What it does

A quote is the priced offer sent to a customer. It's created from an opportunity or standalone, activated to lock it before it goes out, revised into a new version if terms change, and closed as won, lost, cancelled or revised.

Key facts

• Created from an opportunity via the Quotes tab, which carries across the opportunity's details and product lines. Standalone quotes need Name, Price List, Currency and a Potential Customer, then products pulled in with Get Products or added manually.
• Lifecycle: Draft (editable, revision ID 0) → Active (read-only, the version the customer sees) → closed as Won, Lost, Cancelled or Revised.
• Activate Quote makes the record read-only and locks the overall amount. You can't send a draft in the intended flow — activation is the gate.
• While a quote is in Draft, prices adjust to the current price list each time it's opened or edited. Once closed, prices are fixed and no longer track the price list.
• Revise creates a new draft quote and increments the revision ID by one. The original is closed as Revised. You end up with a numbered version history rather than an edit trail.
• Closing a quote manually only works from the Active state. Draft quotes have to be activated or deleted.
• The close-quote dialog captures Status Reason (Lost, Cancelled or Revised), Close Date, Description, and a Create a revised quote yes/no.
• Close associated opportunity only appears in that dialog when you're closing the last quote on the opportunity and you've said no to creating a revision.
• Quotes close as Won automatically when you create an order from them — you don't close them as won by hand.
• Currency rules are the same as everywhere else: header and lines must match, and the currency can't change unless every line is removed. A quote from an opportunity inherits the opportunity's currency.
• Export to PDF generates the customer document, with an Email option that attaches the PDF and sends it. The layout comes from a Word template that can be downloaded, edited and uploaded back.

When to use / skip

Use quotes when the client sends a priced document and cares about which version the customer holds. The activate-and-revise cycle is genuinely good at that — it gives you an auditable set of numbered versions rather than a folder of Word files with dates in the filename.

Skip quotes when the sales process ends at a purchase order, or when quoting happens in a CPQ tool or the ERP. Half-implemented quoting, where sellers create a quote in Dynamics and then produce the real document elsewhere, is worse than not doing it — you get records nobody trusts and a pipeline that double-counts.

Also be honest about the PDF. Word templates handle standard commercial documents fine. If the client's quote has conditional clauses, complex tables per product family, or legal terms that vary by region, budget for a document generation product rather than fighting the template.

Configuration decisions

• Whether quotes are created from opportunities only, or standalone quoting is allowed. Standalone quotes with no parent opportunity break pipeline reporting unless someone has designed for it.
• Whether one opportunity can carry multiple concurrent active quotes (options A, B and C) or exactly one. This changes how close-associated-opportunity behaves and how sellers are trained.
• Word template design and ownership, including whether there's one template or several by product line, region or language.
• Whether an approval step sits before Activate. There's nothing out of the box; if margin or discount needs sign-off, that's a flow or a business process addition.
• Price list selection on the quote — inherited from the opportunity, defaulted from the account, or chosen. The choice determines whether draft repricing helps or surprises.
• Whether revision numbers are shown to the customer on the PDF. Some clients want the audit trail visible; others find it embarrassing.

Gotchas

• Draft quotes silently reprice from the price list on open and edit. A seller who agreed a figure verbally on Monday can open the quote on Friday after a price list change and find different numbers.
• Activation is one-way for that version. To change a single line you revise, which creates a new quote record and a new ID — anyone reporting on quote counts needs to filter out revised versions or the numbers inflate.
• The close-associated-opportunity checkbox only appears in a specific case (last quote, no revision). Clients who saw it once and expect it every time raise it as a bug.
• Creating an order closes the quote as won automatically. If the client's process is "order in ERP, quote stays open in CRM", that's a conflict to resolve in design, not at go-live.
• Currency and price list are effectively locked once lines exist. The recovery is deleting all lines, which sellers won't do — they'll create a second quote and abandon the first.
• Quotes need to be closed before the parent opportunity closes cleanly. Nobody tells sellers this, so opportunity closure fails with an unhelpful message.
• Exporting to PDF uses the template selected at export time. If someone uploads a new template without retiring the old, sellers will keep picking the wrong one.

Consultant notes

• Demo the full activate → revise → revise → win cycle in one sitting. It's the clearest way to show why quoting in the CRM beats quoting in Word, and it exposes any objection to version numbering early.
• Get the client's real quote document into a Word template during discovery, not during UAT. Template work always takes longer than the estimate and it's the thing sales leadership judges the project on.
• Agree the multiple-quotes-per-opportunity question in writing. It affects reporting, training and the close dialog behaviour, and it's expensive to reverse.
• Check what the pipeline reports do with quote values versus opportunity values. Clients often assume they're the same number and they routinely aren't.
• Before go-live, test a quote in a second currency end to end. Currency issues only appear when someone actually does it.

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Worth another look if the client adds an approval step before activation, or moves quoting to a CPQ tool.