Same pipeline as POs. Plus GP%, uplift, and discount knobs.
Customers don't politely segregate their quote requests into a different inbox. They come in alongside POs — same email address, same buyers, sometimes the same thread. As of v0.11.0, SideQuest classifies the email's intent on arrival, builds a draft Estimate in QuickBooks just like it does for a real order, and surfaces four operator tools so the order-entry person can apply pricing before sending the quote back.
The flow
Email arrives
"Can you quote us on 3 ball valves and 12 brass elbows?" Lands in the same Gmail label as your inbound POs.
Classifier runs
Subject and the full body get scanned for intent — long POs, forwarded chains, EDI 850 dumps all get the same attention. Keywords like "RFQ", "please quote", "pricing on" route as a quote request. "PO 1234", "purchase order", "please ship" route as an order. Both present → ambiguous, Claude makes the call.
Draft Estimate built
Same matcher as the PO flow. Every line gets mapped to a QB item. The draft sits unsubmitted waiting for the operator's pricing call.
Operator applies pricing, sends
Apply a gross-profit margin, an uplift %, or a discount %. Stamp the validity window. Submit to QB. Use Cut 2 to draft the reply.
The four operator tools
apply_gp_margin
apply_gp_margin(draft_id, target_gp_pct, costs)
Sets unit prices so each line hits a target gross-profit percentage. The connector pulls per-item costs from your QuickBooks Item record before computing the unit price needed. Lines without a cost in QB get skipped so the operator sees them clearly.
apply_uplift
apply_uplift(draft_id, pct, scope)
Multiplies prices up by a percentage. Use scope per_line to mark each unit price up individually, or doc for a document-wide bump. Negative values are rejected so the operator's intent is explicit.
apply_discount
apply_discount(draft_id, pct, scope)
Same shape as uplift, opposite direction. Reduces prices by a percentage. Refuses 100% or higher so quotes never go to zero by accident. The existing document discount field is reused for the doc scope.
set_quote_validity
set_quote_validity(draft_id, days)
Stamps a "Quote valid through YYYY-MM-DD" note on the draft memo. The Cut 2 auto-reply template reads this and includes the date in the email back to the customer. Default range is 1 to 365 days.
What a quote pass actually looks like in Claude
What this is, and what it isn't
An Estimate in QuickBooks Online IS a quote. SideQuest doesn't introduce a separate document type — the same Estimate object you already use for proposed orders carries the quote. The four operator tools are pure pricing primitives on top of the existing draft model. Cut 2 (v0.6.0) already handles the reply-to-buyer step. The classifier is heuristic for the obvious 80% of cases; when subject and body disagree it returns "ambiguous" and the production connector hands the email to Claude with context.
Pricing
Quote intake is included in every paid SideQuest tier. The classifier and four pricing tools ship with v0.11.0 — install the latest connector zip and they're available in Claude Desktop the next time you open it. There's no separate quote module, no add-on cost, no per-quote charge.
Quotes count toward your monthly PO budget the same way orders do. A 100-PO Solo tier covers 100 emails through the pipeline — whether they're orders, quotes, or a mix.
What it doesn't do (yet)
The classifier doesn't yet remember per-customer preferences. If Acme always sends quote requests using the word "estimate," the connector treats every one of their emails as starting from cold. Per-customer classifier learning is on the roadmap for v0.11.1 alongside cross-reference auto-learning.
The reply template for quote-mode is the same shape as the order template. A purpose-built "thanks for your inquiry" copy variant ships in v0.11.1.
If you want to use SideQuest exclusively for quoting (no PO intake), drop us a brief — the connector supports it, we just haven't documented that mode in the quick-start yet.
Adjacent docs
The integrations page documents how the email side fits with Gmail. The OCR evaluation explains the OCR pipeline behind reading the email body and any PDF attachments. The changelog tracks every version.