Rolled Up Quotes
Hello all,
I'm new to ESC and have a question about quoting. We prefer to "roll-up" our quotes for larger projects. Rather than show each individual part and labor, we package them into logical groups to simplify things for our customers. We use the "Misc. Mat" entry's free-test description to write in what we want, I set the price to be whatever I need it to and uncheck the "print" button for all other line items on the quote. My questions is how to control the quote total and avoid having a number that is twice as high as it should be?
For example, I build up an estimate for $15,000 of parts and labor and want to quote that number. I enter in all the parts and labor, uncheck the "print" box for each and write in the Misc. Mat free-text field whatever description I want. Now I have one line on the quote with no price, although the quote total is correctly stating $15,000. I price the line at $15,000 to make it look better. Now the quote is showing $30,000 in total (parts/labor plus the free text line). My only option to get the two to match appears to be to zero out the price of every part and labor line. This all seems cumbersome. Is there a better way to handle this issue?
Comments
You should be able to add another line with -$15,000 and hide that line
If I'm following correctly, you just need to use the SUB code. It will subtotal everything from the top of the quote, or the last SUB. Then turn off printing for the individual items as you've been doing.
For example:
Mat1 1
Mat 1 1 $100
Mat 2 1 $300
Sub $400 (change sub description to whatever you need it to say)
I typically use something like:
Material Subtotal, including
- Mat1
- Mat2
So they can see what they are getting for their $400, but not the individual pricing.
Hope this helps.
Joey,
You can do that, but you have to be careful or you'll screw up the tax calculation.
I am working with Mark on this and I am not seeing that we have a "SUB" code built in like we do "MAT", "FREIGHT" or "OTHER". Is there a way that we can add it in?
Ok. I found the SUB code. It was set to inactive so I didn't initially see it.
Rick,
I tested it out and it works like a charm... Thanks for your help.
Rick,
Thanks! I think that's exactly what we needed.
Mark
You are most welcome.
Rick,
In our situation, the quote would include material which is taxed & labor which isn't taxed in Illinois.
I don't see this helping us without zeroing out the sell price for each item.
Even when items are not printed the sell price shows up on the quote bottom in the sub-total and total with tax.
This seems the same as adding a sell price to a DESC line.
Dan
Dan,
Sorry, I'm not following. We are in CA, which is the same, taxable material and non-taxed labor.
Are you trying not to show prices at all, or....?
Salesman would like to put a price on multiple "Desc" description lines and still have the labor and material content hidden.
As the original poster stated the only way to do that is zero out all the sell prices on the hidden items but then the taxes are not correct..
It looks like the -$$ totalling all the desc lines is the simplest way to achieve this while keeping taxes and sell price correct per Joey above.
It probably is simplest. It causes a whole host of other issues if you use ESC for more than a simple dispatch and quote tool.
However, the other simple answer is to create two entries to zero out the total, one for labor, and one for materials.
We use billing codes that match the categories of the items. For instance
part number Description Qty
Part # Desc Qty Amount
LACCO 0 Total 1 -2,500 (or whatever it needs to be)
MACC 0 total 1 -10,000 (ditto)
Where LACCO is the billing code for Access Control Labor, and MACC is the billing code for access control material. This will 0 out the tax properly.
Frankly, the billing codes used don't really matter, as long as one of them is taxable, and one not. And they are going to come off in the invoice anyway.
As a matter of policy, we don't ever allow insertion of a price on a description field. But how you handle your database is purely up to you.
Does adding prices to Descriptions affect the accounting at all?
Salesman here want their quotes to look a very particular way. This is extremely difficult with the limited Word functions in the "print options" document tool in ESC.
Are you talking about DESC billing code, or the Description field in a quote?
If the former, and you are using the ESC accounting module, or an integrated accounting program such as QuickBooks, it will probably mess up your accounting departments record keeping.
If the latter, it doesn't really do anything aside of providing the text that the customer sees on the quote. It's a bear to get the prices to line up that way though.
Hope this helps.
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