When a customer accepts a quote, everything commercial on that quote should move to the sales order unchanged and then stop being editable. Price, quantity, pack form, incoterm, payment terms, delivery window. The order is the record of what was agreed; if it can still be edited freely afterwards, you no longer have a record of what was agreed.
This sounds obvious and is almost never how it works in a plant running on Word quotes and an accounting package. There, the quote is a document and the order is a fresh piece of data entry, so the two are related only by whoever typed the second one carefully.
The three things that get re-typed
Watch the hand-off closely and the same three errors appear:
- Price. The quote said US$1,240 per tonne FOB. The order says $1,240 but the discount line did not come across, or came across as a percentage of a different base. Nobody notices until the invoice is disputed.
- Quantity and pack form. The quote was for 18 tonnes in 25 kg bags. The order says 18 tonnes. Production makes it in 20 kg bags because that is what the line was set for, and the customer's warehouse cannot handle it.
- Terms. Incoterm, payment terms and delivery window live in the quote's small print and in the customer's head. They often do not make it into the order at all, which means dispatch and the person chasing payment are both working from memory.
Each of these is a re-typing error, not a judgement error. The people involved know the right answer; the process asks them to write it down twice.
Freeze, do not lock
"Frozen" does not mean nothing can ever change. Customers move delivery dates and revise quantities all the time. It means changes are visible and deliberate rather than silent.
The distinction in practice:
- A frozen field that changes leaves a trace. Who changed it, when, from what to what. The original agreed value is still readable.
- An editable field that changes leaves nothing. The order simply says something different from what it said last week, and no one can prove which version the customer agreed to.
For anything you might have to defend — a price dispute, a short shipment, a customer claiming a different delivery date — the trace is the whole value. This is also the practical case for approvals on quotes: not bureaucracy, but a timestamp on the version that went out.
What should not carry over
Some things on a quote are deliberately provisional and should not become commitments:
- Indicative lead times. A quote often says "approximately 3-4 weeks from order". The order should carry a real date, set against the production schedule, not the sales estimate.
- Availability assumptions. A quote priced on the assumption that a material is in stock is not a promise that it still is when the order lands weeks later. The order should trigger a fresh check, not inherit the old answer.
- Optional lines. Quotes frequently carry alternatives — two pack sizes, a with-and-without-pallet price. Exactly one of them should survive conversion, and the conversion is the moment to force that choice.
The pattern: commercial terms carry over and freeze; operational assumptions get re-checked against current reality.
Why one record matters here
If the quote and the order are one record moving forward rather than two documents, most of this stops being a discipline problem and becomes a property of the system. There is nothing to re-type, so there is nothing to mis-type. The signed version is the snapshot every later step reads from — production reads the pack form from it, dispatch reads the incoterm from it, and nobody reconstructs the agreement from an email thread.
That is the design Aourix is built around, and it is covered in more depth in the lead-to-cash loop. The point is not the software; it is that the second copy is the source of the error, and removing it removes the error class rather than reducing its frequency.
A test for your own process
Pull your last five sales orders and the quotes they came from. Put them side by side and check four fields: unit price after discount, pack form, incoterm, payment terms.
If all four match on all five, your hand-off discipline is good and you should write down whatever that person is doing before they take leave. If even one pair differs, that is not carelessness — it is a process that asks a human to copy four fields correctly, every time, forever, and humans do not do that.