Quotes, approvals and negotiation

In most B2B relationships the price is settled before anyone opens a shop. A buyer asks for a quote, your Innendienst prices it, the buyer raises a purchase order against it, and only then does an order appear. Knowing where that conversation lives, and where it does not, saves you from trying to run it in the wrong place.

The classic B2B path

The vendor-neutral sequence looks like this:

1. Anfrage (RFQ). The buyer asks what 500 metres of hose costs, delivered to two sites, this quarter.
2. Angebot (quote). You answer with prices, quantities, a validity date and delivery terms. It is an offer, not a sale.
3. Bestellung (PO). The buyer's ERP raises a purchase order against your quote. It carries their number, the one that has to end up in customer_order_number.
4. Auftragsbestätigung (order confirmation). You confirm what you will deliver and when.

Steps 1 and 2 are a sales conversation. Steps 3 and 4 are the order. Avoid treating the whole chain as one document that gradually hardens. The negotiation and the order have different owners, different lifetimes and different systems.

What the platform models, plainly

Each part of the sales conversation has its own place:

Quotes and orders meet once

A quote exists so that its price can change; an order refuses to change its money once placed. That is why they are two records. They meet at acceptance: the buyer accepts the quote, whole or line by line, and acceptance hands over an order draft with the negotiated prices as the order's unit prices and the quoted freight on the first order. The order is placed from that draft, and its number is written back onto the quote's positions. One quote can produce several orders when the buyer accepts in parts.

An accepted quote does not create a contract price. The next order from the same customer resolves its prices as usual. See From an accepted quote to an order.

Freight that cannot be priced automatically

A shipping method can carry a quote above value. Above that order value the method stops returning a calculated price and the shipment becomes a quoted one: Speditionsversand auf Anfrage. This is the common case where a parcel tariff cannot answer: two pallets to an island, a crane delivery, a timed slot at a construction site.

The buyer then asks for a quote with their basket, and your team prices the carriage on the quote. Set the threshold on the method rather than telling buyers to phone. It is visible and consistent, whoever picks up the phone.

Approval before the order: procurement

Many B2B customers want an internal sign-off before a purchase becomes an order. In the Revenue Cloud that sign-off happens before the order exists, in the procurement app. At checkout, the cart is checked against the approval rules. If no rule applies, the order is placed directly. If a rule applies, a purchase request is created instead of an order, and the order is created only when the last approver has approved it. A declined request never becomes an order.

That does not mean every order was approved. A purchase no rule catches goes straight to an order. Create order on an order list bypasses procurement altogether, with no approval rules and no budget booking. And when procurement's Approval gate setting is No approval, every submitted cart becomes an order. Where approvals matter, steer buyers from the order list through the cart to checkout.

Approval rules apply globally or to one cost centre, and a cost centre can be tenant-wide rather than tied to one organisation. You maintain the rules, the cost centres and the budgets in the Cockpit. See Purchase requests and How procurement governance works.

Quotes and purchase requests are opposites that can appear together. A quote is you answering your customer; a purchase request is your customer's own organisation approving a purchase internally. A buyer can get a quote, have the purchase approved internally, then order.

How this works in the Revenue Cloud

Negotiated prices for a period live in Pricing and resolve automatically at checkout, so the buyer sees their agreed price without anyone re-keying it. Negotiated prices for one deal live on the quote and reach the order draft at acceptance. If a buyer tells you the price on their screen is not the one you agreed, that is a pricing question with a diagnostic: Check which price a buyer sees.

Next

• The quote lifecycle: how a quote moves from request to acceptance.
• Order lists and recurring carts: the saved basket a buyer re-orders from.