Setup
Quote approval is an optional feature for ensuring some form of authorisation before final quotes are issued to clients. It also prevents final quotes from being amended. The feature is enabled in system parameters, which means it will be active / inactive for all companies - you cannot activate for a single company out of several. Quote approval uses the Quote revisions feature, this must be enabled before you can enable Quote approval.
Once switched on you will need to assign permission to users to allow them to approve quotes. There are 3 approval levels - None, Team and Company. Team approval allows a user to approve quotes on jobs in their handler team, Company approval allows any quote to be approved. You can also set financial limits on approval - quotes above this limit can n ot be approved. These setting can be found on the approval tab in a user record:
Being a quote approver means that you will receive alerts when a quote has been submitted for approval that you can approve. A second alert is sent to the handler on the job when a quote is approved / rejected. These alerts need to be enabled in company settings, on the alerts tab:
Process / alerts
Quotes can only be amended while they are in the draft state. Once submitted for approval a quote cannot be edited. Any user can submit a quote for approval by going to Actions > submit for approval from the phase quotes tab of the job, or the quote tab of a phase (to submit an individual phase quote for approval). This opens a form where you can set a specific approver, or leave blank to alert all valid approvers. This process creates a new quote revision, you should give it a name so that you can select it again in future from a list of quote revisions on this job, and you can also enter notes that may assist the approver:
Clicking submit for approval saves the revision and triggers the alert to the approver(s).
If the handler on the job needs to do more work on the quote after it has been submitted for approval they can revert if back to draft (Actions > revert to draft). This will alert the approver(s) that this quote no longer requires approval.
When an approver opens the quote they can
Reject the quote (Actions > Revert to draft)
Query the quote (Actions > Approval > Query)
Approve the quote (Actions > Approval > Approve)
Printing / pdf
Until a quote is approved any paper or pdf output will indicate the draft nature of the quote in the total section - Draft quote, Not Approved or Cancelled:
Once the quote has been approved it can be printed / pdf'd and sent as normal.