Edit Create a Quote Workflow to allow for calculations

[SHodges45]

Hello,

We currently collect tax in a few locations, and have different shipping rates depending on the number and type of items purchased, and where they are shipping to. Our Sales team currently has to calculate the tax and shipping amounts separately when creating a quote.

I have written some custom code that will call our tax API and the hubspot APIs to calculate and add the tax and shipping line items to the draft quote.

I can set up a workflow that would enroll all draft quotes, however, Ideally we would have a step in the quote creation process where they could trigger that code directly, as there are some cases where a customer may be tax-exempt, the zipcode/state/country fields may not be filled out, etc.

Thanks,

Sydney

[HubDoPete]

Hi Sydney,

An interesting problem, as it’s something we have been working on too, as it’s an area that several of our customers want streamlined.

We’re packing the features into a HubSpot Plugin we are calling “DoQuotes” which we plan to beta test this month. (Sneak peek here)

The first problem you have is the trigger, as it’s tricky to trigger a quote-based workflow when the UI offers limited editing of Quote objects.

If you trigger on quote-created, the HubSpot quotebuilder UI tends to overwrite your data. Plus, in your case, quote-created triggers too soon.

For your use case, you could have a custom property on the deal, such as “Add quote tax and freight”, as a dropdown with one option: 'Now"

When the time is right, the user selects “Now” on that dropdown deal property.

Set quote enrolment based on the associated deal having the Add Quote Tax and Freight property set to “Now”, AND the deal status is Draft.

Another deal-based workflow resets the deal property a few seconds later, in case it is to be used again.

In the long term, create a custom CRM card with a button for the user to press instead of changing a deal property.

Either method takes care of triggering your quote workflow.

We discovered in our pressure tests that taxes added to quotes via the API sometimes “disappear” without a trace.

Taxes are a pseudo object that must be associated with a quote or they disappear in HubSpot back-end data cleanup.

But even when associated with a quote, API-created taxes can still disappear. Not every time though, it is sporadic and therefore hard to reliably replicate.

So we are still troubleshooting why on some occasions, taxes added to a quote via the API simply disappear.

I’d be glad to collaborate with you on this to help you get your solution working.

As we both need to ensure that taxes and fees added via the API, remain on the quote.

best

Pete

[SHodges45]

Hi @HubDoPete,

Thanks for your response! Awesome to hear you’re working on something similar, and thanks for the heads up on the disappearing object issue -- I haven’t seen this yet, but our volumes are super low right now as we’re playing around with it.

Currently, I have the trigger set up based on List Membership (which is based on a new quote created & in draft). This seems (so far) to take long enough for our draft quotes to have added all the line items, etc. And then I have an unenrollment static list that will “reset” membership in case there are multiple quotes per Deal. Its not ideal, but we’ll see how it works for now. I really like your idea with a custom card + button. I haven’t used that functionality yet in Hubspot, but I’m planning on getting more into it this year!

Thanks!

Sydney

[MatthewBoyd]

Hey @SHodges45,

I have just stumbled upon this because we partner with a company called Integration Glue that has just released an update to their Workflow Calculations App.

This new workflow action actually enables us to perform calculations on line items associated to a deal. This includes filtering based on properties at a line item level.

The example from the screenshots below show how we now use it to calculate on a per line item level, the applicable GST (e.g {{amount}}*0.1 in Australia or {{amount*0.15 in New Zealand), but only when the line item has the property “GST Status” is set to Taxable. In this way, you can have different tax rates on the different line items, even on the same deal. I also have mine set up so that it calculated when the line items are added to the deal. If the sales rep adds the line items to the deal before creating the quote, by the time they load the quote builder, the GST property will have already been created. In the scenario they are adding the line items to the deal at the time of creating the quote, they can save the quote, wait 10 secs, refresh the page and the GST is typically calculated.

The same logic can be applied to shipping rates if you have a formula for them, but this typically has a bit more variance to it.

Here’s a recording of it in action