openPayroll

Quotations Module Manual
Version 1.0
Live site: https://zedpayroll.space
  1. Overview
  2. Welcome to the Quotations Module
  3. Getting Started
  4. Setup
  5. Managing Customers
  6. Managing Products
  7. Quotations
  8. Creating a Quotation
  9. Quotation Statuses
  10. Viewing & Editing Quotations
  11. Printing Quotations
  12. Invoices
  13. Creating Invoices from Quotations
  14. Managing Invoices
  15. Printing Invoices
  16. Reporting
  17. Quotation Reports & Export
  18. Invoice Reports & Export
  19. Permissions
  20. Roles & Permissions
  21. Help
  22. Frequently Asked Questions
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1. Welcome to the Quotations Module

The Quotations module lets you prepare quotes, proposals and price estimates for your customers and turn accepted quotes into invoices. Built for Zambian businesses by Essence IT Consulting Limited, it helps you:

  • Keep a register of customers and products
  • Prepare professional quotations with multiple line items, discounts and tax
  • Track every quotation through its lifecycle — Draft, Sent, Accepted or Declined
  • Print clean, customer-ready quotation documents
  • Convert accepted quotations into invoices (one at a time or in bulk)
  • Track invoice payment status (Unpaid / Paid / Cancelled)
  • Run reports and export them to Excel or CSV

All money values are displayed in your company's selected currency (e.g., ZMW).

The Quotations module is a separate area from the payroll module of openPayroll. Your license controls which modules your company can access.
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2. Getting Started

The Quotations module is available from the sidebar under:

  • Quotations — the list of all quotation documents
  • Customers — your saved customers
  • Products — your saved products and services
  • Quotation Reports — summary, filtering and export
  • Invoices — invoices created from accepted quotations
  • Invoice Reports — invoice summary, filtering and export

Before you create your first quotation it is worth registering your customers and products so that you can select them quickly and have prices and tax rates auto-filled.

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3. Managing Customers

Where: Sidebar → Customers

The Customers page lists every saved customer with their Name, Email, Phone, Tax Number, Tax Type (with its rate, e.g. VAT 16%) and Address. Use the search box to find a customer by name, email, phone or tax number.

Register a Customer

  1. Click Register Customer.
  2. Fill in the form:
    • Name (required) — the customer or company name
    • Email (optional)
    • Phone (optional)
    • Tax Number / TPIN (optional) — e.g. ZX0000001234
    • Tax Type (optional) — e.g. VAT, MTOT or Not Applicable (NA). This rate is applied automatically when you quote this customer.
    • Address (optional)
    • Notes (optional)
  3. Click Save Customer.
Tax types are defined centrally by Essence IT Consulting Limited and shown to you read-only. Your default company tax type is pre-selected but you can choose a different one per customer.

Edit or Delete a Customer

  • Edit — click the pen button, change the fields, and click Update.
  • Delete — click the trash icon and confirm.
Deleting a customer does not change existing quotations or invoices — they keep their own copy of the customer details at the time the document was created.
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4. Managing Products

Where: Sidebar → Products

The Products page lists your catalogue with Name, SKU, Description and Unit Price. Search by name, SKU or description.

Create a Product

  1. Click New Product.
  2. Enter:
    • Name (required)
    • SKU (optional) — your own stock code
    • Description (optional)
    • Unit Price (required) — the default price in your company currency
  3. Click Save Product.

To edit or delete, use the pen or trash buttons next to a product.

A product's unit price is only a default. When you add it to a quotation you can still change the price and description for that particular line.
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5. Creating a Quotation

Where: Sidebar → Quotations → New Quotation

Heading details

  • Quotation No — assigned automatically in the format QTN-YYYY-0001. You cannot change it.
  • Issue Date (required) — defaults to today.
  • Valid Until — the date the offer expires (cannot be earlier than the issue date).
  • Status (required) — Draft, Sent, Accepted or Declined. See Quotation Statuses.

Customer details

  1. Use Select Customer to pick a saved customer. This auto-fills the customer name, email, phone, tax number, address, and the Tax Rate from their tax type.
  2. The fields (Name, Email, Phone, Tax No / TPIN, Address) are all editable, so you can adjust them for this quotation only.
A customer Name is always required. If the right customer is not saved yet, use the Register a new customer link — it opens in a new tab.

Items

  1. Under Items, choose a Product from the dropdown — this auto-fills the description and unit price. You can also type a description and price directly for one-off items or services.
  2. Set the Qty (must be greater than 0) and Unit Price.
  3. The Line Total and the running Subtotal are calculated automatically.
  4. Click Add Item to add more lines, or the bin icon to remove a line.

Discount, tax and notes

  • Discount — an amount (in your currency) deducted from the subtotal.
  • Tax Rate (%) — auto-filled from the customer's tax type when a saved customer is selected; otherwise leave at 0 or enter your own rate.
  • Notes — optional message shown on the quotation.

The summary panel on the right shows Subtotal, Discount, Tax and the final Total, all updated live.

Saving

Click Save Quotation. You are taken to the quotation's detail page. Choose Cancel to go back to the list without saving.

Every item line must have a description — the system will ask you to fill any missing ones before saving.
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6. Quotation Statuses

Each quotation has one of four statuses. Use them to reflect where the quotation is in real life.

StatusMeaningUsed for invoicing?
DraftStill being prepared — not sent to the customer✘
SentSent to the customer, awaiting their decision✘
AcceptedThe customer has accepted the quotation✔
DeclinedThe customer declined the quotation✘
Only quotations with the status Accepted can be converted into invoices, and only once — a quotation that already has an invoice cannot be invoiced again.
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7. Viewing & Editing Quotations

Where: Sidebar → Quotations

The list page shows summary cards for Total, Draft, Accepted and Total Value. You can search by quotation number, customer name or email, and filter by status. Quotations marked Invoiced have already been converted to an invoice.

Each row offers these actions:

ActionButtonDescription
Create invoiceFile icon (green)Only for accepted quotations with no invoice yet. See Creating Invoices from Quotations.
ViewEye iconOpens the quotation detail page.
EditPen iconOpens the edit form.
DeleteTrash iconDeletes the quotation (asks for confirmation).

Quotation detail page

The detail page shows your company header, the Bill To customer block, issue and expiry dates, status badge, a line-item table, a totals breakdown (Subtotal, Discount, Tax, Total) and any notes. From here you can Print, Edit, Delete, and — when the quotation is accepted and not yet invoiced — Create Invoice.

Editing a quotation

  1. Click Edit (pen icon) on the list or the Edit button on the detail page.
  2. Change any heading, customer, item or totals fields.
  3. Click Save Quotation.
Editing a quotation replaces all existing line items with what is on the form. When the quotation has already been converted into an invoice, keep in mind the invoice keeps its own copy of the figures.
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8. Printing Quotations

On the quotation detail page, click Print. A print-ready view opens showing a clean, customer-facing document with:

  • Your company logo, name, address, phone, email and tax / TPIN
  • The QUOTATION title with number, date, valid-until date and status
  • The Bill To customer block
  • A numbered item table with quantities, unit prices and amounts
  • Subtotal, discount, tax and the prominent Total
  • Signature lines: Prepared by and Accepted by

Click Print (or press Ctrl + P) to print or save as PDF. The sidebar and navigation are hidden automatically when printing.

The printed document uses your company's theme colour for headers and totals to match your brand.
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9. Creating Invoices from Quotations

An invoice is created from an accepted quotation. The invoice copies the customer details, items, discount, tax and totals so the figures always match the accepted quote. Invoice numbers follow the format INV-YYYY-0001 and are assigned automatically.

Create an invoice for one quotation

  1. Open the quotation (list or detail page).
  2. On an accepted quotation, click Create Invoice (or the file icon on the list row).
  3. The system creates the invoice and takes you to its detail page.

Create invoices in bulk

  1. Go to Quotation Reports (sidebar → Quotation Reports).
  2. Tick the checkboxes next to each accepted quotation you want to invoice. Only accepted, not-yet-invoiced quotations have a checkbox.
  3. Click Create Invoices and confirm.

Afterwards you will be told how many invoices were created and how many quotations were skipped (e.g. not accepted or already invoiced).

Each quotation can produce at most one invoice. If you try to invoice one twice, the system opens the existing invoice instead.
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10. Managing Invoices

Where: Sidebar → Invoices

The Invoices page shows summary cards for Total Invoices, Unpaid, Paid and Outstanding (the total value of unpaid invoices). Search by invoice number, customer name or email, and filter by status. Due dates that have passed on an unpaid invoice appear highlighted in red as overdue.

Invoice statuses:

StatusMeaning
UnpaidIssued, awaiting payment
PaidPayment received — the paid date/time is recorded automatically
CancelledWritten off / voided

Invoice detail page

Shows the company header, Bill To block, issue and due dates, From link back to the originating quotation, paid date if any, status badge, the line items, totals and notes.

Change payment status

Use the Payment status card at the bottom of the detail page:

  • Mark Paid — record that the invoice was paid (records the payment timestamp).
  • Mark Unpaid — revert a paid or cancelled invoice to unpaid.
  • Cancel — void the invoice.
Deleting an invoice removes it from the system entirely. The original accepted quotation remains, so it can be left as accepted or changed back to another status if you need to re-invoice.
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11. Printing Invoices

Click Print on the invoice list row or detail page to open a clean, print-ready invoice document with your company branding, customer details, item table, totals and payment status. Use Print or Ctrl + P to print or save as PDF. The app's sidebar and navigation are hidden automatically when printing.

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12. Quotation Reports & Export

Where: Sidebar → Quotation Reports

The Quotation Reports page summarises your quotations and is the place for bulk invoicing and exports.

Summary cards

  • Quotations — number of quotations in the current filter
  • Total Value — sum of totals
  • Accepted — count of accepted quotations
  • Tax — total tax amount
  • Draft, Sent, Declined — counts by status
  • Subtotal − Discount — the combined pre-tax value

Filtering

Filter by Status, Customer, and an issue-date range (From / To). Click Filter to apply and Reset to clear. The table lists each quotation with its number, date, customer, status, item count, subtotal, discount, tax and total, with a totals row at the bottom.

Exporting

Use the Excel or CSV buttons in the top-right. The export respects your current filters and produces a file named like quotation-report-2026-09-14.xlsx (or .csv) with the same columns plus a totals row.

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13. Invoice Reports & Export

Where: Sidebar → Invoice Reports (or the Invoice Reports button on the Quotation Reports page)

The Invoice Reports page works like the Quotation Reports page but for invoices. You can filter by Status (Unpaid / Paid / Cancelled), Customer and an issue-date range.

Summary cards

  • Invoices — count in the current filter
  • Total Value — sum of totals
  • Unpaid, Paid, Cancelled — counts by status
  • Outstanding — total value of unpaid invoices

Export with the Excel or CSV buttons. The export respects your filters and includes a totals row.

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14. Roles & Permissions

Access to quotations is controlled by three permissions managed by your Owner or Admin:

PermissionControls access to
Manage QuotationsQuotations, Invoices, and both report pages
Manage CustomersThe Customers section
Manage ProductsThe Products section

The sidebar menu adjusts automatically to show only the sections your role can access. If a section is missing, ask your company admin to grant the relevant permission.

The Quotations module itself is enabled per company and is controlled by your license. If you cannot see any quotations menu at all, contact Essence IT Consulting Limited.
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15. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do quotation numbers work?
A: Quotations are numbered automatically as QTN-YYYY-0001, QTN-YYYY-0002 and so on. The number cannot be edited.

Q: Why is my tax rate already filled in?
A: When you select a saved customer, the tax rate is picked up from their tax type (for example VAT 16%). You can still change it for the quotation.

Q: How do I set a different tax rate?
A: When creating a quotation, overwrite the value in the Tax Rate (%) field, or pick a customer whose tax type matches what you need.

Q: How do I add a customer who isn't in the list?
A: Use the Register a new customer link on the quotation form (opens in a new tab), save the customer, then refresh and pick them from the dropdown.

Q: Why can't I create an invoice for my quotation?
A: Invoices can only be created from quotations with the status Accepted, and only once. Set the status to Accepted first, and check that an invoice has not already been created for it.

Q: Can I delete a customer or product that is used on existing quotations?
A: Yes. Existing quotations and invoices keep their own saved details, so deleting a customer or product does not change historical documents.

Q: How do I mark an invoice as paid?
A: Open the invoice and click Mark Paid in the Payment status card. The paid date and time are recorded automatically.

Q: What does "overdue" mean?
A: An unpaid invoice whose due date has passed shows the due date in red with "(overdue)" so you can follow it up with the customer.

Q: Which formats can I export?
A: Both Quotation Reports and Invoice Reports can be exported as Excel (.xlsx) or CSV, respecting your current filters.

Q: How do I get support for the Quotations module?
A: Use the Support section in the sidebar to create a ticket. Your message goes straight to the Essence IT support team.

End of manual. For support, contact Essence IT Consulting Limited.