Guided Quote Builder with Margin Guardrails

The problem this kills

Your reps build quotes in Excel. One copies last quarter's tab, another keeps a "secret" pricing sheet, a third fat-fingers a discount and quotes below cost without realizing it. Nobody can tell which price book a quote used, the same deal gets two open quotes that disagree, and finance finds the margin leak a month later — after the deal is signed.

A spreadsheet will never stop a rep from typing the wrong number. It has no idea what your margin floor is, no approval step, and no memory of which prices were live the day the quote went out.

What you'll build

A guided quote builder — a lite CPQ (configure-price-quote) tool — that your team logs into. A rep picks the published price-book version, adds line items and quantities, and the tool does the math: line totals, taxes and fees, and live margin. The moment a quote dips below your configured margin floor, the tool warns or hard-stops. When discount or margin rules require it, the quote routes to the rep's manager for approval before it can be marked official. The result is an approved quote with a unique number, a clean PDF, and a CSV export shaped exactly for your CRM or quote system.

Crucially, every quote is pinned to a price-book version, so the totals are reproducible forever — even after prices change.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into Claude Code. Before it builds anything, it interviews you about your business — your products and SKU conventions, how you discount, your tax/fee rules, your exact margin floor and approval thresholds, your typical and peak quote volumes, and your messy edge cases (bundles, freight, trade-in credits, multi-currency). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. You get a tool shaped around how your team actually sells — not a generic template.

Inside you'll find: the discovery interview, the full data model (price books, versions, quotes, line items, approvals, audit log), step-by-step build prompts you copy and paste, the margin-guardrail logic, the manager approval gate, PDF and CSV generation, and a verification checklist. Plus a No-API fallback so you can run entirely on a Google Sheet / CSV import today, with no integration to your existing system of record.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is not a toy. The plan builds in the controls that make a quoting tool trustworthy:

• Login so only your team can build quotes.
• Row-level security so reps only see their own organization's (and their own) quotes.
• A complete audit trail — who changed which line, who approved, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the tool drafts and calculates, but a manager reviews and approves before a quote becomes official.
• Margin guardrails that warn or hard-stop below your floor.
• Duplicate guards — quote numbers are unique, and you're warned about duplicate open quotes for the same deal.

Who it's for

Sales reps and sales ops who build quotes in Excel and routinely fat-finger pricing or quote below cost. If you've ever discovered a money-losing deal after it shipped, or argued about which price list was "the real one," this is for you. You don't need to be a developer.

You've got this — paste the first prompt.