The place quoting happens
A quote request arrives as a mess — an email, a photo of a handwritten list, a spreadsheet. Quote Rabbit reads what the customer actually wrote, matches every line to your own Business Central catalogue, prices it at that customer's price, and marks the lines that need your judgement. A person always presses send.
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- screen the whole quote is built on
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- things it writes back to Business Central
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- records it touches that it did not create
What it is
Not a document processor with an inbox bolted on
Quote Rabbit is where the quoting work is done — and that changes what belongs inside it. A request is a conversation with a customer, not a file to parse, and the quote goes back from the same screen, in the same thread it arrived in.
A document processor
- What arrives is a file to parse
- You work in your mail client, then the ERP, then a spreadsheet
- An incomplete line becomes an exception report
- Choosing where to buy is somebody else's job, later
- What comes out is a parsed document
Quote Rabbit
- What arrives is a conversation with a customer
- You work in one screen
- An incomplete line is a question you send — and the answer lands back in the same thread
- Choosing the supplier is part of quoting, because it sets the cost the margin sits on
- What comes out is a quote, sent, on the channel it arrived on
Anyone can build a quote document — a PDF with line items and a total takes a week. The hard part, and the part worth building, is working out what the customer meant: turning their own words into one specific line in one specific catalogue at one specific price, with the supplier chosen. That needs the ERP's data, and it gets better the longer one distributor uses it.
The problem
Of everything quoting involves, one step is hard
Re-typing lines is transcription. Prices are a lookup. Margin is a rule. The quote itself is a template. The whole problem is working out what “those valves” means — reliably enough that a person does not have to re-check every line.
Customers use their own names for things: superseded part numbers, a competitor's code, a free-text description, or nothing identifying at all. The same physical item often exists several times in one catalogue, under different codes from different suppliers at different prices. And “like last time” can only be answered from that customer's order history, which lives in the ERP and not in the message.
Being wrong is expensive in both directions: quote the wrong item and you either lose the order or win it at a price that costs money to honour. Meanwhile the same request went to your competitors, and the first credible answer back is usually the one that wins.
The half everyone misses: the easy promise is “a human just checks and hits send.”
That promise only holds if the system says which lines to check. If a person has to re-verify every line, nothing was saved. Per-line confidence is not a feature of Quote Rabbit — it is the mechanism. The real output is a quote where the uncertain lines are marked, so a person reviews a handful of lines instead of all of them. That is where hours become minutes.
The connection
It works against your Business Central, live
No import, no nightly sync, no copy of your data to keep in step. Quote Rabbit holds a connection to your own Business Central tenant and asks it questions at the moment a request arrives — because a stale copy quotes yesterday's prices and items that no longer exist.
What it reads, at the moment it is needed
- The catalogue — an item added this morning is quotable this morning
- Stock and availability — “in stock today” is why a reviewer picks one supply route over another
- Customers and contacts — identity is what unlocks a price list
- Order history — the only place “those valves like last time” can be answered from
- Suppliers and what they cost — lead time, cost, and your margin at the quoted price
What it writes back
- The quote itself — a real Business Central sales quote, so reporting, follow-up and conversion to order work the way they already do
- The customer's own part names — standard item references your BC partner already understands, and they keep working whether or not you keep paying us
- A new customer record, when a first-time enquiry becomes real business — so the relationship starts in your system, not ours
Where the line is
What it will not do, said before you ask
It does not write stock quantities. It does not post anything financial. It does not touch a record it did not create.
Nothing about the product needs the permission it declines. Stock moves when a quote becomes an order and Business Central posts it, through the same path it always did. That boundary is checkable, which makes it worth more than any certification — and it is the version of this product a distributor's IT contact or Business Central partner can approve.
How it works
From a mess to a sent quote, in eight moments
The clock starts when the request arrives, and elapsed time is the number this product exists to shrink — most of a slow quote is the request sitting in a queue, not somebody typing.
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Everything lands in one place
Email, WhatsApp, EDI, a file somebody drops in. One inbox, one answer to “what have we not replied to yet”, and every row shows how long it has been waiting.
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It knows who is asking
Which unlocks their agreed prices, their history, and the names they personally use for things. When it cannot tell, it says “unknown customer” out loud and quotes at list rather than guessing.
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It splits what they wrote in two
The requested lines on one side; the deadline, the job reference, the correction and the question on the other. Those ride on the quote — a deadline nobody carried is a job lost late, quietly.
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Every line is matched to something you actually sell
By your item number, by the name that customer uses for it, or by what they bought from you last time. Every match says how it was found and how far ahead of the second candidate it was.
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A person looks — at the uncertain lines only
That is the saving, and nothing else is. Judgement is spent only where judgement is needed; the rest of the quote is already right.
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For every line: where do you buy it?
Every supplier you hold for that item, side by side — their price, lead time, what is on their shelf, and your margin at the price you are quoting. The decision that sets what the job earns, made instead of skipped.
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A person presses send. Always.
The quote goes back in the same thread it arrived in, so the customer sees a conversation and not a system. You are first back while your competitors are still typing.
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The quote lives in your ERP — and your ERP gets smarter
A real Business Central quote, and every confirmed part name is written back as a standard item reference. Next time, that line needs nobody, so the share of lines needing review falls the longer it runs.
Who it is for
One question decides the fit better than any demo
What share of your quote requests arrive as free-text email, an attachment, or a photo? The product's value rises with how much of your inbound needs a human to interpret it — and the answer is measurable before anyone is shown anything.
A strong fit
- Runs Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central online
- Sells physical goods from a catalogue — industrial, plumbing, electrical, fasteners, MRO, building products
- Small to mid-sized, the end of the market nobody courts
- Inbound is mostly unstructured: email bodies, attachments, photos, phone
- High repeat business — the same customers, describing the same things their own way
Not for
- Distributors whose inbound is overwhelmingly EDI and portal traffic — nearly everything already arrives resolved
- Anyone not on Business Central — it is the only ERP target, deliberately
- Business Central on-premises — the product is built for BC online
- Enterprises with a document-processing platform already mapped and running
- Businesses selling services or configured-to-order engineering rather than catalogue items
What is different
What we do not claim, and what we do
The matching mechanism is not novel — several funded companies converged on the same design, which is evidence the design is right and none that it is a moat. The real differences are structural.
Genuinely different
- Nothing to map — useful in hours, where the category norm is a per-customer mapping project measured in weeks
- You keep what it learns: confirmed part names land in your own ERP as standard item references, and they outlive the subscription
- Conversation, not intake: an incomplete line is a question in the same thread, not a dead end on an exception report
- Built for the small end of the market — the distributors a weeks-long implementation can never reach
Claims we refuse to make
- “We match against order history” — the established platforms do this too, and publish it
- “It learns, so review falls over time” — the market leader claims the same, credibly
- “We beat the incumbents on matching accuracy” — we do not, and we will not pretend to
The engineering, article by article
How the quoting pipeline is actually built — written up piece by piece as the editorial cluster behind this page grows.
Can AI turn an emailed quote request into a Business Central quote?
Microsoft ships an agent inside Business Central that reads an emailed request and creates a sales quote. This is the whole eight-step process underneath it, what Microsoft documents as going wrong, and why explaining a match is not the same as ranking which line to check.
Read more8 min read
Why should every quote request land in one queue, whatever channel it arrived on?
A distributor with four inbound channels has four queues and no answer to "what have we not replied to yet". The fix is not a faster reader — it is one queue where every request shows how long it has been waiting.
Read more7 min read
Why can't you price a quote line until you know who is asking?
A price list, a contract price and a quantity break all hang off the customer record. Until a request resolves to a customer, a line can only be quoted at list — and Business Central's own agent matches identity on one field.
Read more7 min read
Is a sentence in a quote email a product line or an instruction?
A deadline, a job reference, a question and a signature block all name products and quantities. Send them to a catalogue and you get order lines nobody asked for — and a delivery date that vanishes without trace.
Read more6 min read
Why does a correction in a follow-up email get lost?
The message that changes something is almost always the second one. A correction names a product and a quantity, so every product test fires on it — and applying it as an order line is how a customer's change disappears while the quote still looks right.
Read more5 min readWhat should happen when a customer's words match nothing in your catalogue?
The honest answer is a line that says it matched nothing. Microsoft documents its own agent returning a washing machine for washing powder — the failure is not the miss, it is the confident near-miss that reaches the quote.
Read more6 min readHow do you show a reviewer why a quote line matched?
Two lines can both look certain while one was a coin toss between catalogue entries differing only in supplier. What separates them is how the match was found, how far ahead of second place it finished, and which attribute made it the right item.
Read more7 min readWhy does a quote that looks correct cost the most?
The right item at the wrong quantity is worse than no match at all, because the item is visibly correct and nobody checks. Microsoft documents its own agent returning 2,000 grams for 2 kilograms and a price of zero that means "not calculated".
Read more7 min read
Common questions
Asked by distributors, answered honestly
These are the objections we actually hear, with the answers we actually give — including the one about references, where the honest answer is not yet.
We already have an ERP. Doesn't Business Central do this?
Business Central holds the catalogue, the prices, the customers and the history — and it has nowhere for a photo of a handwritten list to go, no place to hold a conversation with the customer about a line, and no view that puts several suppliers' prices side by side with your margin on each. Quote Rabbit replaces nothing in BC. It turns a mess into rows BC can accept, and hands the answer back into BC's own tables.
How is this different from the big document-processing platforms?
On matching accuracy, it is not, and we do not claim otherwise. On time to value it is a different category: there is nothing to map, so Quote Rabbit is useful in hours where the established document platforms are useful after weeks of per-customer mapping and testing. At a small distributor's size, an implementation project measured in weeks is not a purchase you can make at all.
What if it gets a line wrong?
A person presses send on every quote, always. Confidence is per line, so the uncertain lines are marked and the rest are not. And it tells you what it could not decide rather than guessing quietly: a missing quantity is shown as missing, never as zero, and a line it cannot match says so plainly with your customer's own words next to it.
We work in Outlook — or Gmail. Will it fit?
Both, and WhatsApp, and EDI, and a file you drop in. It reads a shared orders@ or sales@ mailbox rather than anybody's personal one, and the reply goes back in the original thread, so your customer sees a conversation, not a system.
What happens to what it learns if we stop paying?
You keep it. Confirmed part names are written into your own ERP as standard item references, in a table your Business Central partner already understands, and they keep working without us. If you would rather we did not write to your ERP at all, turn write-back off and take an export instead.
Is our data shared with your other customers?
No. How your customers describe parts is your commercial data, and it is never pooled across distributors.
We are not on Business Central. Is there anything for us?
Quote Rabbit itself is Business Central only, deliberately. But the workflow — a messy request read, lines matched, margins applied, a person pressing send — is something we also build as a phased engagement on other systems. That path starts at our AI quoting engine for distributors page, with an internal quoting engine small enough to be provably right.
Can you show us another distributor using it?
Not yet, and we say so plainly: there is no delivered engagement and no reference distributor. What we offer instead is the working demo and a short pilot on your own catalogue — and it is worth knowing that nobody in this category offers a way to simply try the product, so being able to is itself the difference.