Sales quote builder with Excel price-list import and branded PDFs

The challenge

A machine-tool sales business prepared customer quotes from a master Excel price list covering machines, options and offer prices. Each quote also had to account for delivery and installation, training days, trade-ins and special offer prices, and every quote had to look professional when it reached the customer.

Working as the development partner for a UK web agency, we were asked to turn that process into a web application that sales staff could use to build accurate, consistently branded quotes, while management kept control of pricing and discounts.

What we did

• Excel price-list import. We built an importer that reads machines, options and prices directly from the client's master price-list workbook, so the sales team always quotes from the current list. When the client moved offer prices to a different column, we updated the import to match.
• Quote building with pricing rules. Sales staff build quotes from machines and options using auto-suggest dropdowns. The system adds delivery and installation, calculates training as days multiplied by an admin-set day rate, deducts trade-in values, and checks any special offer price against a maximum discount set by an administrator.
• Role-based access. Separate admin and sales logins, each with a profile and signature. Sales staff see only their own quotes, and admins can search and filter quotes by salesperson. Edited quotes are re-numbered in sequence.
• Branded PDF quotes. We rebuilt the multi-page PDF layout to match the client's sample, including the typeface, a centred cover page, a marketing page image uploadable from settings and a consistent reference format in the footer.
• Email delivery. Quotes can be emailed with the PDF attached and a default message.
• Staging and deployment. Each round was built and tested on our staging server, then deployed to the agency's server.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, PHPExcel, PDF generation, email