Negotiate and revise

A sent quote is frozen. Negotiation therefore does not edit it — it produces a new version. This article covers how versions behave and what stays visible afterwards.

The revision model

1. Open the quote on Sales › Quotes.
2. Select Revise. Version 2 is created as a draft, carrying every line, term and condition of version 1.
3. Change what the negotiation changed.
4. Send. Version 1 moves to superseded; version 2 is the live offer.

What this gives you:

• The buyer always has exactly one valid offer. Superseded versions cannot be accepted, which prevents the expensive accident of a customer accepting the first, better-priced version six weeks later.
• Every version keeps its own frozen prices and its own PDF. The document the buyer holds still exists, unchanged, whatever happened after.
• The chain is visible. Version 3 shows what it came from and what changed from the version before it — line by line, with the old and new unit price.

Each revision gets a new validity date. Revising is a new offer, not an extension of the old one, and a version that inherited an expiry two days away is not an offer at all.

Counter-offers from the buyer

A buyer can respond on the storefront in three ways, and they are different things:

There is no "counter-offer" state, and adding one would be a mistake. A buyer asking for €4.50 is a comment; your answer is a revision. Keeping it that way means the offer on the table is always a complete, priced, frozen document rather than a half-agreed position nobody can print.

Customer-visible comments and internal notes

Two distinct threads on a quote, and the distinction has to be obvious in the interface or somebody will eventually write the wrong thing in the wrong box.

• Comments are shared. The buyer sees them on the storefront and by email; your reply reaches them the same way. Use them for anything you would have written in the email chain — delivery dates, part clarifications, the reason the second position changed.
• Internal notes never leave your Cockpit. Margin, the competitor's rumoured number, the reason management approved 14 %, "do not go below €4.60".

Internal notes are visible to everybody with quotes.read, which includes people who will one day be in a room with the customer. Write them so they read like a professional record, not a private aside.

Who approved which discount

Every version records its own approval trail:

• The resolved price of each line before any manual change, so the concession is measurable rather than merely visible.
• The discount granted, in percent and in money.
• Who submitted it, who approved it, when, and which ceiling was breached.

That trail is the reason discount authority is worth configuring. Without it, "why did this customer get 14 %?" has no answer six months later, and pricing governance degrades into a habit — precisely the leak described in Raise order value.

Expiry during a negotiation

Quotes expire while people are thinking. If a live negotiation is running past valid_until, revise with a new date rather than letting it lapse and reopening by hand — the revision carries the negotiation with it, an expiry does not.

If it has already expired, revise it anyway. Version 2 of an expired quote is a legitimate and well-recorded way to come back to a buyer, and it is far better than a new quote with no history attached.

What to check

• After sending version 2, version 1 shows superseded and offers no accept action on the storefront.
• The version comparison shows the changed lines with both prices.
• The approval trail on version 2 names the approver, not just the state.

Next

• Convert a quote to an order — the end of a successful negotiation.
• Reading the quote pipeline — what all this negotiating adds up to.