Survey the site

Every route ends in the same place — a draft PQS survey attached to a technical request — but they differ in how much typing they save you.

Pre-Quote Surveys opens as a list and offers a kanban and a calendar from the switcher at the top right. Every one of them is filtered to pre-quote surveys only and hides cancelled ones behind the Not Cancelled facet, which you can remove.

The search panel offers filters for Not Cancelled, Draft, In Progress, Completed, Pending Approval and Approved, and group-by for State, Surveyor and Customer.

The header carries the whole workflow. Start Survey in draft; Mobile App in draft or in progress, which auto-starts a draft survey and opens the touch capture screen; Complete Survey while in progress; Approve and Reject in pending approval, both visible only to survey managers; Cancel in every state except approved and cancelled; Reset to Draft only on a cancelled survey; and Create Quotation once the survey is Completed or Approved, which is visible only to salespeople. Beside them sit Print PDF, Export Excel, Export CSV and Email Report, available in any state.

The smart buttons above the title are Customer Location and Get Directions (only when the site has coordinates), Quotations counting the orders created from this survey, Done counting completed items, and Duplicate.

Under the title, a coloured strip always names the next sensible action — Add the first survey item, Ready to start, Continue measuring — 3 of 5 items completed, All items are done, Waiting for approval, Ready for quotation. It is a prompt, not a control.

Below the fields sit the live tiles: Items (done of total), Completion with its bar, Surveyed Area in square metres, Quotations when any exist, and an All Items Done tile when nothing is outstanding.

Opening an item — through Add New Item or the arrow at the end of a row — gives the pre-quote speed form, a single screen built for a phone held in one hand at the bottom of a ladder. Its header has Save & Add Next and Mark Complete, and a two-step status bar running Pending to Pass.

The item record itself also holds the three-point aperture measurements, the diagonals and the whole site-conditions block, but no pre-quote screen shows them: opening an item from a pre-quote survey always lands on this speed form, and the mobile app and the surveyor's portal show the same reduced set. Those fields belong to the production survey, and that is where they are filled in. At the pre-quote stage a good width, a good height and a photograph are worth more than twenty fields half-filled.

Complete Survey stamps the completion time and then routes the survey. It goes to Pending Approval when the survey requires approval, and straight to Completed when it does not. For a pre-quote survey the only rule that applies is the Approval Threshold (%) in Site Surveys › Configuration › Settings, default 5: if the total surveyed area differs from the total quoted area by more than that, a manager has to sign it off. A pre-quote survey typically has no quoted area to differ from, so in practice it completes directly.

Going to approval also raises a to-do activity, Survey Approval Required, on every Survey Manager. Approve stamps the approver and date and closes those activities; Reject sends the survey back to Draft — not to In Progress — and closes them with "Pre-Quote survey rejected — returned for corrections". Approving a pre-quote survey deliberately writes nothing back to any sale order: that is a production-survey job.

If the technical request stage mapping is configured (Stage after Pre-Quote Approved in the same Settings screen), approval also moves the request forward to that stage. The move is forward-only, and an unset mapping does nothing at all.

Create Quotation opens the Create Quotation from Survey dialog. It is the one wizard that matters on a pre-quote survey, and it does considerably more than open a blank order.

Choosing a profile and colour resolves each line's product through the Colour & Material mapping. If any line is still without one, a warning banner appears and Create Quotation refuses with "No product found for: … Please configure the Color & Material mapping for the selected Profile + Color combination, or assign a product manually."

When it does run, it creates the sale order for the survey's customer, links it to the technical request, and writes one order line per wizard row carrying the description, item code, width, height, area, sill height, floor, location, colours, glass and profile names, with the quantity taken from the surveyed quantity (falling back to 1). Each survey item is then back-linked to the order line it produced, and the survey PDF is attached to both the order and the survey with a note in each chatter. The new quotation opens.

Two things are worth knowing before you press it. Every item is carried, not just the completed ones — an item left half-measured becomes a quotation line at whatever size it holds. And with Generate Designs on, every window is drawn as a fixed window; openable types are a later, deliberate edit in the designer. Design generation never blocks the quotation: what was drawn, what was skipped and what failed is summarised in one note on the order's chatter.

Select several surveys in the list and the Actions menu offers seven wizards, all bound to the survey list:

Email Report opens its own small dialog — Recipient Email (required, "Please enter a recipient email address." if left empty), CC Emails, Subject, Message Body and an Include Excel Export toggle — and sends the survey PDF, optionally with the spreadsheet beside it.

The Compare to Order comparison wizard exists on this model too, but it compares a production survey with its sale order. Called from a pre-quote survey it looks for the production survey on the same order and stops with "No production survey found for comparison. Please create and complete it first."

Print PDF renders the pre-quote survey report: a cover page, then exactly two openings per page — each with its measurement band and its photographs and sketch printed full width — and a final Summary & Sign-off page carrying the customer and surveyor signature blocks. It deliberately prints no design drawing; the drawing belongs to the quotation, not to the record of what was measured.

Export Excel and Export CSV produce a measurements-only file — the pre-quote export has no quoted-versus-surveyed columns because there is nothing quoted to compare against. Both check your access rights before they render.

Two different portal pages exist, for two different audiences, and they are easy to confuse because their addresses differ by one letter.

The surveyor's portal — /my/surveys

A surveyor needs no WindoorERP seat. They sign in as a portal user and work at /my/surveys, which plans their day, opens each job, and captures the openings where they stand. A pre-quote survey gets its own capture screen — the one screen in the product where a surveyor may add items, because on a pre-quote there is nothing sold to protect. The screen carries the item list, the aperture and dimension fields, the photo slots and the not-ready outcome, and it queues its saves through connection gaps.

Before leaving, the surveyor runs the ready check, which lists every blocker at once: no items at all, items neither measured nor marked not-ready, a not-ready item without a reason, a completed item missing a dimension. Out-of-tolerance measurements and openings that disagree with their own siblings are reported as advice and never block. Submit starts the survey if it is still a draft, completes it exactly as the back-office button would, and then raises a Quote <customer> to-do on the job's salesperson with the survey attached — the pre-quote survey's one automatic hand-off. Quoting itself stays a human click, because the wizard needs a profile and a colour the field cannot supply.

No portal route can approve a survey. After submission the surveyor cannot edit either: "This survey has already been submitted and can no longer be edited. Ask the office if it needs to be re-opened." Re-entry is a Re-visit Request, which a manager decides in Site Surveys › Field Portal › Re-visit Requests. The whole surveyor experience — the day plan, the outcomes, the customer message templates, the performance page — is documented in Measure on site from the surveyor's phone.

The customer's page — /my/survey/<id>

Singular, and a different thing entirely. Every survey is born with an access token, and /my/survey/<id>?access_token=… renders a public page for the customer: the reference, the order if there is one, the status badge, the survey type, the scheduled and completed dates, who is attending, a measurement progress bar, a warning naming how many openings were found not ready, the on-site contact and access notes, and the signature once it exists. There are no measurements and no prices on it — that is what makes the link safe to send.

The link is real and the token is checked properly, but nothing in the interface hands it to you: the action that mints it and the Portal URL field that holds it are not on any form or menu. In practice the page is reached only from a link built elsewhere. Ask your administrator if you need it.

"Survey can only be started from Draft state." — someone has already started or completed this survey. Check the status bar before pressing anything.

"Items can only be added in Draft or In Progress state." — the survey has been completed. A completed pre-quote survey is closed to new openings; duplicate it, or have the manager reject it back to Draft.

"Please enter surveyed dimensions before marking as complete." — a width and a height are the minimum an item must carry.

"The survey must be Completed or Approved before creating a quotation." — press Complete Survey first. A survey sitting in Pending Approval is not enough either: it needs the manager's decision.

"Only Pre-Quote surveys can create quotations from this wizard." — you have reached the quotation wizard from a production survey. Production surveys feed production orders, not quotations.

"No product found for: … configure the Color & Material mapping…" — the profile and outside colour you chose have no product mapped for those item codes. Complete the mapping, or set the Product column by hand on the offending rows.

The item code came out as New Item rather than a number — the item has no floor, or the floor has no one-character Code on it. Set the code under Configuration › Dropdown Options › Floors.

The quotation was created but the drawings are missing — design generation is best-effort and never blocks the order. Open the new order's chatter: one note lists exactly what was drawn, what was skipped for missing dimensions or zero quantity, and what failed.

A dropdown on the item form does not offer a value that exists under Configuration › Dropdown Options — those records are a reference list only. The selections on the item are fixed in the software and adding an option does not extend them.