The Quote Approval Workflow: Draft to Approved
A walkthrough of how a quote moves through CareSuite's approval lifecycle — draft, pending approval, approved or rejected — and lands in the same approval log used elsewhere in the app.
A quote that goes out to a customer without anyone else reviewing it is a quote that can commit your business to a price or terms nobody signed off on. CareSuite gives quotes a real status lifecycle instead of leaving approval as an informal step someone's supposed to remember.
The four states
A quote in CareSuite moves through four statuses: draft, pending approval, approved, and rejected. A quote starts as a draft while it's being built — line items, quantities, discounts, tax — and stays editable in that state. When it's ready to go out, it moves to pending approval rather than straight to the customer. From there, it's either approved (and can now be sent or converted toward an order) or rejected, sending it back for revision.
Underneath, a quote (care_quotes) carries the line items (care_quote_items) with quantity, unit price, discount, and tax rate per line, rolling up to a subtotal, discount, tax, and total — along with currency and an FX rate, relevant for businesses quoting in more than one currency. valid_until sets an expiry on the quote itself, and the whole thing links to a customer and, when relevant, the opportunity it came from.
Walking through a quote
Build the quote as a draft: add line items, set quantities and any per-line discounts, and let the totals calculate as you go. Once it reflects what you actually intend to offer, move it to pending approval — this is the signal to whoever reviews quotes on your team that this one needs a look before it goes anywhere.
The reviewer approves or rejects. An approval moves the quote forward and, in practice, is usually the point at which you'd send it to the customer or begin converting it toward an order. A rejection sends it back — the quote stays in the system with its history intact rather than being discarded, so the next revision isn't starting from a blank page.
Where approvals get logged
Quote approvals write to care_approval_log — the same log used for purchase-request approvals elsewhere in CareSuite. Each entry records the module, the specific record it applies to, the action taken, and who took it. That shared log matters because it means "who approved what, and when" isn't scattered across different features with their own separate history — anyone auditing approval activity across the business checks one place, whether the approval in question was a quote or a purchase request.
Printable output once approved
Once a quote is approved, CareSuite has a dedicated print-ready layout for it — a clean, print-formatted version separate from the working screen you build the quote in, meant for handing to a customer or filing as a record. The same print treatment exists for orders, so an approved quote that converts to an order carries the same document treatment through to fulfillment.
Why the extra step is worth it
The temptation with any approval step is to see it as friction. What it actually buys you is a record: which quotes went out with sign-off, who gave it, and — because rejected quotes stay in the system rather than being deleted — what didn't make it out the door and why. For a business where quotes represent real pricing exposure, that trail is worth the extra click.