Introduction

The Quotes facility allows you to see details of quotes involving your company which are sent through BearingNet. To make full use of the Quotes system you should have your inventory loaded onto BearingNet and make sure it is regularly updated. Quotes are divided into those inquiries requested from your company (Selling) and those made by your company (Buying).

Buying and Selling are further divided into ‘Inbox’ and ‘In Progress’. You can reply to quotes through BearingNet, and the system will keep track of all the messages sent and received. Emails will also be sent (although users may turn off this facility). Specific users in your company can also be assigned quotes for certain companies and countries. For example, you may have one user account set up to receive quotes from all companies in Europe, or all companies beginning with the letter ‘A’.

To view quotes, click on ‘Quotes ‘and the quotes page will be displayed. When you first visit the Quotes page it will show you any new inquiries you have received, rather like your email inbox. If you have no inventory loaded, then this inbox will always be empty. The heading ‘Inquiry Inbox’ under ‘Selling’ is highlighted to show that this is selected. Any requests for quotations made by your company in the Search page will show in the ‘Buying’ side. Any unread inquiries are displayed in bold.

If you have selected ‘Send all quotations by fax or email’ in the ‘Company settings’ section of ‘Your Account’ all quotations will be emailed to you and will be included in the ‘in progress’ section of the quotes system. These do not count as ‘new inquiries’ therefore the ‘new inquiries’ box on your welcome screen will always show zero.

The Quotes system has been designed to work automatically with the user who is logged on. Please see the section headed‘Automatically transferring quotes to Users’.

In the above image ‘Selling in Progress’ has been selected. This displays all ongoing inquiries (including new and saved) that other companies have requested from you. Note that each quote is labelled ‘Selling’ and the word ‘To’ is displayed before the company name. Any quote listed on the ‘Buying’ side will have the label ‘Buying ‘before the part number and ‘From’ before the company name. Click on any of the 5 headings to make the page display as follows:

• Inquiry Inbox: Display Requests for Quotations on stock you are listing (i.e., items you are selling)
• Selling In Progress: Display ongoing inquiries, including new and saved inquiries (all you are selling)
• Show all: Display all inquiries made to and all quotations made by your company.
• Quotation Inbox: Display responses to your Requests for Quotations from other companies (i.e., items you are buying). This could be a quotation or the seller asking for more information.
• Buying In Progress: Display ongoing quotations, including new and saved quotations

The number in brackets after the heading shows the number of unread quotes requiring an action or response. These quotes will be displayed in bold until you click on the individual quote.

Viewing a quote

To view a quote, click on the part. If you are in the ‘Inquiry Inbox’ and click the part number, then this will be a request for a quotation so the page will display with the ‘Quick quote’ option selected as follows:

Quick quote

This is an easy way to respond to a request for a quotation. To make a quick quote fill in the boxes, add a message if required, and click ‘Send’. If your user account is set up to display the confirmation page (see ‘User settings’) then the quote will display in a suitable format for printing with a ‘continue’ button. You will then return to the quote list. If the requesting company has their user account set up to receive emails for quotes, then an email will also be sent to them.

Post reply and not able to quote.

If you need more information or wish to discuss the quote, you can click ‘Post Reply’. If you are unable to quote, then click ‘Not able to quote’. In either case you may only fill in the message box (all other boxes are greyed out as they are not relevant) and then click ‘Send’. If the user account receiving this message is set up to receive emails for quotes, then an email will also be sent.

Will send quotation by fax or email

This option tells the company that you will contact them separately, outside of the BearingNet system.

If you are in the ‘Quotation Inbox’ (Buying) and click on a part number, then the page displays with a message box for you to send a message.

Once a quick quote (or a reply) has been posted, clicking on the part number will make the page display with any quick quote details previously made and a message box for you to fill in. A list of messages between you and the other company is also displayed at the bottom, in date order.

The original inquiry details are displayed in the table at the top of the page. You may also find out details about the other company by clicking on ‘Details – Click for more’. To hide this box, click ’Hide details’.

Click the ‘Back’ button to return to where you were on the quotes list.

Quote search

Clicking on the ‘Quote Search’ heading reveals a search facility. This allows you to search through all your quotes for a particular item.

Filter by

The quotes page defaults to showing all new inquiries for all user accounts from your company and all companies that have sent inquiries. You may display quotes for a given user or a certain company. The ‘Filter by’ dropdown lists give names of staff members who have quotes assigned to them and names of all companies that your company has quotes with.

To display quotes for a member of staff select their name from the dropdown list and the page will refresh with their quotes showing. To view quotes for a company, select the company name from the dropdown list and all quotes for that company will be displayed. Once you have selected any filtering, it will remain until you deselect it by changing the dropdown lists back to ‘All staff’ and ‘All companies.

Action

Here you can either save or delete quotes. Deleting allows you to keep your inbox tidy. Normally all quotes will be deleted after 21 days of inactivity. To keep a quote for longer you need to save it. Please note that saved quotes will not be deleted so you may wish to periodically delete saved quotes.

Save

Saving a quote will stop it from being automatically deleted after 21 days of inactivity. Select ‘save’ from the dropdown list and then check the box by the relevant quote and click ‘OK’. Saved quotes will then show a blue disk icon on the right-hand side.

Delete

Select ‘delete’ from the dropdown list and then check the box by the relevant quote and click ‘OK’. Note that the other company can still reply to your discussion (although it is marked as deleted), in which case the quote will automatically reopen.

Transfer to

This is useful if you have many quotes and several users in your company. Quotes may be transferred between users by selecting ‘Transfer to’ from the ‘Action’ dropdown list, then selecting the relevant user in the ‘Transfer to’ dropdown list, checking the box(es) by the relevant quote(s) and then clicking ‘OK’. Note that the ‘transfer to’ dropdown list is only active when the ‘Action’ box has ‘transferred to’ selected. You can then use the ‘Filter by’ dropdown lists to see quotes assigned to various users.

Will send quotation by fax or email

This option tells the company that you will contact them separately, outside of the BearingNet system.

Automatically transferring quotes to users

When your BearingNet account was originally set up, one user will have been set up as the current sales contact. To see who is responsible for which company or country, either click the ‘Sales Contact Settings’ link at the top of the page or click the ‘Your account’ tab and then select ‘Sales Contact Settings’ . This will show you who is the contact in your company for receiving quotes for each company listed on BearingNet. It is shown alphabetically by company, but you can click the link at the top to display by country.

You can assign a user to receive quotes from a specific company, region, or country.

To assign a user to be responsible for a particular company’s quotes, select the user you wish to assign the quotes to from the ‘select a user’ dropdown list, then check the box by the company name and click ‘OK’ at the bottom of the page.

To make a user receive quotes from a region or country, click the link ‘Select by country’ and the page will display with regions and countries listed alphabetically. The link will then change to say ‘select by company’ so you can return to the company list. You can page through the countries by clicking on the letters at the top or bottom of the page: Then select the user from the dropdown list, check the box by the required region or country and click ‘OK’. Please note that this will only set companies or countries on BearingNet at that time. Any companies who subsequently join BearingNet would need to be added by the user, unless you have already established the rule in the 'Rules' 'Sales Contact Details' section of Your Account, in which case the rule will automatically apply to all new companies who join.

User settings

Each user may also change some quote settings by selecting ‘User settings’ on the ‘Your Account’ tab. Here you can select whether to receive emails for ‘New Inquiries’, ‘Replies’ and ‘Cannot Supply’ and whether you wish to ‘show the quotation confirmation screen’ (useful for printing).

The ‘notification level’ lets you decide whether to receive a short email informing you that there are inquiries in the BearingNet system for you to look at (Email a notification) or receive a full email giving details of the quote (Email full details ).