Creating a Customer Quote

The Scenario

Your customer asks for a price on goods or services. You reach out to your suppliers, collect their quotes, then use those supplier prices as the basis for a quote you send back to your customer — with your margin applied.

Buyer24 automates this "reseller" or "distributor" workflow: once you have a supplier quote in an RFQ, you can generate a professional customer-facing quote in seconds.

Before You Start

You need:

• An active RFQ with at least one received and reviewed supplier quote
• Your desired markup percentage (or you can set it per line item)

Optional but helpful:

• Your organization's logo and brand colors (set in Organization → Branding)
• Default customer quote settings (markup %, default payment terms, validity days) in Organization → Quote Defaults

Two Ways to Generate a Quote

When you generate a customer quote, you choose between two modes:

You pick the mode on the generation screen. Your organization can set a default mode in Organization → Quote Defaults, and Buyer24 remembers your last choice in your browser.

Note: Keep-original mode works with PDFs that have selectable text. Scanned-image PDFs aren't supported in this mode — use Rebuilt for those.

Option A: Rebuilt (Branded Template)

Step 1: Open the Customer Quote Tool

1. Open the RFQ that has the supplier quote you want to work from
2. Click Customer Quote (in the action menu or the top-right area of the RFQ)
3. Select the source supplier quote you want to base the customer quote on

Step 2: Configure the Quote

Customer name — Who you're quoting. This appears in the header of the generated quote.

Markup — Enter a percentage markup to apply across all line items (e.g., 20%). It's applied uniformly; you can adjust individual line items in the next step.

Special terms or notes — Any customer-specific conditions, delivery arrangements, or notes you want included.

Click Generate Quote.

Step 3: Review and Edit

The AI generates a complete draft quote in a few seconds. It:

• Applies your markup to each line item
• Rewrites item descriptions into customer-appropriate language (removing supplier-specific jargon)
• Sets professional payment terms, validity period, and conditions

Review the draft line by line:

• Edit any line item — click on a price, description, or quantity to modify it inline
• Adjust individual markups — override the blanket percentage for specific items
• Add or remove lines — add items or remove anything not relevant to the customer

Option B: Keep Original Layout

Choose Keep original layout when the supplier's PDF has a layout worth preserving — technical drawings, detailed spec tables, or formats that would lose meaning if rebuilt.

1. Select the supplier quote's PDF attachment as the source
2. Enter your markup (a percentage or a fixed amount)
3. Buyer24 scans the pages and detects every price on them — supplier unit prices, line totals, subtotals, and tax/total amounts each get a proposed marked-up replacement

The Review Preview

Before anything is applied, you review every detection in a full-page preview:

• Every detected price is listed and highlighted on the page. All detections start included — uncheck anything that isn't actually a price (e.g., a weights column), or adjust a replacement value directly.
• Ambiguous detections are flagged in amber for you to resolve — this review step is your safety net against a supplier cost slipping through.
• Drag to select the content areas to keep. Buyer24 pre-selects the area around the detected prices (typically the line-items table). You can adjust the bands, select multiple areas per page, or exclude whole pages. Everything outside the kept areas — including the supplier's header and footer branding — is shaded in the preview and removed from the output.
• Draw white-out boxes to manually cover anything else inside the kept area (for example, a supplier name embedded in the table).

The preview works on phones and tablets too — pinch to zoom, tap a detection to review it.

Apply and Export

When you confirm, Buyer24 replaces the supplier prices with your marked-up prices (matching the original number formatting) and wraps the preserved pages in your own branded quote document — your header, totals, and terms surround the supplier's original content.

If you later change the markup, the preserved pages are flagged as out of date and one click re-applies the new prices from the original file.

Sending the Quote to Your Customer

When the quote looks right, you have two ways to deliver it:

Send to customer (recommended). For requests with a customer contact — for example, ones that came in through your branded customer portal — click Send to customer. Buyer24 emails your customer the quote PDF with a View your quote online button, and the quote becomes visible on the request in their portal. Until you click Send, the quote is a draft only you can see — sending is what releases it.

After sending:

• The quote shows a Sent badge with the date and recipient, and editing locks — the document your customer received stays exactly as sent
• Re-send is available if the customer misplaced the email
• To revise pricing after a negotiation, regenerate the quote and send the new version

Download PDF. You can always download the branded PDF and deliver it yourself — attach it to your own email or print it. The quote stays saved in Buyer24, linked to the source RFQ.

Quote Numbers

Each customer quote is assigned a sequential reference number (e.g., CQ-2026-0001). This makes it easy to reference in follow-up communications and track which quote a customer is responding to.

Updating a Quote

If a customer negotiates or you need to revise:

1. Open the saved customer quote
2. Click Edit to adjust line items, markup, or terms — if the quote has already been sent, editing is locked; regenerate it to create a fresh version instead
3. Download the new PDF, or Send to customer again

The old version is kept for audit purposes. The new version gets the same quote number with a revision indicator (e.g., CQ-2026-0001 Rev. 2).

Tips

• Set your defaults once — In Organization → Quote Defaults, set a standard markup, validity period (e.g., 30 days), payment terms, and your preferred quote mode so you don't have to enter them every time.
• Review AI-rewritten descriptions carefully — In Rebuilt mode, the AI rewrites supplier descriptions for customer readability, but you know your customer's terminology best. A quick read-through takes 2 minutes.
• Resolve every flagged price in keep-original mode — Amber-flagged detections mean Buyer24 wasn't certain which price it found. Confirm each one so no supplier cost reaches your customer.
• Keep the markup flexible — A blanket 20% may not be right for every line item. High-value or low-margin items often need individual adjustments.