Streamline Your Quoting Process with QuoteWerks’ Paste Special

Creating accurate and efficient quotes can be a complicated task, especially when dealing with multiple pricing strategies such as special pricing, promotional offers, or highly customized product configurations. Whether you’re a reseller, distributor, or business offering custom solutions, it’s essential to ensure your quotes reflect the correct pricing, customized setups, and all necessary product details. Luckily, QuoteWerks offers a feature that simplifies these challenges—the Paste Special wizard.

In this post, we’ll dive into how you can streamline managing special pricing, promotional discounts, and custom configurations when quoting by taking advantage of the QuoteWerks Paste Special feature.

Pricing Complexity in Quotes

Pricing is rarely straightforward. Businesses often face various types of pricing models, including:

• Special Pricing: Discounts, deals, or special pricing offered by your vendors or distributors based on your or your customer’s company or purchasing profile.
• Promotional Pricing: Temporary price reductions that align with special events or marketing campaigns.
• Customized Configurations: Tailored solutions that have been built in and exported from a third-party configuration tool.

Handling all these types of pricing can lead to errors, delays, and confusion if not managed carefully. The good news is that QuoteWerks has a feature—Paste Special—that makes it easier to handle these complex scenarios quickly and accurately.

What is Paste Special in QuoteWerks?

Paste Special is a tool within QuoteWerks that allows you to import product data, including pricing, from external sources such as spreadsheets or vendor files, directly into your quotes. This feature offers several advantages:

• Import Data: Import data from the clipboard, CSV, or delimited files that contain product details and pricing. With QuoteWerks Web, even more formats are available.
• Custom Import Templates: Set up templates for recurring pricing data from specific vendors, ensuring consistency.
• Combine Data from Connected Databases: Merge external product information with data already stored in QuoteWerks’ connected product databases.

How Paste Special Enhances Your Quoting Process

1. Import Data Without Hassle

   Paste Special simplifies the process of importing product data and pricing from external files. Often, vendors send updated product lists or pricing in CSV, Excel, or other delimited formats. Instead of manually entering every detail, you can copy the data from these files, paste it into QuoteWerks, and the system will help map the relevant information, such as product names, prices, and descriptions. This saves time and ensures that all details are accurate.

2. Create Import Templates for Regular Vendors

   A major benefit of Paste Special is the ability to create custom import templates. If you receive pricing or product data regularly from the same vendors, you can design a template to map that vendor’s data format directly into QuoteWerks. For example, you may receive product lists that include columns such as “Part Number,” “Price,” and “Description.” By creating a template, QuoteWerks will know how to interpret this data correctly, removing the guesswork and reducing the chance of errors.

3. Easily Combine External Data with Internal Databases

   QuoteWerks enables you to connect product databases from multiple sources, including your own inventory, Etilize, third-party suppliers, and vendors. When you use Paste Special to import product information, QuoteWerks can cross-reference the imported data with your internal databases. This way, any matching products will have their relevant details (like part numbers and descriptions) updated automatically. For instance, if a vendor provides a new price for a product you already sell, QuoteWerks can automatically update that product in your quote with additional product details, keeping it consistent with your internal records. This integration reduces the need for manual entry and helps maintain accurate, up-to-date product information across all your quotes.

4. Manage Special and Promotional Pricing with Ease

   Managing different pricing strategies—whether special discounts, promotional prices, or seasonal offers—becomes simpler with Paste Special. When you receive updated pricing information from your vendors or suppliers that includes special discounts or promotional pricing, you can import it directly into QuoteWerks. This ensures that your quotes reflect the latest pricing without needing to manually adjust individual line items.

5. Configure Customized Product Bundles and Solutions

   When offering products with customized configuration or customized bundles, Paste Special can help you manage the complexity. Whether you're quoting for custom-built computers, software packages, or other personalized solutions, Paste Special makes it easier to import the various components and their prices. You can merge external product data with your internal configurations, ensuring that everything is accounted for in your quotes. This functionality is especially useful for businesses that need to customize each quote for the specific needs of the customer while maintaining pricing accuracy.

AI-Powered Importing: The Next Level of Paste Special

Quoting just got even easier. With the latest enhancements to QuoteWerks Web, the Paste Special feature now leverages artificial intelligence to make importing quotes and product lists smarter and faster than ever.

What does this mean for you?
You can now import quotes from a wide range of file types—including CSV, Excel, HTML, PDF, and XML—even if the data spans multiple pages or comes in a less-than-perfect format. The AI engine automatically detects and extracts tables from your documents, so you don’t have to spend time reformatting or cleaning up files.

But it doesn’t stop there. The system intelligently analyzes the imported data, identifies columns that match key QuoteWerks fields, and makes “best guess” suggestions for field mapping. This means less manual work for you, fewer errors, and a much faster quoting process.

In short:
- Import from almost any file type, even complex or multi-page documents
- Let AI do the heavy lifting by recognizing and mapping columns for you
- Enjoy a seamless, guided import experience that saves time and reduces mistakes

No more tedious data entry or guesswork—just quick, accurate quote importing, powered by AI.

Importing a Bill of Materials (BOM) from Vendors like Cisco, Dell, HPe, and others

Many technology vendors, such as Cisco, Dell, and HPe, provide detailed Bills of Materials (BOMs) for complex solutions. These BOMs often include multiple components, part numbers, descriptions, and special pricing or discounts. Manually entering this information into your quoting system can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

With the QuoteWerks Web Paste Special feature, you can quickly import BOMs provided by vendors like Cisco, Cicso and HP. Simply copy the BOM data from the vendor’s spreadsheet or export file, and use Paste Special to map the columns—such as part number, description, quantity, and price—directly into your quote. This ensures that all components are accurately captured, and any vendor-specific pricing or configurations are preserved.

For recurring vendors, you can even create custom import templates tailored to the BOM formats provided by Cisco, HPe, or other suppliers. This streamlines future imports and guarantees consistency, saving you valuable time and reducing the risk of missing critical components in your quotes.

By leveraging Paste Special for BOM imports, you can confidently handle even the most complex technology solutions, ensuring your quotes are both comprehensive and accurate.

How to Use Paste Special in QuoteWerks

1. Prepare Your Data: Make sure the product and pricing information is in a delimited format or table, like CSV or Excel. Double-check that the columns in the file correspond to the fields you want to map in QuoteWerks.
2. Create a Custom Import Template: If you frequently import data from a particular vendor, create a custom template to automatically map the vendor’s data fields to QuoteWerks’ product fields. This speeds up the process for future imports.
3. Use Paste Special to Import Data: Once you’ve prepared your data, go to the quote in QuoteWerks where you want to add the products. Select the Paste Special option, paste the copied data, map the columns to fields on the quote, and QuoteWerks will automatically organize it into the appropriate fields.
4. Review and Edit: After importing the data, take a moment to review the quote and ensure everything looks correct. You can edit individual products, quantities, or pricing if needed.
5. Generate and Send the Quote: Once the quote is finalized, you can easily send it to your customer via PDF or QuoteValet, confident that the pricing and product configurations are accurate and up to date.

Conclusion

The QuoteWerks Paste Special feature significantly simplifies the process of managing special pricing, promotional discounts, and customized configurations when quoting. By allowing you to import data from external sources, create custom import templates, and integrate that information with your internal databases, this feature saves you time, reduces errors, and ensures that your quotes are always accurate.

If you’re looking for a way to streamline your quoting process and handle complex pricing scenarios with ease, the QuoteWerks Paste Special tool is an essential feature. It helps you stay organized, maintain consistency, and create professional quotes faster than ever before.

Related:

• Request a QuoteWerks Demo
• Learn more about Paste Special
• Learn more about QuoteWerks Web

About the Author:
Josh Lockheed
Training Evangelist
QuoteWerks