Quotes Pilot and the future of

So for those of you who have access to the Quotes Pilot what are your thoughts thus far? For those of you who don’t have access as yet here is what you can look forward to.

Quotes is a SF Object in itself but obviously has tight dependency upon Opportunities. Right now the Pilot Quotes does not even have a Tab, so the only way you can access it is via Opportunities and that via a Related List.



The idea is you select your Products on your Opportunity and then Create a Quote. The Quote then displays standard field info like Quote Name, Number, Expiration Date, Status, Discount, Sub-Total, Total, Grand Total and Address information.

Once you save the initial data you can then add new Quote Line Items similar to Product Line Items on the Opportunity and you can apply individual Line item Discounts, qty etc if need be and you can edit the existing Line Items that were populated upon the converting the Opp Line Items into the Quote.



You now have the ability to Create a PDF version of the Quote (of which the Visualforce page can be customized with your companies logo) and you can email the Quote directly from the Details page.
So to the limitations. You can check out the IdeaExchange Idea for the Quotes Pilot here.

First thing one notices once you have played around with the Quote, adding Discounts etc you have a different Grand Total from the Amount shown on your Opportunity. Could be a problem I hear you say! Yes exactly! Not sure about the rest of you but in our Company our Quote needs to reflect the Opportunity. What this has meant until now is a plethora of Custom Fields on the Opportunity to handle Discounts etc.

I queried this with the Product Manager for Quotes and thankfully they are building a syncing mechanism into the next iteration/release with a possible February slot.

Great News!

The second limitation is that you can only grant Discounts to individual Line Items and not a overall discount after the individual Line Item Discounts have been applied. News has it that this may be a feature in the Summer Release.

So some thoughts about the new Quotes Object. About time! One does find himself wondering how this is viewed by all those Application Partners of Salesforce. Is this considered competition by them? Anyway all I can say is that I am patient enough to watch and ride the evolution of Quotes and hopefully reap the benefits of this being taken care of Salesforce and not some third party App.

Just our of interest for those who require further functionality such as invoicing etc take a look at Financialforce