In the last article of our onboarding series, we created a lead as well as related activities to keep track of our interactions with her. In this article, we will create a new estimate.
If you use QuickBooks Online, you should be familiar with creating Estimates. An estimate, or quote, is a proposed price for your products and services that you will give to a potential customer.
The great thing about Method is its two-way sync with QuickBooks Online. With our sync, any user with the given permissions can create an Estimate (as well as other transactions) in Method and it will sync immediately to QuickBooks. Your Method users do not need access to your QuickBooks account at all.
Create an Estimate
While still viewing your new lead, click the Estimates tab in the app ribbons panel.
Click ⊕ New Estimate.
This will create a new Estimate. Note that this estimate (and all transactions) use Customers, not Contacts. You can read more on this in our article "What is a Contact?"
The next few fields for the Estimate are fields you may be familiar with if you use QuickBooks Online. The only required fields are the customer and the estimate date.
Following fields are specific to Method.
Assigned To: You can assign transactions to Method Users.
Tags: Used to categorize your estimates. Learn more about tags.
Opportunity: You can associate this estimate with an opportunity (which will be covered later).
Wait for sync approval?: This indicates the estimate will not sync to QuickBooks. Since the customer is a lead and doesn't sync, it would make sense that her transactions don't sync. However, if you were to uncheck and save this estimate, then the customer lead will automatically convert to a customer and immediately sync to QuickBooks.
The item line grid holds the items for this estimate. Click inside the grid and add some items to this grid. In our example scenario, we quoted an ice rink job.
Click Save at the bottom of the screen. This will save your Estimate (but not sync it) and updates the totals for the Estimate.
🔎 Note: For more information on creating estimates, please see Create an Estimate for QuickBooks Online Accounts.
Congratulations!
This concludes creating an estimate for your contact! If you are following along, you may be wondering why the estimate hasn't synced to QuickBooks online like we promised, however, remember, the customer is currently a lead, and thus will not sync.
Now, if you are a sales representative or a sales manager, you may want to know how to encapsulate what you learned within the Sales Opportunities App.
Fortunately, we have you covered, so please see our next article Onboarding - Create an Opportunity.