Estimating for Dynamics 365 Business Central
An emailed request for quote becomes a priced quote in your own sheet, every line mapped to Business Central’s item card at your markups. Your estimator reviews it, sends it and enters it as a sales quote in Business Central.
Sales & estimatingUpdated Oct 202620 ERPs
See it work on Business Central.
Click through the steps. Fictional data, in Business Central’s terms; the real thing runs on Business Central.
Attached material list for the detached garage at Lot 14 Birchwood. Need pricing by Friday.
Customer, project, due date and the material list, from the estimating mailbox.
The problem, as it happens in Business Central.
A request for quote is an email with a material list or a set of drawings attached. The estimator reads it, finds each item in Business Central’s item card, checks cost, applies the house markup for that customer, and builds the quote in the same Excel sheet the yard has used for years. Then a revision comes in.
The desk writes over a thousand quotes a year. Most of the time goes into reading and retyping, not into the pricing decisions that win the job.
How it works.
- 1
The request becomes a card
Forwarded into the estimating mailbox or opened by hand: customer matched to the customer card, project, due date, attachments. The estimator sees it on the desk with the due date on it.
- 2
Lines are read and mapped
Items read out of the material list or taken off the drawings, mapped to the item card in Business Central, with the matches a person should check flagged. A drawing is measured into regions the estimator confirms before anything is priced.
- 3
Costed and priced
Cost from Business Central, price from your versioned markup policy by customer and category. Supplier quotes you hold are priced from where you have them. The estimator sees the margin per line, not just the total.
- 4
The quote, in your sheet
The house Excel sheet and its PDF, versioned. The estimator reviews, downloads and sends from their own mailbox, and enters it as a sales quote in Business Central. Revisions are a new version, not a new file.
How it connects to Business Central.
Lunica reads the item card and the customer card through Business Central’s API, under a user that can only read: current cost, the price level and markup each account carries, and the quotes already in Business Central’s history, so a revision is priced against what went out last time. Supplier quotes you hold are read from the share or mailbox where you keep them.
Nothing lands in Business Central without a person and nothing is sent on its own. The quote is written into your own sheet and PDF; the estimator sends it from their own mailbox. It goes into Business Central as a Business Central API call or import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared, and Lunica records the number afterwards so the pipeline and Business Central agree.
What a week looks like.
- Reading and retyping stop being the job.
- Every quote is priced on the same policy.
- Revisions keep their history.
- Pipeline, hit rate and expiring quotes in one view.
Questions
Does it send the quote?
No. It tells the estimator a quote is ready. The estimator sends it from their own mailbox.
Does it write to Business Central?
No. Lunica reads Business Central and prepares the quote. A person enters it as a sales quote in Business Central, and Lunica records the number afterwards.
What about takeoffs from drawings?
Drawings are measured into regions a person confirms before anything is priced.
Will it match our sheet?
It writes your sheet, not ours. The output is the Excel file your customers already recognise, plus a PDF.
Pass-through quotes from a manufacturer?
Attached and priced from the supplier’s quote on file, with its validity date tracked.
Where does it run, and what does the model see?
On one server inside your network, whether Business Central is in Microsoft’s cloud or on your own server, reading through Business Central’s API, under a user that can only read. The model sees the request, its attachments and the items it is matching, not the whole item card.
Does it need a server?
Lunica runs on one server inside your network, whether Business Central is in Microsoft’s cloud or on your own server, set up and maintained by Lunica. It reads Dynamics 365 Business Central through Business Central’s API, under a user that can only read. There is no inbound connection from outside your network.
What does Lunica read in Business Central?
The customer card, open items and terms, purchase orders and receipts, the item card, quotes and order history, as each workflow needs them. Read-only, and only the rows a task is about.
Can it post to Business Central?
Nothing lands in Business Central without a person. What belongs in Business Central goes back as a Business Central API call or import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared.
What about our documents?
Invoice copies and scans keep living in the attachments on the record. Lunica reads them when a workflow needs one and never writes to them.
The same workflow, on another ERP.
Estimating is written for every system on the list. You’re reading the Business Central version.
Lumber and building materials
Wholesale distribution
General business
- Dynamics 365 Business Central
- NetSuite
- Sage 100
- QuickBooks Enterprise
- Acumatica
- SAP Business One
- Epicor Kinetic
Another system? Tell us which →
See it on your Business Central data.
Thirty minutes. We walk the workflow on Business Central data, then map it to yours.