Quoting & Brokerage
Brokerage in APEX runs on three records: an RFQ (a customer asking for price and availability on a part), a quote (your priced answer), and a deal (the opportunity you track on the pipeline board). Demand lands in the RFQ inbox, you quote it, the customer decides — on the phone or on their portal — and won business hands off to a sales order or a work order.
Who works here: the sales desk lives in the RFQ inbox and the quote list; brokers watch the pipeline board and chase the follow-ups worklist; owners and admins configure and pay commissions; the front office adds contract prices on the customer profile so key accounts price themselves.
The brokerage picture
Two things about this flow are easy to get wrong:
- The customer’s approve / decline on the portal is the only approval step in the flow — there is no internal sign-off between draft and sent.
- Accepting a quote does not create an order. The handoff to a sales order or work order is a manual step — see Margins & the handoff.
Where quoting sits
| Neighbor | What flows across |
|---|---|
| Customers | Every RFQ, quote, and deal belongs to a customer. Contract prices live on the customer profile (Contract pricing), and portal users are invited there — see Customer Portal. |
| Sales Orders | Where an accepted quote becomes a fulfillable order — created manually today. |
| Work Orders | Shop jobs quoted through this desk are opened as work orders — see Work Orders. |
| Inventory | The inbox auto-matches a requested part number against your part master, so you know instantly whether you can quote from stock — see Inventory. |
Finding the module
The sidebar entry is Pipeline. It opens on the deal board, and a row of tabs across the top of the page moves you between the five sales screens. The Quotes sidebar entry reaches the same surface — its Customer Quotes and Customer RFQs links open the matching tabs directly:
| Tab | What it is |
|---|---|
| Pipeline | The deal Kanban board — see The deal pipeline. |
| RFQ Inbox | Inbound demand, with automatic part matching — see The RFQ inbox. |
| Quotes | Every outbound quote and its lifecycle — see Quotes & contract pricing. |
| Commissions | The commission ledger and reports — see Commissions. |
| Follow-ups | Sent quotes with no decision yet, ranked by value and staleness — see The follow-ups worklist. |
Only Commissions and Follow-ups have no sidebar link of their own — they are reachable only through this in-page tab row.
Roles: any staff member with access to the module can capture RFQs, build quotes, and move deals. If your workspace uses customer data scopes (Team → Members), you only see the RFQs, quotes, and deals of the customers in your scope. The Commissions tab is the exception — it is owners and admins only.