D365 Business Central : Create Sales Quote using Contact

Have you ever wanted to create a new Sales Quote without creating a new Customer? For businesses dealing with multiple quotes for potential clients, we want to avoid creating new customers for every prospect, especially if we want to maintain a clean customer list. One workaround is to have a dummy Customer when you create a Sales Quote, then create a new customer when the prospect turns to a customer. However, there is another workaround, which is to use Contact. Let’s explore this method.

Let’s say we have a prospect called NAV Guy. First off, you’ll need to create a new Contact for NAV Guy. Once that’s done, it’s time to dive into creating the Sales Quote.

Instead of filling in the Customer details as usual, we’re going to utilise the Contact No. field, which you’ll find tucked away under “Show More” on the Sales Quote page.

When we select the Contact No, BC will prompt you to pick the Customer Template. This template helps pull in essential info like Posting Group, Payment Terms, Customer Price Group, Dimensions, and more, typically associated with Customers but not Contacts.

After selecting the Contact No, we can see that the Customer No is still blank while the Contact No and Customer Template Code are filled in. For blogging purposes, I have personalised the page so the Customer No, Contact No, and Customer Template Code are no longer hidden.

Note that there is also Bill-to Customer Template, but it is not on the page.

Let’s fill in the rest of the quote details as usual.

That’s it. We can print and send the Quote without creating a customer record.

When the contact transitions from prospect to customer, simply convert the quote into a sales order using the “Make Order” function.

During this process, you’ll be prompted to create a new customer. Confirm the creation, and the system will seamlessly generate a new customer record based on the Contact’s information and the designated template. This newly created Customer will automatically link to the Sales Quote, which seamlessly transitions into a Sales Order.

Additionally, if you possess multiple Quotes for the same Contact and one converts into an Order, the other Quotes will update with the newly created customer number—streamlining your operations further.

Manual Customer creation is also an option through the Actions > Create > Create Customer.

However, it’s worth noting the limitation: the logic for creating a new Customer resides within the Release Sales Document codeunit. As such, you cannot release a Sales Quote or approve an Approval Request without triggering the creation of a new customer.If you need the Sales Quote to be approved first, then you will need to dive into some customisation.

And there you have it. A simple trick to streamline your Sales Quoting process without unnecessarily cluttering up your Customer list. I hope this helps you.