QuoteDesk
Turn a messy RFQ email into a priced quote in under an hour
What was actually happening
A quoting application shaped around one manufacturer's actual pricing logic — material costs, volume breaks, customer-specific terms, and the approval rules that were living in a sales manager's head.
- RFQs arrived as email attachments in a dozen formats — PDFs, spreadsheets, photographed drawings
- Pricing rules lived in an 80-tab workbook that one person maintained
- Every quote over a threshold needed an approval nobody could track
- Average turnaround was three days, and competitors were answering in one
How we solved it
01Intake that reads the attachment
Incoming RFQs are parsed — line items, quantities, specs, and drawings extracted and normalized into a structured request. Ambiguous fields are flagged for a human rather than guessed.
02Pricing as a rules engine, not a spreadsheet
Material costs, margin floors, volume breaks, and customer agreements encoded as versioned rules with an effective date. Sales can see exactly which rule produced a number.
03Approvals with an audit trail
Threshold-based routing, one-click approve from Slack or email, and a permanent record of who approved what and when.
04Quote documents on brand
Generated PDFs and a shareable web quote with expiry, plus write-back to the ERP so nothing gets rekeyed.
Screens that carry the workflow
Interface placeholders — the real product screens go here once client approval lands.
Parsed RFQs with confidence flags on uncertain line items
Line-item pricing showing which rule set each number
Threshold routing with one-click approve and full history
Versioned pricing rules with effective dates and a dry-run preview
Where the models actually do work
The application works without any of this. The AI is what makes it fast — and every use below has a confidence threshold and a human path when it isn’t sure.
- Document extraction from PDFs, spreadsheets, and photographed drawings
- Spec matching against the product catalog with confidence scoring
- Draft cover letters in the sales rep's voice, edited before send
Your version won’t look like this one.
That’s the point — the whole reason to build rather than buy is that your process is yours. Tell us what yours does and we’ll sketch the shape of it.