Salesforce.com introduced with their Spring ’10 release a new feature which a lot of customers where asking for for a long time; quotes.

Quotes are a part of opportunity management so in order to work with quotes you will have to use opportunities, products and pricelists. Per opportunity you can create multiple quotes. These quotes exist out of a quote record where you can enter the quote name, expiration date, status, address information and tax and shipping costs. Besides this the quote also has quote line items which are a copy of the opportunity products. These line items can be changed, deleted or new ones added. 

Per line item (a product) you see the list price, can set the sales price, quantity, a description and the discount in percent. With the "Start Sync" button you can keep the quote (or multiple quotes) and opportunity in sync for the line items, discounts, quantities and amounts.

Per quote you can create a PDF which can be attached to the quote, emailed to the customer or printed on paper. The logo on top of the quote can be changed by added your desired logo to the shared document folder and giving it a name starting with “QUOTE_PDF_LOGO”. Click here for more details on logo's in the quote PDF.

Some remarks that could be changed with the next release to make this a flexible perfect feature;  

• On the quote and quote line item you can add new fields but these fields will not appear on the generated PDF, this PDF is standard (except the logo) and the layout cannot be changed. Suggestion is to create something similar to the page layout to design your own PDF format.
• The discount per line item can be set in percentage. The total discount is calculated based on the sum of these discounts. It would be nice to be able to have, besides these discounts, the possibility to add a certain amount as discount so you can choose for percentage or fixed amount.  The fixed discount is also handy for presenting a nice looking total quote amount.
• The tax amount is entered as a fixed amount which is then added to the quote amount. It would be very handy if you could choose if you would like to set the tax rate as fixed amount or as a percentage of the quote amount.
• In spite of opportunities quotes are (not yet?) available on mobile. Looking at a salesperson; creating the quote and sending it to the customer while visiting him could be a very powerfull feature. 

With adding some workflows, for instance a simple approval process the business process as it is used in your company can be adopted. In the example (see attached screen dumps) an approval of the manager is requested when the total amount of the quote is more then 9999. When the manager approves the quote the record is unlocked, status set to “Approved” and the quote PDF can be created.