Linos CPQ.
Configure · Price · Quote — built for the shop floor.
Configurable templates for railings, fences, gates, sheet metal, shower doors, glass panels, mirrors, and IGUs. Real-time pricing with margin floor protection. Approval workflow. PDF + e-sign. Pulls customers from Linos Sales (CRM); pushes accepted quotes to Linos Fulfill (order-to-cash) — or to QuickBooks if that’s your billing.
Six things that break in small-shop quoting.
Custom fabricators sell complex configurable products with industry-specific pricing rules. Today most of them quote in Excel and re-key into QuickBooks. Six recurring failure modes:
Excel estimators that only one person understands
Pricing logic in cell W42, formulas drift, no audit trail. New rep can't use it without three weeks of training.
Discount approval is a group text
Rep texts the owner asking for 8% off. Owner is on a job site, doesn't respond. Quote sits. Customer goes elsewhere.
Re-keying the quote into QuickBooks
Accepted quote gets typed into the accounting system manually. Dimensions get lost. Wrong glass thickness ordered.
No mobile path on a job site
Rep measures the railing, drives back to the office, opens Excel, builds a quote, emails PDF. 4 hours later.
Margin invisibility
Reps don't know if a 12% discount kills the margin or just trims it. Owner finds out after the job is done.
No follow-up
Sent quotes go cold. Nobody pings the customer. Lost sales no one tracks.
Twelve product templates, ready out of the box.
Each template has the inputs your reps already ask about — dimensions, finish, infill, hardware. The pricing engine combines material rates + labor + finish + customer tier + quantity breaks + margin floor in real time.
Aluminum Railing
Top-rail with cable / glass / picket infill
Steel/Iron Fence
Welded picket fence, ornamental
Custom Gate
Pedestrian / driveway / sliding, optional automation
Sheet Metal Cut
Cut-to-size with hole pattern
Powder-Coated Frame
Brackets, racks, signage frames
Frameless Shower Door
Single + return panel, custom hinges
Glass Railing Infill
Tempered panels, polished edges
Mirror Cut
Wall mirror, beveled / polished edge
Glass Table Top
Round, oval, racetrack, rectangle
Insulated Glass Unit
Window IGU with Low-E and tinting
Standoff & Bracket Pack
For glass railings + balustrades
Hinge & Handle Pack
Door hardware kit, weight-rated
Real-time price. Real-time margin. Floor enforced.
Every line item runs through a six-step pricing waterfall — visible to the rep, audit-logged for finance.
1. Material
Area × thickness × material rate × waste factor. Different rates per material grade.
2. Labor
Setup + per cut + per bend + per weld + per hole + per linear ft, at hourly rates per skill.
3. Finish
Powder-coat / anodize / galvanize per sq ft + edge finish per linear ft.
4. Hardware
Hinges / standoffs / handles / motors as line components.
5. Discounts
Quantity break + customer tier (contractor/volume) + rep discretionary, applied in order.
6. Margin floor
Per-product floor enforced. Below-floor blocked or escalated.
Estimator AI — quoting that learns from your shop’s history.
Most CPQ tools give you one number from a formula. Linos Estimator AI gives you a price band, the comparable past jobs that justify it, a labor reality check against your historical actuals, complexity factors auto-detected from inputs, and material rate freshness flags so stale costs don’t silently eat margin.
Confidence band, not a point
Returns P15 / engine point / P85 calibrated from your closed quotes. The band is tight when you have history, wide when you don't — telling you how much to trust the number.
Comparable jobs surfaced
Top 3 most-similar past quotes shown side-by-side: estimated, final, actual cost, hours-estimated → hours-actual, won/lost. The pattern is visible at a glance.
Labor reality check
Formula says 9h install. Your last 5 similar jobs averaged 11.8h. Recommends a buffer — or, if you're consistently under, tells you you can compete tighter.
Complexity factor detection
Auto-detects automation kits, oversized panels, heavy-gauge glass, low-iron upgrades, driveway gates, large discounts — each adds a calibrated % uplift with rationale.
Material rate freshness
Flags FRESH / STALE / VOLATILE per material. Aluminum spot index up 6% since rate was set 14d ago? You see it before you quote, not after the job ships.
Photo → config
Rep snaps a railing on a job site. Claude estimates length, height, infill, finish. Pre-fills the configurator. 30 seconds vs. 15-minute measurement.
Quote-from-text
Rep types or speaks: "45 ft aluminum railing, 42 in tall, glass infill, black powder coat" — AI pre-fills the configuration.
Margin advisor
Flags lines below the floor or within 5% of it. Suggests specific actions: drop discount X%, switch finish, raise quantity.
Win-rate predictor
Given price, customer tier, discount, and product family, estimates probability of close. Stops over-discounting cold.
Follow-up drafter
Quote sent, no response. AI drafts a friendly day-3 / day-7 check-in referencing the specific configuration.
Fallback always works
Without an API key, deterministic heuristics keep all features functional on cached data. Quality drops, not features.
Configure fields per module. Six roles out of the box.
Your shop’s fields aren’t our fields. Add a Project name to quotes, a Credit limit to customers, a Regional surcharge % to pricing — without a developer, without a release. Every change is gated by role and recorded in the audit log.
Built-in + custom, by module
Catalog, Customers, Quotes, and Pricing each expose their built-in fields plus admin-added custom fields. 9 field types: TEXT, NUMBER, CURRENCY, PERCENT, DIMENSION, CHOICE, BOOLEAN, DATE, TEXTAREA.
Owner · Shop Admin · Sales Manager · Sales Rep · Production · Read-Only
Built-in roles cover every common shop org structure. Granular permissions per module: read, write, fields:create, fields:edit, fields:delete. Custom roles addable.
“Self” vs “all” on each grant
Sales reps can edit their own quotes, not their colleagues’. Sales managers see everyone. Production sees accepted only. The matrix is visible end-to-end — no hidden permission magic.
The middle layer between Sales and Fulfill.
CPQ doesn’t replace your CRM or your billing system — it sits between them and handles the configurable-product complexity neither of them does well.
Linos Sales (CRM)
Customer + opportunity + contact data flows in. Rep clicks “Generate Quote” on an opportunity → CPQ opens with context pre-filled.
Linos Fulfill
Won quote → production job created with cut sheet + BOM. Job scheduled, invoiced, shipped, paid.
QuickBooks
Don’t use Linos Fulfill? CPQ pushes invoices directly to QuickBooks Online. Same connector pattern.
Three commercial paths.
CPQ is licensable standalone, alongside Sales (CRM) only, or as part of the full Field Sales Suite for Manufacturers.
CPQ standalone
You have your own CRM and use QuickBooks for billing. CPQ replaces your Excel estimator and ties to QBO directly.
CPQ + Sales
CPQ + Linos Sales as a CRM. Customer + opportunity flow stays inside Linos. QuickBooks for billing.
Full Field Sales Suite
Sales (CRM) + CPQ + Fulfill (order-to-cash). End-to-end on Linos. No separate accounting needed.
See it on your shop’s products.
Demo loads with 12 templates (5 metal, 5 glass, 2 hardware), 10 customers, 6 reps, and 10 sample quotes across all stages. Configure a railing, see the price + margin in real time, push it through the approval flow.