What to put on a sales quote, and how to get it accepted

This is general information, not legal advice. The rules depend on your activity and your country, and they change. Soldlyne gives no legal advice: check what applies to you with an official source or a professional.

A quote does two jobs. It tells the customer exactly what they’d be buying, and it gives you both a written record of what was agreed. The clearer it is, the less time you spend answering questions about it.

The parts of a clear quote

Who’s selling: legal name, address, company number and VAT number if you have them, and an address that someone reads.
Who’s buying: the company and the person.
A reference and two dates: when it was issued and until when it holds.
The lines: a description a stranger could understand, a quantity, a unit price, a tax rate, and a discount if there is one.
Totals: before tax, the tax, and the amount to pay.
The terms: when and how payment happens, and anything else that would surprise someone if they only found out later.

Get the sums right

Quotes go wrong in small ways that cost trust. Two rules prevent most of it:

Show tax per rate. If a quote mixes rates, show each rate with the base it applies to. The customer’s accountant will want to check it, and tax worked out line by line and then added up can drift from the tax on the total by a cent or two.

Keep exact amounts. Floating-point arithmetic in a spreadsheet or an app can produce rounding errors. Soldlyne, for instance, keeps every amount as an exact integer in the smallest unit of the currency, rounds each line’s net once, and works out tax once per rate on the sum of that rate’s lines.

Number them without gaps

Numbering quotes is good practice even where the law doesn’t ask for it: it lets anyone refer to one without confusion, and it makes a missing one visible. The rule is stricter for invoices: in France, an invoice needs a unique number based on a continuous chronological sequence.

Whatever you choose, don’t delete a quote you’ve sent. Keep it, and issue a new one.

Freeze what you sent

Once a quote has gone out, it shouldn’t change under the customer’s feet. If your address or their company name changes next month, the document they have must still match your records. So a sent quote should keep a copy of the seller and the customer as they were, and any change should make a new quote with a new number.

What the rules say in France

Some activities must give a written quote before the work. Service-Public’s page on mandatory quotes (verified by its authors on 9 September 2022, so check for changes) lists, among others:

building and home-equipment work and repairs;
removals;
car rental for vehicles under 3.5 tonnes;
eyewear and hearing aids;
home help from a monthly price of €100 including tax;
cosmetic surgery above certain thresholds, and funeral services.

Each activity has its own list of what the quote must contain. That same page says a client is only bound once they sign the quote, and that for building work they should add a handwritten “bon pour travaux” or “bon pour accord” above the signature.

For other activities, a quote may not be mandatory, but once accepted it can still bind both parties. If you sell to consumers, more rules apply. Ask a professional if the stakes are real.

Accepted online: what to record

A customer can accept by email, by a signed PDF, or on a page. Whichever you use, what you want afterwards is evidence of who agreed to what, and when:

The exact document, as it was when they answered.
A deliberate act: a typed name and a ticked box say more than a link that was merely opened. Mail scanners open links too, so opening one should change nothing.
The name, the date, the IP address and the browser.

Is that a signature?

Not in the strong sense. Under the EU’s eIDAS regulation, article 25 says an electronic signature can’t be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic or isn’t “qualified”, while only a qualified electronic signature has the equivalent legal effect of a handwritten one.

So a typed name on a quote page is a record of a yes, and it may be useful evidence, but it isn’t the same as a qualified signature. For a large contract, or where the law asks for a signature of a certain level, use a proper e-signature service. We state this plainly about Soldlyne’s quotes: accepting one records a customer’s yes, and contracts and signatures aren’t part of it.

After the yes

Decide what happens next before you send the first one: who gets told, what moves on the deal, and who writes the invoice. In Soldlyne, accepting moves the deal to your first Won stage and notes it on the timeline, while invoices stay with your accounting tool. Soldlyne doesn’t check your seller details, choose a tax rate or say what a quote must contain where you are. That part remains yours.