Estimates - Close once flipped to Sales Order?

Thanks for joining the Community forum, Liza. I have here information and guidelines that could help you handle your estimates and sales orders in QuickBooks Desktop.

First off, please know that QBDT does not have a built-in feature to automatically close estimates (quotes) when they are converted to sales orders or invoices. Thus, you need to manually close it once fully billed by making it inactive. 

Should you want to track your outstanding estimates, you can run the Estimates by Customer report. Moving forward, I'd suggest creating a sales order from the estimate itself.

Additionally, while the ability to automatically close an estimate is unavailable, I think that it's a great idea to help our users like you experience the best of our services. With this, let's send this suggestion to our Product Developers so this can be considered in future updates. Here's how:

1. Open QuickBooks.
2. Go to the Help menu.
3. Select Send Feedback Online.

I'm adding this article you can use should you need to personalize the appearance of your form templates: Use and customize form templates.

Feel free to post here again if you have further QuickBooks-related concerns. We are available 24/7 to lend a hand with each of your queries. Stay safe!

Thank you James! As a follow up question, you mentioned closing the quote after being converted and through the process. We create quotes, then convert to sales orders then convert to invoices. Would there be a system issue if we closed the quote as soon as we converted it to a sales order (the step before the invoice in our case)  or would it close our entire order chain by closing it that early (before finally invoicing)? Thanks again!

Hello there, LizaSFO.

Allow me to chime in and share some information to completely address your concerns about estimates, sales orders, and invoices in QuickBooks Online.

In QuickBooks, the quote, sales order, and invoice workflow is designed to help you track and manage your sales process effectively. Closing a quote after converting it to a sales order should have no impact on the rest of the workflow or your ability to create an invoice for the sales order. You will still have access to the sales order in QuickBooks and can generate an invoice once you're ready.

I've also added this article to learn more about the different customer transaction workflows: Get started with customer transaction workflows in QuickBooks Desktop.

If you have any further questions or need more specific guidance on using QuickBooks Desktop for your quote-to-invoice workflow, please let me know.