Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Generating Quotes, Orders, and Invoices

Microsoft CRM manages the entire process of generating quotations, orders, and invoices. An essential ingredient in developing quotes is the product catalog, which we describe in Chapter 7. The product catalog contains your list of products and their prices and discount structures. Microsoft CRM's quotation system draws from these products, prices, and discounts to create pricing specific to each customer.

After you generate a quote and give it to a customer, the best scenario is that the quote comes back as a signed order. The second-best scenario is that the quote comes back for revisions. Even after a quote is converted to an order, however, you can still revise it (until you send it to the accounting system). After an order goes to accounting, it becomes an invoice.

Although the logical flow is from quote to order to invoice, you can also create an order without creating a quote. And, in the same way, you can create an invoice without having created either a quote or an invoice. As you can see, you can start anywhere in the cycle.

In this chapter, we cover how to use Microsoft CRM to create a quotation, turn the quote into an order, and make the order into an invoice.

Creating and Activating Quotes

Several years ago, we met with a very large distributor of paper products. They had been in business for more than a hundred years and had a hundred million dollars of revenue. Their entire quotation procedure was a verbal system. They ...