Quotes Settings
Quotes Settings is the Setup page where administrators turn on the standard Quotes feature in Salesforce and configure how quotes behave across Opportunities, Products, Price Books, and the document generation pipeline.
Definition
Quotes Settings is the Setup page where administrators turn on the standard Quotes feature in Salesforce and configure how quotes behave across Opportunities, Products, Price Books, and the document generation pipeline. The page itself is small, but the decisions made here ripple through every Opportunity-to-Quote workflow in the org and determine whether sales reps can produce a customer-ready PDF in two clicks or have to copy data into a manual document.
The Setup page lives under Setup, then Quotes, then Quote Settings. The page exposes a single primary toggle to enable Quotes, plus a related setting to enable Quote Templates, which controls whether reps can generate branded PDFs directly from quote records. Once Quotes is enabled, the Quote object becomes available for layouts, reports, and automation, and a Quotes related list appears on the Opportunity page layout.
What enabling Quotes actually unlocks
The Quote object and its line items
Turning on Quotes activates the standard Quote object and its child Quote Line Item object, which mirrors Opportunity Products in structure but stores the values at a snapshot moment. Each Quote rolls up Quantity, Unit Price, Discount, Tax, and Shipping into header-level Subtotal, Total Price, and Grand Total fields. The line items have their own list price, sales price, and discount fields, allowing sales reps to negotiate a per-line discount that differs from the underlying Opportunity. Salesforce maintains a one-to-many relationship from Opportunity to Quote, meaning a single Opportunity can have several Quotes, with one designated as the Synced Quote.
Synced Quotes and bidirectional updates
The Synced Quote feature is the part of Quotes that confuses most new admins. When a Quote is marked as the Synced Quote on its parent Opportunity, the Quote's line items and the Opportunity's Products stay in lockstep: editing a quantity on the synced Quote updates the Opportunity Product, and vice versa. Only one Quote per Opportunity can sync at a time. Switching the sync designation between Quotes overwrites the Opportunity Products with the newly synced Quote's line items, which is the right behavior for "the customer accepted version two of the quote" but can blow away pricing work if used carelessly. The sync direction is bidirectional, but most teams set a process convention to edit only the Quote side.
Quote Templates and PDF generation
Enabling Quote Templates is a separate toggle on the Quotes Settings page. Templates are drag-and-drop documents built from rich text, fields from the Quote and related records (Opportunity, Account, Contact, User), and tables for line items. Multiple templates per org are common, scoped by region, brand, or product line. Generating a PDF from a Quote takes two clicks and produces a file that can be emailed directly to the customer or stored on the Quote for archival. The template engine supports custom logo placement, formatted line item tables, terms and conditions text, signature blocks, and conditional sections that only appear when specific fields are populated.
Pricing, currency, and multi-currency considerations
Quotes inherit the Opportunity's Price Book, currency, and pricing model. Multi-currency orgs see the Quote's currency match the parent Opportunity and cannot be changed independently. List prices on the Price Book determine the starting unit price for each line item, with the rep entering a Discount percentage or amount that produces the Sales Price. Tax and Shipping fields are header-level by default but can be configured as line-level via custom fields and rollup formulas. Orgs that need true line-level tax with jurisdiction lookup typically install a tax integration (Avalara, Vertex) rather than building it on top of standard Quotes.
Standard Quotes versus CPQ
Standard Quotes (enabled via Quotes Settings) is the lightweight option Salesforce includes with Sales Cloud Professional and above. It works for orgs whose quoting needs fit a flat line-item structure with discounts and a basic PDF. Salesforce CPQ (now also called Revenue Cloud CPQ) is a separately licensed product that replaces standard Quotes for orgs with complex configurations: bundles, dependency rules, tiered discounting, contracted prices, subscription pricing, and amendment workflows. The two are mutually exclusive in practice; an org running CPQ rarely uses the standard Quote object except for legacy records. The Quotes Settings page remains relevant in CPQ orgs only for legacy quote access or specific reporting use cases.
Reports, list views, and analytics on Quotes
Once Quotes is enabled, three new report types become available: Quotes, Quotes with Quote Line Items, and Quotes with Opportunities. These power the standard sales analytics views: quote acceptance rate, average discount percentage by product family, time from quote creation to acceptance. Most pipeline forecasting still happens on the Opportunity object, but quote-level analytics are useful for diagnosing where deals stall in the discount approval flow. The standard list views give reps a place to track every Quote they own, filter by status (Draft, Sent, Accepted, Rejected, Expired), and bulk-update fields when needed.
Disabling Quotes and the impact on existing data
Disabling Quotes after the feature has been used is technically possible but discouraged. The Quote records remain in the database, but they become inaccessible from the standard UI, custom Quote layouts disappear from the related list on Opportunities, and any process or flow that references Quote records errors out. If the goal is to migrate from standard Quotes to CPQ, the right path is to leave standard Quotes enabled, build CPQ alongside it, and migrate Opportunities to CPQ workflow gradually, marking the legacy Quotes as inactive rather than deleting them. Removing the feature outright should be treated as an irreversible decision.
Enable and configure Quotes in the org
Enabling Quotes is a five-minute Setup task, but doing it well requires planning around page layouts, Quote Templates, and the integration between Quote and Opportunity. Run the configuration in a sandbox first so the sales team can preview the quoting experience before the change reaches production. Plan a brief training session for reps alongside the rollout so they understand the synced-quote behavior and the PDF generation flow before they touch live customer deals. The Setup page itself is one screen with two toggles, but the work around it (templates, layouts, training, reports) is where most teams spend their effort.
- Enable Quotes from Setup
From Setup, search for Quote Settings (or Quotes Settings depending on UI release). Toggle on Enable Quotes. The page reloads and a Quotes related list appears on the standard Opportunity page layout for new layouts; existing layouts may need the related list added manually. Confirm in a sandbox that the Quote object now appears in Object Manager.
- Enable Quote Templates and build the first template
On the same settings page, toggle on Enable Quote Templates. Navigate to Setup, Quote Templates, and create a new template. Drag in the company logo, a header table with Account and Contact merge fields, a line-item table bound to Quote Line Items, terms and conditions text, and a signature block. Save and activate. Test the template by generating a PDF from a sample Quote in the sandbox.
- Configure page layouts and Quick Actions
Open the Quote object's page layout in Object Manager. Add fields the sales team needs (Expiration Date, Description, Status), arrange related lists (Quote Line Items, Notes, Files, Activity), and pin the New Quote Quick Action to the Opportunity page layout for easy quote creation. Add the Sync Quote button to the Quote layout if Opportunity sync is part of the workflow. Save and assign the layout to relevant profiles.
- Train the team and roll out to production
Run a thirty-minute training session showing reps how to create a Quote from an Opportunity, edit line items, mark a Quote as Synced, generate a PDF, and email the PDF to a customer. After sandbox sign-off, repeat the configuration steps in production during a low-traffic window. Communicate the new Quotes capability via the team's normal release channel and follow up on adoption two weeks later through the standard Quote-creation report.
- Disabling Quotes after use hides records from the standard UI but does not delete them. Process and Flow references to Quote records will error if the feature is turned off later.
- Only one Synced Quote per Opportunity. Switching sync overwrites the Opportunity Products with the newly synced Quote line items, which can lose pricing work if reps are not careful.
- Multi-currency Quotes inherit the parent Opportunity currency and cannot be changed independently. Cross-currency deals need a separate Opportunity per currency.
- Quote Templates support around 75 pages of content and have a 50 MB image limit. Very long quotes or image-heavy templates fail to render with confusing error messages.
- Standard Quotes and Salesforce CPQ should not be used together for the same Opportunities. Pick one quoting model per business unit to avoid pricing drift between the two systems.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Quotes OverviewSalesforce Help
- Enable QuotesSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Quotes Settings.
- Quotes OverviewSalesforce Help
- Quote TemplatesSalesforce Help
- Synced QuotesSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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