Quote Expiry Dates in EDGEBIC: Why a Promise Has a Shelf Life

Every quote in EDGEBIC carries an expiry date, defaulting to 30 days, because a simulated promise date is a snapshot of your shop's capacity, and capacity moves. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions, the date and cost on a quote were built by scheduling the job into the real gaps your floor had at the moment you simulated. As orders land and the backlog shifts, those gaps change, so a quote has a shelf life. The expiry date is the honest admission of that fact, and re-simulating before a stale quote moves is what keeps a promise from quietly becoming a lie.

A promise date is a snapshot, not a constant

The reason a quote expires starts with how the promise date is built. EDGEBIC does not add a fixed number of days to today. It borrows the live finite capacity scheduling engine, schedules the quoted job against every committed order, and reads the finish date off that plan. The date is accurate precisely because it accounts for the shop as it stands.

But "as it stands" has a timestamp. The moment a new order is scheduled, or an existing one slips, the gaps the quoted job would have used are different. A date that was real when you simulated it can be optimistic a week later. That is not a flaw in the simulation. It is the difference between a live plan and a static estimate, and it is why the quote needs an expiry the way a perishable good needs a use-by date.

The expiry field and its default

Two dates on the quote frame its validity. The quote date is when the quote was raised. The expiry date is when it stops being valid, and it defaults to 30 days after the quote date. The only hard rule is that the expiry must be later than the quote date; a quote cannot expire before it exists.

Thirty days is a sensible middle ground, not a law. It is long enough for a normal sales conversation to play out and short enough that a quote cannot outlive the capacity plan it was built on by much. You can set it shorter or longer per quote to match how fast your shop's load actually turns over.

What "expired" actually means

An expired quote is not deleted, and nothing about it is thrown away. Its status can be marked Expired, and its simulated dates and costs are simply treated as stale. The quote still holds everything it did: the product, quantity, direction, markup, price, and the last simulation's results.

That means an expired quote is revivable. Re-run the simulation, and its start date, end date, hours, and cost update to reflect today's capacity and rates. Move it back into the active pipeline, and it is a live quote again with an honest date. Expiry is a prompt, not a tombstone. The full status flow is in the quote lifecycle.

The refresh banner: the system tells you when the world moved

You do not have to watch the calendar to catch a stale quote. When work-center rates or capacity change after a simulation, the quote view shows a banner asking you to refresh and re-run before sending. Following it is the whole discipline. The banner is EDGEBIC noticing that the snapshot the quote is built on no longer matches the floor, and telling you before the customer finds out.

A quote's dates and costs are point-in-time by nature, so a simulation that ran last week and a shop that took on three new orders since are simply out of sync. Refreshing re-anchors the quote to the current plan.

A worked example of a quote going stale

Acme's 200-unit Widget-A quote simulates on July 16 and comes back with a window of July 20 through August 14, a 25-day lead time built around the mill's current backlog. The margin is green at the quoted $85 per unit. The customer goes quiet.

Six weeks later the customer signs and expects the August 14 finish. But the quote expired at the 30-day mark for a reason: since July 16 the shop booked several more mill-heavy jobs, and the gaps the quoted job would have used are gone. Re-simulating now returns a later window, because the milling step queues behind the new backlog. The honest move is to hand the customer the new date, not the stale one. If instead the shop had quieted down, re-simulating might beat the old date, a pleasant surprise to pass along. Either way, the number the customer commits to is the current one, not a six-week-old snapshot.

How expiry ties into conversion

Expiry matters most at the moment of conversion, because converting a quote copies its dates and costs straight onto a new manufacturing order. Convert a stale quote and the order inherits a plan built on an old floor, so the promise the customer received and the date the real schedule produces will not agree.

The habit that prevents this: re-simulate before converting any quote that is near or past its expiry. Confirm the dates and the margin against today's shop, then convert. The order then inherits a current, capacity-aware plan, and the real scheduling run reproduces a date you can actually keep. See how a quote becomes an order for what carries forward.

Setting expiry dates that protect you

The right expiry window depends on your shop, not a rule. A job shop whose backlog churns weekly should keep the window short, so a quote cannot outlive its plan. A make-to-order shop with long, stable lead times can extend it. The test is simple: the expiry should be short enough that a quote you send today is still a promise you can keep when the customer signs it.

Whatever window you choose, treat any quote at or past expiry as a re-simulate before it moves. That single habit is what separates a quoting process that stays honest over time from one that slowly fills with promises the floor can no longer keep.

The takeaway

A quote expiry date exists because a promise date is a capacity snapshot, and snapshots age. EDGEBIC defaults the window to 30 days, flags stale simulations with a refresh banner, and lets you revive any expired quote by re-simulating against today's floor. Set the window to match your shop's volatility, refresh before you send or convert, and the expiry does its job: it keeps a quoted date honest for exactly as long as it is true. See the full workflow in the EDGEBIC quoting guide, how a stale date can shift in why a quoted date can move, and the platform in full on the EDGEBIC overview.