Business Central already supports sales quotations. The harder part for a manufacturing sales team is often gathering the information to put in one. A customer asks for “the fixings we bought in May,” but the rep still has to find the item, confirm the pack size and check the delivery request.
Automating that preparation can remove much of the lookup and copying. It also needs to fit with the native quotation workflow and any Microsoft agent features available in your environment. We will follow one repeat RFQ to show what to check before adding another tool.
Turn the customer’s shorthand into a quoteable request
Suppose the buyer writes: “Can you price 30 boxes of the fixings we bought in May? Use our site reference E-318 and deliver next Thursday.”
First find the May sale for that customer. Identify the item and variant, then check the current pack size. If a box contains 50 pieces, the customer is requesting 1,500 pieces. Preserve both the requested 30 boxes and the conversion so the rep can verify the quantity and price together.
The delivery request needs a separate answer. The May transaction can tell you what you supplied; it cannot tell you whether the same stock is available for next Thursday. Keep E-318 with the draft and pass the requested date to the person who can confirm it.
Compare the work with Business Central’s native sales workflow
Microsoft’s native sales-quote workflow supports customers and prospects, followed by conversion to an order or invoice. Microsoft also points to its Sales Order Agent for email-driven quote work. Establish which of those steps your environment already supports.
Compare the actual scope: product interpretation, technical documents outside the ERP, custom extensions and reviewer control. Bourne is relevant when you need to build work around those requirements; native features may already cover a simpler quote queue.
Create the draft, then verify its lines and terms
Microsoft publishes a salesQuote API resource. Use it with your administrator to confirm the supported fields and actions. Do not assume that creating the header also completes every required line or custom extension field.
In an Outlook quoting workflow, the rep still owns the customer request while operations checks availability. Keep “next Thursday” as the requested date until someone confirms it; an unanswered internal email must not become a delivery promise.
Test the box quantity and requested date through the final document
Test the complete quote, including quantity conversion and delivery terms. Measure reviewer corrections by type so improvements in product matching do not conceal persistent unit or address errors.
A quote-level pilot scorecard should separate item errors from unit or address corrections, so a high match rate cannot hide an unusable quote. Include these inputs in your evaluation:
- Export sample sales quotes with customer and item references.
- Include item variants and the units your sales team quotes.
- Add examples from prospects and customers with several delivery addresses.
- List extensions and required fields that affect quote creation in your environment.
Measured review and correction times help validate the opportunity in your deployment. The quoting calculator gives an initial estimate from your current workload and a fixed time-reduction assumption.
Include a packaging change in the test, not only a correctly maintained box quantity. GS1 treats a changed case quantity as an identification change at that packaging level. Your review should therefore catch an old supplier case reference even when the underlying fastener description still matches.
Start with the quantity the customer expects to receive, follow its conversion into the Business Central line, and check the warehouse quantity produced by your setup. Repeat with the old pack reference in the email. The useful result is either the correct new pack confirmed by the buyer or a focused question about packaging; silently using the historical conversion should fail the test.
Where Bourne fits alongside Business Central
Business Central already gives you the sales quote record. Choose Bourne when your reps spend too much time collecting the information that belongs in it. We can connect the customer’s email to item references and current commercial data, then build a review screen for the unresolved lines.
For the fixing request above, the useful result is a draft with the correct box quantity and a delivery question assigned to the right person. Your rep should not have to repeat the lookup just to approve it. Talk to us about quoting with Business Central.
Frequently asked questions
Does Business Central already have an AI sales agent?
Microsoft’s sales-quote documentation points to its Sales Order Agent. Check availability and supported scenarios for your environment, then compare them with your requirements before buying additional software.
Can we quote a prospect before creating a customer account?
Business Central supports quotes for prospects as well as customers. Confirm the contact and customer-template process with your administrator, especially before converting the quote.
Can we keep our existing quote layout and approval rules?
Make them explicit acceptance criteria. Test the generated document and the live approval behavior; a successful API call alone does not prove that extensions and layouts behave as expected.
Further reading
GS1: pack and case quantity changes
When changed case or pallet quantities require a new GTIN.
Arda Bulut
Arda Bulut is the co-founder and CTO of Bourne and HockeyStack. He leads engineering at Bourne, building the platform people use to create AI products, agents and automations.