A quote status is the lifecycle stage of a customer quote, from Draft through Submitted, Approved, and finally Converted into a manufacturing order. It is the single field that tells everyone where an offer stands: still being built, out with the customer, accepted, declined, lapsed, or turned into a real job. The status moves in one general direction, from a private draft toward a committed order, and it gives sales, planning, and production a shared vocabulary for the state of every quote without anyone having to chase an email thread.
This entry defines the quote status and shows how it behaves inside EDGEBIC by User Solutions. For the wider index of planning terms, see the manufacturing glossary, and for the what-if alternatives inside a quote, read what is a quote scenario.
How it works
A quote begins as a Draft, the stage where a sales rep is still calculating pricing and the offer has not left the building. When it is sent, it becomes Submitted. While the customer weighs it, it sits Under Review. From there it reaches one of three outcomes: Approved when the customer accepts, often signaled by a purchase order; Rejected when they decline; or Expired when the validity window closes with no answer at all.
An approved quote has one further stage. When it is turned into a manufacturing order, it becomes Converted, which is the successful end of the lifecycle. Conversion is a deliberate act, separate from approval, because accepting an offer and creating the job are two different events. A quote can sit Approved for a while before anyone converts it, and the status makes that gap visible.
The value of the status is that it is a shared signal. Sales knows which offers are live; planning knows which are about to become work; production knows which have crossed into real orders. Because Rejected and Expired are distinct, a pipeline can honestly separate offers that were turned down from offers that were simply never answered, which keeps win-rate figures meaningful.
A concrete example
A print shop quotes a customer for two hundred brochures. While the estimator is still working out paper and press time, the quote is a Draft, visible only inside the shop. Once the price is set and the PDF goes out by email, the quote flips to Submitted.
The customer's purchasing team takes a few days to consider it, so the quote reads Under Review. Then the purchase order arrives: the quote becomes Approved. A planner picks it up and creates a manufacturing order for the two hundred brochures, and the quote becomes Converted, its final state, now a historical record of how the job was priced and promised. Had the customer instead said the price was too high, the quote would read Rejected; had they gone silent past the thirty-day validity, it would read Expired. Each ending tells a different, honest story.
How EDGEBIC uses it
In EDGEBIC, a quote is built by running the scheduling engine in simulation mode to estimate lead time and cost, and its status tracks where that offer stands in its lifecycle. The status advances as the offer moves from an internal draft, out to the customer, through their review, to acceptance, rejection, or expiry, and finally to conversion into a manufacturing order.
The distinction between Approved and Converted matters in practice, because acceptance and job creation are separate steps. An approved quote is a commitment from the customer; a converted quote is a live job on the plant. When conversion happens, the quote's scheduling direction and its simulated basis carry onto the new manufacturing order, so the promise made in the quote becomes the starting point for the real schedule rather than a figure someone re-derives by hand.
Because the status cleanly separates rejected offers from expired ones, and pending offers from converted jobs, it doubles as a pipeline signal: what is live, what is won, what lapsed, and what has already become work on the floor. The day that validity runs out is the quote expiry date, past which the priced promise should be re-run rather than re-sent. To explore the alternatives a single quote can carry, read what is a quote scenario, and for the per-step tweaks inside those scenarios, read what is a step override in quote scenarios. For the order a converted quote becomes, see what is a manufacturing order.
Expert Q&A: Deep Dive
Q: How do we tell the difference between a quote the customer accepted and one we have actually turned into a job?
A: Those are two different statuses. Approved means the customer accepted the offer, typically when a purchase order arrives, but no production work exists yet. Converted means you have created a manufacturing order from that approved quote, so the job now exists and can be scheduled. Keeping them separate matters because acceptance and job creation are distinct events: a quote can sit Approved for a while before someone actually converts it, and the status tells you exactly which of those has happened.
Q: A quote sat unanswered past its validity date. What status should it carry?
A: Expired, which means the validity period passed without a customer decision. It is distinct from Rejected, where the customer actively declined. Expired is the passive outcome, the offer simply lapsed, and it keeps your pipeline honest by separating quotes that were turned down from quotes that were never answered. If the customer later revives interest, that is normally handled as a fresh quote or a re-issue rather than by reviving an expired one, so the history stays clean.
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