Unlike sales orders, quotes in Katana do not commit stock, allowing for flexibility until customer confirmation. Once confirmed, quotes can be converted into sales orders, triggering stock reservations and formalizing the sales process.
While this is typically relevant for B2B (business-to-business) sales, it's also used for B2C (business-to-consumer) sales when creating quotes before a customer confirms an order.
The main difference between a SO and a Quote in Katana is that Quotes do not create commitments to your Stock.
When a Quote is confirmed by a customer, turn the quote into a SO to have it start participating in Stock reservations for items on the order.
Example of a standard Quote workflow
Create a Quote by clicking on the global "+" button and selecting + Quote.
Fill in the information on the Quote card (added items won't affect Stock quantities).
Print or save the Quote as a pdf and send it out to the customer.
If confirmation is received from the customer, change the Quote status from Pending to Confirmed. Make changes to the Quote before confirming if needed.
The Quote is turned into a SO which appears in the Open tab of the Sales orders table in the Sell screen. The SO now checks for the availability of required Sales items and Ingredients and creates commitments in your Stock.
Checking for item availability and possible deadlines for Quotes
Since a Quote doesn't participate in Stock commitments, Sales items/Ingredients availabilities and expected production deadlines are not displayed in Quotes.
To find item availability info, create a SO, check availability, and revert it to a Quote.
Create a SO and fill in the Customer and items information.
Check the Sales items and Ingredients availability status to see if the items are In stock, Expected, or Not available.
By default, a new SO is added to the bottom of the Sales order table, but you can drag and drop orders to change their priority and adjust the Sales items and Ingredients availability statuses. (Higher ranked orders have a higher priority on reserving items from stock.)
If the Sales items availability is Not available and you want to estimate the production time for the required products, you can create a Make to order manufacturing order (MO) for the products and check the production deadline. If you are using automatic production deadline calculations, you can change the MO priority from the Schedule tab to automatically update production deadlines.
If the MO is only used for estimation and you don't want to actually add it to the production schedule, delete the MO afterward.
Revert the SO back to a Quote by changing the Delivery status to Quote status → Pending. Stock is no longer committed to this order until the Quote is confirmed.
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