This post explains the different features of estimates, reservations and shipments and how they interrelate.

Estimates

Estimates are used to provide a quote to your customer for material rental as well as unit prices (consumables and services). They are associated with a specific customer but not with a job site and do not affect your inventory balances. An estimated return date is required in order to calculate the anticipated costs to your customer.

An estimate can be converted into a reservation or directly into a shipment.

As you can see above, you can attach documents or photos just as you can with reservations and shipments.

You can also track the status of an estimate:

Here’s what a sample estimate looks like:

Reservations

An estimate can be converted into a reservation or you can create a new reservation from scratch. A reservation requires that you specify a job site and reserves materials so they are not available to be shipped to another job site. A rent stop date is not required.

Shipments

Estimates and reservations can both be converted into shipments. Reservations appear on the Shipping tab and are turned into shipments by clicking on the Send Selected Shipment button.

Alternatively, you can create a new shipment by clicking on the pallet of boxes to ship items to a location.

There are three types of shipments:

• Deliveries – moves equipment from your branch office or laydown yard to a job site
• Returns - moves equipment from a job site back to your branch office or laydown yard 
• Transfers - moves equipment from job site to job site, or branch to branch

Once a shipment has been entered your inventory is automatically updated so you always know your available balances at each location.

Your relationship with your customer is important and an essential part of this relationship involves sharing information. Whether it’s via telephone conversations, mailed invoices, or emailed PDF files, you have information in common. Quantify was built from the ground up to give you the ability to more easily share this data - invoices, shipments, jobsite balances, and whatever other information you’d like. Doing this in real-time increases your customer’s efficiency, speeds up payment, and increases trust between your companies.

Quantify’s new Location-Based Security feature allows you to share data with your customers. You’ll need to install Quantify Mobile Tools on your server and give your customer instructions on how to install Quantify and the remote URL of your server.

To begin, click on the Customer tab. You will see the contacts associated with each customer. Contacts are managed through the customer record instead of the Users tab in order to separate customer contacts from your employees. To add a contact either double-click the customer or highlight the customer name and click the edit button on the toolbar above. On the customer dialog box you’ll see additional Add/Edit/Delete buttons for the contacts. There are two important things to note on the contact record. First, contacts can only have a role of ‘Customer’. Second, if you want the contact to be able to log in and view data, check the box that allows them to see the parent customer’s jobs.

Because you may have many different contacts for a customer as well as many different job sites, Quantify doesn’t blanket-assign a contact to all jobs for that customer. Instead, you assign individuals to the various locations that you want them to see. Assignment of customers to job sites is accomplished by selecting “Assign Customer Users to Job Sites and Job Site Groups” under Security on the Users tab.

Although similar to assigning individual users to job sites, the customer view of this dialog box filters by customer. Once a customer is selected, the tree view displays the job sites associated with the customer and also filters the user list to display only the related contacts. Simply select the customer contact from the User list and then check the boxes next to the job sites that they belong to. Shown below is a screen grab of what Quantify looks like when the customer is logged in. The customer will not see tabs that they do not have access to, such as Customers, Vendors, and Users. The customer will see only invoices and shipments for job sites they are assigned to.

Contacts also see a different tree view of your organization. The main parent node is their company name and the underlying job sites are the ones they belong to. By default they also see the shipments, invoices, and various pivots and reports, plus the ability to map the locations in Google Earth and view product history. All of the permissions for a customer are customizable.