Enquiries and the public quote form

Before this existed, that first ask arrived however it arrived — a phone call, an email, someone stopping a cleaner in a car park — and turning it into a quote meant opening a blank drawer and typing everything out from scratch. An enquiry is the first lead object in the product: somewhere for that ask to land as a record, before it is a client, before it is a quote, and usually before it is anything you have priced.

It is deliberately not a client. Most enquiries never become one, and creating a client row for every stranger who fills in a web form would poison the client list, the portal and every report that counts clients. An enquiry stays an enquiry, in its own inbox, until you decide what it is.

The Enquiries screen

Enquiries sits in the Business group of the sidebar, directly above Quotes — the step before a quote exists gets the slot before it too. The item carries a count badge of its own, covered below. The page is titled Enquiries with the subtitle Leads from your public quote form, before they are clients, and the one button in the header is Copy Public Link.

The ledger carries five columns: Who, What they want, Came from, Received and Status. Who shows the business name if one was given, the person's name if not, with their email or phone underneath. The search box above it matches the name, business name, email, phone, message and location in one go, and the status tabs — All, New, Contacted, Quoted, Won, Lost — are Title Case to match Quotes' own tabs, deliberately.

Two values appear under Came from today: Website for anyone who found the form on their own, and Client referral — followed by via {client name} — when they arrived through a client's own referral link (see Referrals in The client portal). The vocabulary holds two more, Added by you and Raised on site, reserved rather than decorative, for whenever a second way to log a lead by hand arrives.

The form a stranger fills in

The link opens a plain page at a URL shaped like app.cleanflo.io/brennan-cleaning/quote — the same company slug your client portal links already use, so it sits right next to a client's own app.cleanflo.io/brennan-cleaning/riverside-homes. There is no login and no PIN, on purpose: whoever is on the other end has never had an account with you and may never have one. The page renders your company's display name and nothing else about it — no address, no other clients, no prices.

A blank name gets Please tell us your name., a blank message gets Please tell us what you need cleaned., and a badly formed email or phone number is rejected before it can be saved as the only way to reach somebody. None of that is visible on the page itself, which also carries a hidden field a person never sees: a real visitor never fills it in, but a form-filling bot fills in every input it finds. A submission with that field set gets exactly the same Thank you screen a genuine one does, and writes nothing to your inbox.

Getting your link, and switching it off

Copy Public Link, in the Enquiries header, is the only place the link is generated. The first time anybody presses it, CleanFlo builds your company's slug if one does not already exist yet — the same slug a client portal link would use — and copies the finished address straight to your clipboard. The button briefly reads Copied before going back.

A Let anyone request a quote from your public link toggle sits on the Company tab of Settings, on by default. Switch it off and the link stops opening for anyone — useful for a company that is fully booked and does not want to advertise a way to ask. With it off, the Enquiries screen shows a standing notice: Your public quote form is switched off, so the link above will not open for anyone. Turn it back on in Settings → Company.

The five statuses

Opening an enquiry

Clicking a row opens a detail sheet titled with the enquiry's name, subtitled with their business name, and carrying the status pill in the header. Underneath sits everything they typed: when it was received, where it came from, their email and phone as live mailto: and tel: links, where the job is and when would suit if they said, and the full message under What they asked for.

Pressing Mark Lost does not resolve the enquiry on the spot. It opens an inline reason picker — the same four reasons a declined quote uses, Price too high, Chose another company, No longer needed and Bad timing, followed by one reason that only enquiries get, Not a genuine enquiry, and finally Other with a free-text box — and a Mark Lost button to confirm it. Not a genuine enquiry exists for exactly the spam that talks its way past the honeypot: a real person typing nonsense into a real form, rather than a bot filling in a field it should never have touched.

Convert to Quote

Convert to Quote has no dialog. It builds a real draft quote — a one-off recipient, the same shape the quote drawer's own New Recipient option writes, not a client — and takes you straight to the normal Quotes screen with it sitting there like any other draft you had built by hand. Converting never creates a client record: most enquiries never become one, and this is not the moment that decides it either way.

Everything else about the new draft is exactly as if you had built it yourself: Issue Date is today, Valid Until is thirty days out, the VAT rate on the line follows whether your company is VAT registered, and follow-up reminders are on by default. There are no prices filled in anywhere on it — an enquiry never carries a price, so a quote born from one is priced the same way every other quote is, by you.

Once an enquiry has a linked quote, Convert to Quote disappears from its detail sheet. Unlike converting an accepted quote to an invoice, which you can press more than once, an enquiry cannot be converted twice.