Handling Customers, Quotes, Work Orders, and Finance

[!NOTE] Quotes, work orders, finance, and some AI-assisted actions can be limited by workspace access. Missing visibility is not always a bug.

Start from CRM, not from a blank commercial record

1. Open or create the customer account first.
2. Keep key contacts, service scope, and account notes in CRM so quotes and work orders inherit the right context.
3. Apply the right SLA or service-policy snapshot before commercial work starts.

Build the quote from operational context

1. Create the quote from the inspection, defect, or customer context whenever possible.
2. Choose the purpose deliberately: Remedial work, PPM contract, or Ad hoc.
3. Review scope, pricing, and exclusions before the quote leaves the portal.
4. Use the quote desk to monitor draft, sent, accepted, and declined states instead of relying on email memory.

Move accepted work to the right handoff

1. For accepted remedial quotes, create the work order as soon as approved work is ready for delivery.
2. Keep completion notes, delivery state, and scheduling follow-up attached to the work order rather than leaving the work trapped in quote state.
3. If the team knows the service month but not the exact visit day, use Target month on the work order and convert it to Exact date when dispatch is ready.
4. Feed work orders back into Scheduler when engineer assignment or deployment needs to happen.
5. For accepted PPM contract quotes, review the generated service contract and routines instead of creating a remedial work order.
6. For accepted ad hoc quotes, confirm that no automatic work-order or service-contract handoff is required.

Follow the commercial lifecycle

The equivalent sequence is:

1. Build the quote as a draft, then send it for the customer's decision.
2. Sent, rejected, or expired quotes can produce a revision draft only before a fulfilment handoff exists.
3. An accepted remedial quote creates or reuses its linked work order; the completed work order can enter Ready to Invoice.
4. An accepted PPM quote creates or reuses its service contract and routines, but the current product does not create a recurring billing candidate without a canonical occurrence.
5. Accepted CRM-linked non-PPM quotes can enter Ready to Invoice. A remedial quote can also create a work order for fulfilment; an ad hoc quote does not create a fulfilment record automatically.
6. A candidate creates a draft invoice. The invoice can be issued, partly paid, paid, voided, or written off under the lifecycle rules below.
7. A voided or written-off invoice no longer suppresses its source, so an otherwise eligible source can return to the queue.

For remedial work, the accepted quote and its completed linked work order can both appear before either one is invoiced. Any invoice for the quote or a work order linked through it suppresses both sources unless that invoice is voided or written off. Those two states release the eligible source back to the queue.

Send contractor job packs for external delivery

Use contractor job packs when a work order needs to be delivered by a third-party engineer or specialist who is not part of the sending organization. The work order remains owned by your organization; the contractor receives a controlled view of the job and submits staged updates for review.

1. Create or identify the contractor record through the contractor access workflow. Keep the contractor email, company, and optional linked app user accurate because grant delivery and evidence ownership are checked against that identity.
2. Create an access grant against the work order through the contractor grant workflow. Choose whether the contractor can only view the pack or can submit evidence and status updates.
3. Deliver the pack by native app user binding when the recipient already has a Deucalion app account, or by the generated contractor portal link when they are working outside the app.
4. The pack exposes the work order, site address and access notes, work-order items, safe documents, and paged site assets. It does not expose internal admin notes, raw access tokens, or unrelated customer workspace data.
5. Contractors with submit access can send notes, proposed work-order status changes, work-item completions, checklist responses, and evidence references. Submissions are staged first; they do not update the official work order until an admin reviews them.
6. Review submitted contractor evidence from Work Orders → Submissions. Use Approve and merge only when the update should become part of the official work-order record. Use Request changes or Reject when the submission is incomplete or should not be accepted.
7. Revoke expired or incorrect grants promptly. Grant activity records creation, viewing, submission, resend, denial, and revoke events so the office has an audit trail.

Use finance to review receivables, not platform controls

1. Use Finance and customer account context to see whether a receivable ties back to a quote, work order, or manual invoice.
2. Keep the organization's receivables and workspace billing decisions visible in the finance desk.
3. Public org-admin guides stop at workspace billing and receivables. Platform-level credit tooling is intentionally outside this documentation set.

Troubleshooting

Related guides

1. Use the linked customer, quote, work-order, and finance guides for the task-level detail behind this commercial flow.
2. Use Client Handover and Quote Approval, Quoting a PPM Contract and Creating Routines, Contractor Job Packs, and Billing Candidates and Accounting Export Availability for the newer workflow detail.
3. Use Common Issues when availability, team controls, or billing configuration affect what the commercial desks can do.
4. Use Reports, Exports, and Connected Systems for generated documents and outbound delivery, and Finance, Receivables, and Billing for invoices and payment state.