From Quotation to Order: Setting Up Your Sales Workflow in Odoo

A sales workflow that lives in people’s heads breaks the moment the business grows past one or two salespeople. Quotes go out in different formats, prices vary by whoever sent them, and the handoff to the warehouse and finance is a manual scramble. Odoo Sales lets you encode the workflow once so it runs consistently. Here is how to set it up.

Start with quotation templates

If your team sends similar quotes repeatedly — a standard service package, a common product bundle — build quotation templates. A template pre-loads the products, descriptions, terms, and optional add-ons, so a salesperson produces a complete, consistent quote in minutes instead of rebuilding it each time. This is the single biggest time-saver and the easiest way to keep your quotes on-brand and on-price.

Configure your product catalogue and pricing first

A quote is only as good as the catalogue behind it. Before you optimise the workflow, make sure products carry correct prices, units, and tax settings. Configure pricelists for your customer tiers — reseller, retail, volume — so the right price applies automatically based on who the customer is. When pricing is configured, salespeople stop guessing and quotes stop being inconsistent.

Enable online quotation and e-signing

Odoo can present quotes as a web page the customer views and accepts online, with optional online signature and even online payment of a deposit. This removes the back-and-forth of “did you get my quote?” and shortens the time between sending and confirming. For Indonesian B2B, pairing the online quote link with a WhatsApp message gets it seen quickly.

Add approval steps where they matter

If your business needs sign-off on big discounts or large orders, configure an approval step so a quote above a threshold routes to a manager before it goes out. This prevents margin-eroding discounts being given without oversight, while letting routine quotes flow without friction. Do not over-engineer this — add approvals only where a real risk exists.

Make the handoff automatic

This is the payoff. When a quote is confirmed into a sales order, configure what happens next:

• Delivery: the order creates a delivery order in Inventory, so the warehouse sees what to pick and ship without re-entry.
• Invoicing: decide your invoicing policy — invoice on order, on delivery, or on a percentage — so billing triggers correctly and matches what was sold.

The goal is that confirming an order sets off the whole downstream chain automatically. No re-typing into the warehouse system, no separate invoice creation, no reconciling differences later.

Track and review

With the workflow in place, your pipeline of quotes and orders becomes a live report: what is sent, what is won, average deal size, and where deals stall. Review it regularly — the workflow is not just about efficiency, it is about visibility into how selling is actually going.

A sensible rollout order

Catalogue and pricelists first, then quotation templates, then online quoting, then the delivery and invoicing handoff, then approvals if you need them. Build it in that order and each piece stands on a solid foundation.

Getting the quotation-to-order workflow right is one of the highest-leverage things you can do in Odoo — it touches sales, warehouse, and finance at once. If you would like help mapping your real sales process into Odoo, we are glad to walk through it with you in an hour, no charge.