<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  QuoteWerks Help > CHAPTER 1: Introduction > What is QuoteWerks and What Can You Use it to Do?

As its name suggests, QuoteWerks is used to create professional quotes in any industry. These quotes are composed of line items. For example, in a pool package, you’d add one 30-foot pool, 1 pool cleaner, 1 required pool accessory, 1 installation charge, etc. as line items. QuoteWerks is a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use product that works in any industry, saving you time and money.

Here are just a few tasks you can perform with QuoteWerks:

1.Track cost, selling price, and profit. You can adjust the selling price and therefore your profit by adjusting individual markups for each product, or the entire quote. You can mark up your cost by percent or points, and discount your products from list price or calculate the cost of an item based on a discount. You can always see what your profit is per item and quote.

2.Set up your products to handle volume costing and pricing discounts.

3.Track product information specific to your company’s needs, such as color, weight, size, etc. With customizable fields, you can track whatever you need to.

4.Add items to a quote in one of the following ways:

A.Select items from a list

B.Search for particular items by part number, description, etc.

C.Select items from folders that visually group your products together in an organized, efficient way

D.Use QuoteWerks’ advanced features to further automate adding items

E.Create and use bundles that add groups of products to your quote, eliminating the need for you to remember which products should be included with others

5.Create associations between products, so you can specify that a particular product has a substitute product, other products are required with it, and that certain products are optional add-ons for it.

6.Use the Configurator tool to take you through a step-by-step process of building a quote by giving you a series of lists to choose products from.

7.If you often build similar quotes, save time by using QuoteWerks’ quote-template feature to store and then recall these similar quotes.

8.Import product and pricing information, including pricing from IT distributors. QuoteWerks leverages connectivity to these distributor databases with price-comparison features.

9.If you store your products in a Microsoft ODBC-compliant data source, you can link directly to those products without having to import them. When products and pricing update within the external pricelist, they update in QuoteWerks instantly.

Quotes are, of course, created for your customers. QuoteWerks creates both quotes and proposals, the distinction being that quotes typically contain line-item detail of products and services you're selling the customer. A proposal is more of a Word document format with a lot of text describing your company and the products and services you're offering, then simply showing a single summary price.

In today’s sales environment, most companies use a contact-manager package to keep track of customers and potential customers. QuoteWerks leverages contact-management software like Act!, Act! for Web, GoldMine, Maximizer, Microsoft CRM, Outlook, Sage 50 (Peachtree), QuickBooks®, salesforce.com, Saleslogix, and SugarCRM by seamlessly extracting customer information and writing useful information back to the contact management software, providing an integrated solution.

When printing a quote, you can choose from a variety of quote formats or create and modify your own. You can print invoices, and have QuoteWerks create automatic purchase orders for each vendor on your quote.

When a customer holds onto a quote for a while, product price changes usually occur. That’s why QuoteWerks has a price-refreshing feature that automatically updates the prices in the quote with the latest prices — or better yet, the best prices offered by your different vendors.

Once your customer accepts a quote, turn it into an order by changing the status from a drop-down box. Then use our optional link to QuickBooks or Sage 50 (Peachtree) to create invoices and more.