Quote management

Quote management software for the three weeks after you press send

The open book by age and value, a follow-up cadence a person actually runs, expiry that produces a task, and a win/loss record specific enough to be worth reading.

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Diagram titled "Quote and revision control", showing the seven RFQ-to-order stages from enquiry intake through to accepted order.

In short

KanchanFlow is an RFQ-to-Order CRM whose quote management runs the open quote book after the document goes out: ageing by day and by value, a drafted follow-up cadence a person sends, expiry handling that produces a task rather than a lapse, and unlimited revision history on every tier.

Ask a shop owner how many open quotes they have and the honest answer is usually a guess. Ask what the total value is and the answer is a worse guess. Ask which of them were followed up last week and the conversation ends.

This is not carelessness. A quote leaves the building as a PDF attached to an email and immediately stops being a record anybody can act on. The estimator has moved to the next RFQ, the salesperson assumes the estimator is chasing, and three weeks later the quote expires without a single deliberate decision having been made about it.

The book

Four ways to look at the open quotes

Same records, four questions. Which are old, which are big, which are about to expire, and who is carrying them.

By age: Days since sent; Buckets at 3, 7, 14, 30 and 60 days. Anything past 30 with no contact logged is on the leakage list, not the pipeline.
By value: Open quote value; So a $180,000 weldment package is not chased with the same energy as a $900 repair part.
By expiry: Days to validity end; A quote about to expire is either re-issued at current cost or closed with a reason. It should never simply lapse.
By estimator: Load and conversion; Open quote count, median response time and win rate per person, which is a coaching tool rather than a scoreboard.

Cadence

A follow-up sequence that a person still sends

The Quote Follow-Up agent drafts each message on the cadence you set. Nothing leaves without somebody pressing send.

Timing	Step	Who acts	What the message does
Day 0	Quote sent	Automatic	Delivery and open events recorded
Day 2	Confirm receipt	Drafted, person sends	Short. Confirms the buyer has it and the file opened
Day 5	Technical check-in	Drafted, person sends	Offers to walk the buildup or discuss an alternate material
Day 10	Decision check	Drafted, person sends	Asks directly where the decision sits and who else is involved
Day 20	Validity reminder	Drafted, person sends	Names the expiry date and what happens after it
Expiry	Close or re-issue	Task to a person	Re-cost at current material price or close with a logged reason

The cadence is set per part family, not globally. A prototype quote and a tooling package do not decide on the same clock, and applying one schedule to both means half your follow-ups arrive at the wrong moment.

Approvals

Four rules worth having, and none more

An approval engine that fires on everything gets ignored inside a fortnight. These four cover the exceptions that actually cost money.

Margin below the floor for the part family — Routes to the owner or sales manager with the estimator's reason attached.
Total above a value threshold — A $250,000 quote gets a second pair of eyes regardless of margin.

New customer with no credit history — Routes to whoever owns credit before a lead time is promised.
Lead time beyond a committed limit — Stops a shop promising sixteen weeks on a machine group that is booked twenty-two.

Approvals reach the approver as a push notification with the quote, the breached rule and the estimator's written reason. An owner in the aisle between two machines approves or declines in fifteen seconds, which is the difference between a rule that speeds a quote up and a rule that parks it on a desk until Thursday.

Win and loss

Seven reasons, recorded on every closed quote

Price — with the competitor number where the buyer shares it
Lead time we could not hold
Capability or capacity we do not have
No decision made, budget pulled or project cancelled
Incumbent retained without a real bid
We no-bid it deliberately
Lost on terms, credit or freight rather than on the part

One quarter of honest loss reasons is worth more than a year of pipeline forecasting. A shop that finds it loses a third of its quotes on lead time rather than price has learned something it can act on — buy capacity, re-sequence the schedule, or stop quoting work it cannot deliver.

The Sales Forecast agent weights open quotes by stage, age and the historical win rate for that customer and part family. That forecast is only as good as the loss data behind it, which is the real reason to record reasons carefully.

Boundaries

What quote management does not do

What this is not

This is not an ERP, MRP, CAD, BOM, or advanced CPQ system — it manages customer RFQs, quotes, follow-ups, and order handoff.

It does not decide your price, does not negotiate, and does not tell you to drop a margin to win a job. It surfaces the facts — this quote is 34 days old, this customer accepts at 22 percent margin, this part family loses on lead time — and leaves the commercial judgement where it belongs.

Questions about quote management

Quoting software builds the document. Quote management runs the book after it is sent — the ageing, the follow-up cadence, the expiry, the revisions, the approvals and the win/loss record. Most shops are reasonably good at building a quote and poor at what happens in the three weeks afterwards, which is where the revenue is.

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