Introduction
The make-to-order tour started at a confirmed sales order. This flow rewinds to where that order comes from: a customer asking for a price, a quote that answers it, an acceptance that turns it into work. Quote to cash is the commercial spine that runs alongside the build — pricing on one end, a settled invoice on the other.
We'll follow one inquiry from a blank quote all the way to an order Carbon is ready to ship.
One opportunity, many documents
In Carbon, a request for quote, a quote, and a sales order aren't a rigid chain — they're three documents that hang off a single opportunity. The opportunity holds a slot for each (salesRfqId, quoteId, salesOrderId), and any of them can be empty.
That design has a practical consequence: none of the steps are mandatory. You can raise a sales order cold, quote without a formal RFQ, or carry one opportunity through all three. Carbon tracks the relationship through the opportunity, not through a foreign key that forces the sequence.
Quotes are optional — the opportunity is the thread.
A sales order does not require a quote, and a quote does not require an RFQ. Each document links back to the same opportunity, so you can enter the flow at whatever point a deal actually starts.
Build the quote
Open a new quote and add a line per item the customer asked about. Pricing lives on the line and supports quantity breaks, so the unit price for 10 can differ from the price for 100 — the negotiated number you land on is what carries forward later.
A fresh quote sits at "Draft". Each line moves through its own state as you work it up: "Not Started", "In Progress", "Complete" — or "No Quote" for a line you decide not to bid. The line states let you quote a multi-item inquiry piecemeal instead of all at once.
When the numbers are ready, finalizing the quote moves it to "Sent" and marks its lines "Complete". That status is also the gate for the next step.
Send it to the customer
Carbon can hand the customer the quote directly. With digital quotes enabled, a "Sent" quote exposes a private share link — an unguessable id, no login required. Internal notes are stripped before anything reaches the customer.
From that link the customer does one of two things. They accept — optionally attaching their PO as a PDF — and the quote converts straight into a sales order. Or they reject, and the quote moves to "Lost". Either way the outcome lands back in Carbon without a single email thread.
Acceptance is a first-class action, not an inbox.
The customer-facing share link turns an accept into a real conversion and a reject into a recorded outcome. A companion customer portal then shows them live order and job status as the work proceeds.
When a quote doesn't land
Not every quote converts, and Carbon keeps a distinct status for each ending. A quote whose validity date passes turns "Expired"; one the customer rejects becomes "Lost"; one you withdraw yourself is "Cancelled". Each is a real outcome on the record, not a quote left hanging.
None of them ends the conversation. A quote carries a revision number, so when a price needs reworking you re-quote rather than start over — the revision bumps, the customer sees the current terms, and the history of what changed stays intact.
Re-quoting bumps a revision and keeps the trail.
A lost or expired quote isn't wasted work. Raise a new revision off it and the prior terms stay on the record, so a negotiation that runs three rounds leaves three readable versions, not three disconnected quotes.
Into a sales order
Whether you convert internally or the customer accepts, the same thing happens: Carbon builds a sales order from the quote. The order lines carry the negotiated net unit price, the new order reuses the quote's opportunity, and the quote flips to "Ordered" — or "Partial" if only some lines converted. The order itself opens at "To Ship and Invoice".
That status is the handoff. Everything from here — production, shipment, invoice — keys off the sales order, exactly where the make-to-order tour began.
Jobs come from the order, never the quote.
There is no path from a quote straight to a production job. A make-to-order line on the sales order is what spawns a job — so the sequence is always quote → order → job. The order is the source of truth the floor builds against.