Quotes

A quote is a priced proposal you send to a client for sign-off. The client reviews and accepts it through a secure link, and on finalisation OpsMerge raises the paperwork for you: an invoice for the one-off charges and a contract (new or amended) for the recurring ones.

Lifecycle

A quote moves through these statuses:

Status	Meaning
Draft	Fully editable. Not visible to the client.
Awaiting approval	Over your approval threshold; a colleague must approve before it can be sent.
Approved	Cleared internal approval, ready to send.
Sent / Viewed	Emailed to the client. Viewed means they have opened the link.
Needs info	The client replied with a question via the quote's Messages thread.
Pending finalisation	The client has signed. One step left — see Finalising.
Accepted	Finalised. Invoice / contract / project spawned.
Declined / Expired / Withdrawn	Terminal. Content is frozen for the audit trail.

Once a quote leaves draft its commercial content (lines, prices, terms) is frozen. To change the substance of a sent quote, create a revision — the client link then shows the latest version.

The contact is the exception: it is addressing metadata, so you can change it at any point before the quote reaches a terminal status. Pick the new contact on the quote header and it saves immediately.

Contacts and sending

Set the client contact on the quote header — the selection saves as soon as you pick it. When you hit Send:

• The send dialog offers the client's contacts in a picker; choosing one fills in their email address and records them on the quote.
• You can still type a one-off recipient address manually (for example, an accounts inbox), without changing the quote's contact.
• Resends to the same recipient reuse the same secure link, so the client never ends up with two competing versions. Sending to a different recipient revokes the old link and issues a fresh one (the previous address loses access), with the swap recorded in the audit log.
• After sending, Copy customer link on the quote fetches the live portal URL, for pasting into a chat or a call follow-up.

Questions and replies

If the client replies to the quote email, the reply lands on the quote's Messages tab and the quote flips to Needs info so it stands out in the list. Reply from the Messages tab (it emails them directly and keeps the thread together), then mark the question answered. Out-of-office auto-replies are stored but do not flip the status.

Recurring lines

Any line can be marked recurring with a billing frequency (monthly, quarterly, annual, and so on). On the PDF the client sees:

• A cadence tag against each recurring line (for example, "Monthly").
• A totals breakdown separating one-off charges from recurring charges, so there is no ambiguity about what is payable once versus per period.

Finalising an accepted quote

When the client signs, the quote parks at Pending finalisation rather than auto-creating anything. This is deliberate: appending lines to a client's contract or raising an invoice is a commercial action you confirm, not something a customer click does behind your back.

Open the quote — the amber banner has a Finalise button. The dialog proposes:

• One-off lines → raise a draft invoice.
• Recurring lines → append to the client's existing contract when there is an unambiguous match (a single active contract in the quote's currency, or the contract chosen when the quote was created), otherwise create a new contract.

Adjust either choice if the defaults are not what you want, then confirm. The quote flips to Accepted and links to everything it spawned.

Approval chains

Set an approval threshold in Quote settings to require sign-off on quotes above a value. Submitted quotes park at Awaiting approval until an approver acts; the threshold in force at submission time is recorded on the quote.

Templates

Recurring shapes of work (new starter setup, standard onboarding) belong in quote templates — sections, lines, recurring flags and all. Instantiate a template to start a pre-filled draft.