Aspire Technologies is readying the next major update of its QuoteWerks sales quoting and procurement solution.
Currently in a closed beta release, version 23 of the product should reach market within the next two weeks.
“We’re very close,” said QuoteWerks Vice President Brian Laufer in a conversation with ChannelPro last week at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect event in Orlando. Aspire recently adopted a new naming convention for the product, he noted, in which the big release the company ships annually is named after the year it will be used in.
Included among version 23’s enhancements will be support for MFA via widely-used authentication apps from Microsoft, Google, and Cisco’s Duo unit. QuoteWerks offers authentication only via text messages at present. Aspire has no plans to make using MFA mandatory, Laufer notes.
Included as well in version 23 is the ability to create white label URLs for QuoteValet, the QuoteWerks product’s online quote delivery and acceptance vehicle. At present, Laufer notes, end users see a generic quotevalet.com link when receiving quotes. “Depending on who your customer is, they’re like, ‘Who the heck is quotevalet?'” he says. Going forward, MSPs will be able to add their own name to that URL.
“That way there’s a level of branding on there so that the customer feels comfortable clicking on the link,” Laufer says.
A new set of reports for the QuoteWerks system’s procurement feature is coming in the new release too. “We have a really great dashboard,” Laufer says, “but now we’re going to allow them to have full capability to export things out into .pdf and Excel.”
Other functionality in the new release will make sending order tracking numbers to customers, which is currently a manual process, much simpler. “We’ve automated it so that they have the ability to send out those tracking numbers automatically to their customers,” Laufer says. “It cuts out that extra step.”
This year’s smaller, quarterly QuoteWerks updates added integrations to three new distributors: ADI, BlueStar, and ScanSource. An enhanced integration with Amazon shipped in April also provides access for the first time to the often lower pricing available through Amazon Business, a version of Amazon’s online marketplace that caters to commercial buyers.
Users are increasingly turning to sites like Amazon Business and other non-traditional suppliers to source hard to find goods in a time of continued supply chain logjams. VendorRFQ, an addition to QuoteWerks shipped in February that helps users collect and compare information on product availability, technical specifications, pricing, and more from multiple companies in real time through a centralized interface, makes coping with supply chain headaches simpler for MSPs as well, Laufer says.
“They have to go to vendors that they don’t normally work with sometimes,” he notes. “Using VendorRFQ, it allows them to get those types of pricing from those vendors [online] as opposed to picking up the phone and calling them.”
Used by more than 88,000 people worldwide in over 101 countries, QuoteWerks is Aspire’s flagship offering. The system has won the gold medal for best quoting software seven out of the last nine years in ChannelPro‘s annual Readers’ Choice Awards.
