Sales quotes and orders in the customer portal

What the field is for

Use it for a note meant for the customer, such as a delivery arrangement or what the price includes. Everything you type appears on the website, so internal notes belong in Work Description, which the portal never shows. The field holds up to 250 characters.

Where the customer sees it

The portal shows the comment with the customer's live quotes and orders. Archived versions of a quote or order do not carry it.

Quotes created from a web request

Process Request puts the request number in Your Reference on the new quote, and the requester's own reference in External Document No. The portal shows both, so the customer recognizes the quote.

If the customer later accepts that quote in the portal and gives a purchase order number with it, that number lands in those same two fields when the quote becomes an order, and the requested date in Requested Delivery Date. What you filled in yourself is never overwritten. See Website Quote Acceptances.

Since 1.0.44 the quote can also start with a Project line and carry text lines with the inspection certificate and the processing under an item line; see Web Requests. The portal shows item lines only, so those text lines are on the PDF and not in the line overview.

What the portal shows of a quote or order

• The number, the dates, the status, the number of item lines, the customer's reference and this comment.
• The item lines: item, description, size (with Steel 365 since 1.0.44 also its length, width and thickness) and quantities. The line data contain no prices, discounts or amounts; a PDF printed with your own report shows what that report shows.
• A quote can be accepted only once it is released, so release a quote when it is final.

Delivery dates and progress per order line

For an order, the portal shows per line the requested and the promised delivery date of that line itself, and how far the line is: open, partly shipped, shipped or invoiced. A partial delivery is therefore visible per line, instead of as one average on the header.

• That makes it worth maintaining the delivery dates on the order lines and not only on the header. The header keeps them for the list of orders, but the customer looks at the line in the detail.
• If a line carries nothing, the portal shows nothing there. An empty date is not a promise, and that is better than a date taken from the header that is wrong for that line.
• The progress per line comes from the ordinary Business Central quantities (quantity, shipped, invoiced), so it means the same thing with and without Steel 365. A line for a quantity of zero is always open.
• Quote lines do not have this: on a quote nothing is ordered yet, so any statement about delivery would be about something that does not exist.

Track and trace

For a posted shipment, the portal shows the package number, the shipping agent and a ready-made link to that agent's tracking page. Business Central builds that link from the internet address on the shipping agent's card, the same field the standard Track Package action uses.

• If you want your customers to be able to follow a shipment, fill in the internet address on the shipping agent's card and make sure the package number reaches the shipment.
• When the steel goes out on your own lorries there is no agent and no package number. The portal then shows nothing, and that is intended: a button to a carrier's search page with nothing in it only disappoints.