Procurement quotation process: the buyer's step by step

On paper, quoting is simple: ask three suppliers for a price and pick the best. In practice, the procurement quotation process has more steps than it looks — and almost none of them stall on the decision. It stalls in the middle, when the replies come in each in their own way and you have to line everything up side by side to compare. This is the real step by step of the person doing the buying, from the first item on the list to the order sent back to the supplier.

1. Build the list of what you need to buy

It all starts with a need: stock ran low, the job site asked for materials, maintenance needs a part. The buyer pulls that into a list of what to quote — what to buy, how much, and by when.

The clearer the list, the better the quote. "Cable" leaves room for the supplier to send just about anything; "flexible cable 2.5 mm², 100 m" leaves no doubt. Describing it well here keeps you from receiving proposals you later can't even compare.

2. Pick the suppliers

With the list ready, you decide who to ask for a price. It might be your usual supplier, plus two or three more for reference, or a new one that showed up with an interesting offer.

Here a simple rule applies: get quotes from at least three. With just one, you have nothing to compare against. With three, you can see what's market price and what's an outlier. If you want the bigger picture before moving on, it's worth understanding what procurement quotation is and how it fits into the routine.

3. Send the request for quotation

Now you fire off the request for quotation — the well-known RFQ. The golden rule is to send the same list, with the same specifications, to everyone. If each supplier gets a different version, you're not comparing — you're guessing.

Plenty of people improvise at this step: one asks by email, another by WhatsApp, a third by phone. Then nobody has a record of what was asked — and the chaos of the next step is already born right here.

4. Take in the replies — and the chaos begins

The replies start trickling in, and this is where the process goes off the rails. You don't get to choose how the quote arrives: each supplier uses whatever's at hand.

• a polished PDF, generated by their system;
• a scanned PDF, crooked, from a stamped sheet of paper;
• a photo or screenshot sent over WhatsApp;
• an Excel spreadsheet, laid out however each one likes;
• the whole catalog, for you to "pick freely."

It's six in the evening, nine quotes from nine suppliers in front of you, and the order has to go out tomorrow morning. Between you and the order sits one dumb task: copying all of it into a single spreadsheet, by hand.

5. Standardize everything into one base

This is the real bottleneck of the process. Before comparing anything, you have to pull what matters out of each proposal — code, description, quantity, unit, and price — and line it up item by item, in the same format. Done by hand, this is what eats the whole afternoon.

This is exactly where OrbitQuote's AI extraction comes in. You upload the quote exactly as it arrived — PDF, crooked photo, screenshot, Excel, or catalog — and within seconds you get an organized list, line by line, in the right column. A photo or scan, with no text to copy, becomes data. A supplier catalog, instead of flipping through hunting for a code, lists the products one by one. It's the same work as extracting a quote PDF to Excel, only now it works for any format the supplier sends.

No system gets it 100% right on a blurry photo, and anyone who swears they do is lying. That's why the result lands in a table for you to review: a quick glance, fix what you need, move on. The machine does the heavy lifting; the final word is yours. And if you'd rather work outside it, you can export to Excel, make your edits, and re-upload the spreadsheet for a fresh extraction, with your changes already in — without throwing away work each round.

The quotation process rarely stalls on the decision. It stalls on transcription — the grunt work of pulling the numbers out of the proposals and getting them into the same table.

6. Compare by total cost and decide

With everything in the same format, comparing gets easy. Putting the prices side by side and squaring them up — same unit, same quantity — reveals who's cheapest on each line and overall. The classic tool for this is the price comparison sheet, the grid that lays out item × supplier all at once.

But the secret is to look at the total cost, not the unit price in isolation. The cheapest supplier on a single line may not be the best deal once freight, lead time, and how many orders you'll have to manage come into play. Sometimes it pays to consolidate everything with one supplier to simplify the logistics; sometimes it's worth splitting. What matters is deciding with the comparison in hand. If you've never done it side by side, it's worth learning how to compare supplier quotes.

Once the supplier is decided, the cycle closes: you send the order back to them, whatever way works best — exported as PDF, Excel, or text formatted for WhatsApp. What came in as a mess in a thousand formats goes out as a clean order, ready to send. To take your first steps inside the product, the help center shows how to upload the file.

Frequently asked questions

What are the steps in the procurement quotation process?

Identify the need and build the list, pick the suppliers, send out the request for quotation, take in the replies, standardize everything into one format, compare by total cost, and decide by sending the order back to the chosen supplier.

Why is organizing the replies so much work?

Because each supplier replies in its own format: PDF, a WhatsApp photo, a spreadsheet, or a catalog. To compare, you have to pull it all into one base, and doing that by retyping item by item eats the afternoon and opens the door to mistakes.

Can I standardize quotes without retyping item by item?

You can. You upload the quote exactly as it arrived — PDF, photo, Excel, or catalog — and you get the items organized into code, description, quantity, unit, and price, ready to review and compare.

How many suppliers should I get quotes from?

There's no fixed number, but asking at least three for a price creates a healthy basis for comparison. With just one, you have no reference; with three, you can see what's market price and what's an outlier.