Opportunities & quotations¶

The commercial side of a job, before it becomes a project: a Company you are selling to, an Opportunity you are trying to win, one or more Quotations you offer, and — once one is accepted — the Project that carries the work.

Everything here is ordinary MatStream configuration. An opportunity is a folder with properties and a lifecycle, a quotation is a numbered item with lines and revisions, and both get their tabs and views from mechanisms the rest of the workspace already uses.

Opportunities¶

An opportunity is one pursuit: one client, one thing you are trying to win. Quotations, documents, tasks, contacts and activities all hang underneath it.

Opportunities are numbered automatically — OPP2026 0001 and upward.

The pipeline¶

Opportunities move Qualifying → Proposal → Negotiation → Won or Lost, with On Hold available from either middle stage.

Two things about that lifecycle are deliberate:

• You can record a loss from any live stage. Most opportunities die before anyone negotiates, and a pipeline that could only record a loss at the last stage would overstate every earlier one.
• You can step back. Proposal returns to Qualifying, Negotiation to Proposal. Sales does not move in one direction, and a lifecycle that pretends otherwise gets worked around by leaving everything in Proposal.

Open Opportunities¶

The Sales folder contains an Open Opportunities view — everything that is neither Won nor Lost, with owner, probability, value, weighted revenue and expected close date. It is a live view rather than a saved report, so it always shows what is true now.

Quotations¶

A quotation is what you offered, at what price, until when. It sits under the opportunity it was offered for.

The quotation's name is its number, allocated automatically — Q2026 0001.

Lines¶

Each line carries a description, a Quantity and a Unit Price. Line Total is calculated for you and cannot be typed.

Lines can be added by hand or picked from the Library, so a quotation can quote catalogue items directly.

Price Lists¶

Where the quotation's Pricing tab is configured, choose a Price List. The quotation date selects an enabled period, and a new line copies its item's price from that period. The period currency must match the quotation currency. If the item has no price in that period, the line is unpriced rather than using an older price.

Changing the Price List later does not silently rewrite saved lines. On an editable quotation, deliberately saving a different list or date refreshes existing line prices. Review the refreshed lines before issuing the quotation.

Revising a quotation¶

Quotations move Draft → Issued, then Accepted, Declined or Expired.

There is deliberately no way back from Issued to Draft. The customer is holding a copy of the document, so changing it means a new revision — B, C, and so on — against the number they already have. Editing an issued quotation in place would leave two different papers claiming to be the same quotation.

Expired is kept separate from Declined on purpose: "they said no" and "we never heard" are different outcomes, and a pipeline that treated them as one could not tell them apart.

Creating an output from an accepted quotation¶

An accepted quotation can trigger an ordinary stored automation on its lifecycle transition. The script chooses an enabled Folder- or Occurrence-family category and a fixed Explorer landing folder, then calls the controlled generic Create Entity action.

The output can therefore be a Project, Sales Order, Spare-Part Order or Service Order. The automation does not assume that every accepted quotation needs a Project.

The created entity receives a pinned Generated From link to the exact source version. The entity, its Explorer placement and that link are written in one transaction.

The action refuses rather than guesses when:

• the configured category is missing, disabled or not an Explorer category;
• the configured landing folder is missing or belongs to another workspace;
• the output name is blank;
• the exact source version no longer exists.

Refreshing does not create another output. Automation retry protection uses the lifecycle event identifier. An administrator can deliberately use the configured Accepted → Draft recovery transition, delete a test output, and accept again; that is a new event and produces a replacement.

What a company shows¶

A Company gains four tabs listing what points at it: Opportunities, Quotations, Projects and Purchase Orders. Contacts are already a Uses tab, because a contact person sits under the company rather than referring to it.

Activities & the timeline¶

An Activity is something a person did about a thing: a call, an email, a meeting, a site visit, a note. Activities tabs appear on opportunities, companies and projects.

Activities are log entries: they have no versions and no lifecycle, because they happened and there is nothing for them to progress through.

The timeline¶

The timeline for an item merges two things: activities somebody logged, and events the system recorded — moved to Issued, timesheet approved, file checked in — newest first.

They are kept apart in storage on purpose. A logged activity is testimony: somebody chose what it says, and can edit it. A system event is evidence: written as part of the thing it describes, and editable by nobody.

An event type the timeline has never seen still appears, described from its own name, rather than being silently left out. A gap in a history is worse than an untidy line in one.

Note: The timeline is available through the API; it is not yet on an item's tabs.

Permissions¶

Category and lifecycle-state permissions apply as they do to any other item. For a lifecycle automation, the user must be allowed to perform the exact transition. The configured automation then runs through its narrow action API; it does not give that user general permission to create arbitrary Projects or orders.

Known limitations¶

• No print template for quotations. The field mapping is ready; what is missing is a Word document with the merge fields in it. Until one exists, a quotation cannot be printed or sent as a PDF from MatStream.
• Property copying and financial posting are not yet generic script actions; the first Create Entity action creates, places and links the output only.
• The timeline has no tab, only an API call.
• Sales currency is a per-item field. There is no workspace base currency and no conversion, so a workspace quoting in more than one currency must total each separately.