might appear to be finished. Xero told us that they are already busy working on more features and functions to expand the capabilities of quotes, like the ability for a customer to view and accept quotes online, and a feature to copy a quote to a bill or purchase order, and more.
If you want to know more about Xero Quotes, and see them in action, check out their video, or tune in to the Quotes feature webpage at Xero.