Orders and quotes

A custom order starts as a conversation and ends as a boxed cake on a bench. Most of what goes wrong between those two points is a copying problem. The price lives in a sent email, the deposit in a spreadsheet, the flavour in a text message and the delivery address in someone's head.

In ibakepro a quote and an order are the same record. Converting one retypes nothing. It adopts the option the customer chose and starts the machinery that reserves stock and tracks money.

One quote, several prices

A quote can carry more than one option. Each option holds its own items, its own total, its own delivery fee, its own discount, its own notes and its own custom field answers, so a 6, 8 and 10 inch (15, 20 and 25 cm) version of the same cake is three priced choices on one document rather than three quotes to keep in step.

You can mark one option as your recommendation. It shows as a badge on the customer's page. It is a hint, not a default: ibakepro will never adopt the recommended option on the customer's behalf.

There is a generator that builds the next sizes up from the option you are looking at, pulling each variant's real cost through as it goes. It saves the typing. It does not decide what to charge.

What the customer does

The customer opens their order portal, sees the options as cards, picks one and confirms. The payment schedule for that option is built at that moment, so the deposit they are asked for is sized against the option they picked. Until they confirm, the pay button stays disabled and says why.

Converting

A card deposit converts the quote the moment the payment is captured. A bank transfer or cash payment is different: the customer submits it, it sits awaiting verification and it converts when a person approves it. Nothing marks a bank transfer received until someone confirms the money landed.

Converting adopts the chosen option's items, pricing, delivery fee and label, discount, notes, custom field answers and any details still to be filled in. The delivery type and the address stay at order level, because they belong to the order rather than to a size. The order goes to confirmed and a timeline entry records which option was adopted and who did it.

Two guards sit in front of that. A quote with several options and no resolvable selection is refused, because guessing is worse than asking. And if a payment is waiting for approval against a different option than the one you are converting to, the conversion stops and offers you the override rather than applying that money to a total it was never computed against. Money already recorded is never lost in a conversion.

Statuses, and what each one costs you

An order moves through pending, confirmed, in production, ready, dispatched, delivered and completed, and can be cancelled from any of those but the last two. You can skip forward, so a counter sale goes straight from pending to completed. Completed and cancelled are the end of the line.

Stock is the part worth knowing. Nothing is reserved while a record is a quote or a pending order. Ingredients and packaging are reserved when the order first reaches confirmed or beyond, and come off your stock on hand at delivered or completed. Cancelling releases the reservations and puts back anything already deducted.

Editing an order that already exists

An order stays broadly editable until it is delivered. The gates are real ones:

Delivered locks the items, the pricing and the delivery logistics. You can still record delivery confirmation, take payment and fix a phone number.
Completed or cancelled leaves notes, tags and attachments.
Once money has been collected, the customer on the order cannot be changed and the total cannot be reduced below what has already been paid.
Deleting is only available on a pending order with nothing paid against it. Everything else cancels instead, which keeps the record.

Change the total on an order with a schedule and the unpaid instalments resize around what is already paid. Paid rows are left alone.

Cancelling

Cancelling releases stock, cancels the outstanding payment rows and stops the schedule so no more reminders go out. It does not move money. Refunding is a separate action taken against a specific payment, by a person, because a cancellation and a refund are not the same decision.

Switch quote validity on in Settings and quotes get an expiry date. Ones nobody answered are cancelled automatically when they expire, with a note on the timeline.

Design decisions

Expiry closes a dead quote on its own. The follow-up before that is an automation you switch on.
A multi-option quote converts only on a real selection, the customer's or yours.
Cancelling stops the schedule and returns the stock. Refunding is a deliberate, separate action.
Cost changes cascade, prices wait for you. That is covered in recipe costing.

Essentials covers 100 orders over the life of the account. A quote is the same record as an order, so it takes a number when you create it. Growth and Business are uncapped.

Cake order management, from quote to delivered