Purchase Quotation

A Purchase Quotation is a request for a price sent to a supplier — the buying-side mirror of the sales quotation. It is the earliest document in the procure-to-pay chain and the one with the lightest footprint: creating one changes nothing in the business. No stock is reserved, no accounting entry is posted. It exists to gather supplier offers so a buyer can compare them before committing.

Purpose

A purchase quotation answers the question “what would this cost us to buy, and from whom is it cheapest?” It is used when a buyer wants prices before raising a firm order — the request-for-quotation (RFQ) step of purchasing. The buyer lists the items and quantities needed and sends the request to one or several suppliers; each supplier responds with prices and terms, and the buyer compares the offers.

The purchase quotation is optional. Purchasing can begin directly at the Purchase Order stage. But where competitive sourcing is expected — large or first-time buys, tender processes, cost-sensitive procurement — the purchase quotation is where each supplier’s offer is recorded, and copying the winning one forward into a PO keeps that price consistent through the rest of the chain.

Position in the document chain

The purchase quotation is the head of the purchasing chain. Once a supplier is chosen, its quotation is copied into a Purchase Order; from there the chain continues to Goods Receipt PO and A/P Invoice.

flowchart TD
    REQ([Purchase Request]) -->|sourced| PQ[Purchase Quotation]
    PQ -->|supplier chosen| PO[Purchase Order]
    PO --> GRPO[Goods Receipt PO]
    GRPO --> API[A/P Invoice]

    style PQ fill:#ede9fe,stroke:#7c3aed,stroke-width:3px
    style PO fill:#ede9fe,stroke:#7c3aed
    style GRPO fill:#dcfce7,stroke:#16a34a
    style API fill:#fef9c3,stroke:#ca8a04

• Copies from: nothing (it is the start), or optionally a purchase request.
• Becomes: a Purchase Order (one-click copy) once a supplier’s offer is accepted. The quoted price and terms carry forward through the document-chain fields (BaseType / BaseEntry / BaseLine).

Because the same need may be quoted to several suppliers, a purchasing exercise often produces several purchase quotations — one per supplier — of which at most one is converted to a PO.

Key fields

A purchase quotation is a Document entity — the universal base shared by every SAP B1 transactional document — distinguished by its DocObjectCode. The supplier is a business partner of vendor type, so its CardCode is a V-code (e.g. V001).

Header

Lines (DocumentLines collection)

Stock and G/L effect

None. A purchase quotation reserves no inventory and posts no journal entry. Stock levels and the general ledger are untouched. This is what makes it safe to raise and revise freely — it is a request for information, not a transaction. Nothing in the business changes until the chosen quotation becomes a Purchase Order and, later, a Goods Receipt PO.

Service Layer entity

(SAP’s current generally-available Service Layer is /b1s/v2/; Norma’s connector and mock both speak /b1s/v1/PurchaseQuotations.)

How to create it in Norma

Use the create_purchase_quotation tool — the purchasing twin of create_quotation. It needs:

• card_code — the supplier’s code, a vendor V-code (e.g. V001).
• lines — each an item_code + quantity.
• Optionally per line, unit_price — when given it is authoritative (the price being requested or recorded); when omitted the line falls back to the item’s list price. This matters for a quotation, where the whole point is often a negotiated price that differs from the standard list.

Every Norma write is held for human review before it reaches SAP. The tool prepares the purchase quotation, the review gate shows exactly what will be created (supplier, lines, prices, total), and only on approval does the connector POST it to /b1s/v1/PurchaseQuotations. Nothing is written to SAP until a human approves.