Inquiries and quotations

Most business-to-business sales do not start with an order. They start with a question ("what would 200 alternators cost?") and an offer ("$200 each, valid for 30 days"). SAP S/4HANA records both as pre-sales documents so that the eventual order can be created from them, and so that sales management can see what is in the pipeline and how much of it turns into business.

The inquiry

An inquiry (document type IN in the standard system, created with VA11) records that a customer asked. It holds the customer, the products and quantities of interest, and a validity period for the request. It does not reserve stock, it does not post anything, and many companies skip it entirely. It is useful where sales management wants to measure demand they could not serve, or where large tenders need a formal record of the request.

The quotation

A quotation (document type QT in the standard system) is Contoso's offer. In SAP GUI it is created with VA21, changed with VA22 and displayed with VA23; in Fiori, the Manage Sales Quotations app covers the same ground and links to related apps such as the customer 360° view. The quotation can be created from scratch or with reference to an inquiry, in which case the customer and items are copied forward.

The fields that make a quotation more than a price list are the valid-from and valid-to dates in the header. They state how long the offer stands. A quotation also carries full pricing, so the customer sees exactly what the order will cost, and an availability check can be run to tell the customer when the goods could ship.

Closing quotations that are lost

Quotations that are never accepted should not linger as "open". The clean way to close them is to set a reason for rejection on the items, such as "price too high" or "competitor chosen". That removes them from open-document lists and gives sales management a reason code to analyze. Leaving them open inflates the pipeline and makes conversion figures meaningless.

Sending the offer

A quotation only works if the customer receives it. In SAP S/4HANA the quotation form is sent through output management, typically as a PDF by email to the contact determined from the business partner. Check three things on the output: the price and validity printed match the document, the right contact receives it, and a changed quotation is re-sent rather than leaving the customer with an old version. Wrong recipients on commercial documents are both a customer problem and a data privacy problem, so treat them as serious defects.