When a quote runs out — Help

Every quote 1pm sends has always carried a Valid until date. It printed on the client's copy, it printed on the PDF, and nothing in the app paid the slightest attention to it. A client could open a quote from March in September and accept it at March prices, and nobody was told the deadline had come and gone. The date was a promise the product did not keep.

That date now does something. Once it passes, the client can no longer accept the quote from their own copy, the quote reads as lapsed wherever you look at it, and your pipeline figures stop counting it as money still in play. You are not blocked, because you are the venue and a client who rings up to say yes should not be turned away by a date field.

This article covers where the date comes from, how to change it, what the client sees when a quote runs out, how lapsed quotes read on the quotes list, the leads pipeline and the Quotes report, and the two automations that chase a quote before and after it lapses.

How long a quote stays open

The default lives with your other document defaults, on Tax & invoicing in your account, as Quotes stay open (days). It ships at 30.

It sits next to Payment due (days after issue), and the two are deliberately separate numbers. Payment terms are how long a client has to pay an invoice you have already won. Quote validity is how long they have to make up their mind in the first place. They used to share one setting, which meant you could not change either without moving the other, so setting a month-long quote window would quietly have put every invoice you raise on net 30.

Thirty days is the catering and food service norm. A client waiting on a photographer, a band and a venue before they can say yes to you will very often burn a fortnight without it meaning anything at all, so a two week window lapses in the middle of a live decision. If your work turns around faster, shorten it. Anything from 0 to 365 days is accepted.

Two things to know about changing it:

It applies to the next quote you raise, not the ones already out. The date is stamped onto the quote when it is created, exactly like an invoice's due date, so quotes already with clients keep the date they were sent with. That is the point: a quote is a document you gave someone, and its terms should not move under them after the fact.
Accounts that existed before this setting arrived were moved to 30 days. They were on 14 only because that was the invoice payment term they were borrowing, not because anyone chose it.

Changing the date on one quote

Open the quote and you will find a Valid until date field under the heading, beside the lead and event details. Change it and it saves on the spot, no separate save button.

This is the fix when a client asks for another week: push the date out and their existing link works again, with the Accept button back. There is no need to raise a new quote unless the pricing has actually changed.

The same field is the one to reach for when you want a particular quote held open longer or shorter than your account default. A tender with a hard closing date, a seasonal menu that only makes sense until the end of the month, a hold on a date you cannot keep open indefinitely.

Leave the date empty and the quote never lapses. That is a valid setup for anyone who would rather chase by hand.

What the client sees when it lapses

The client's quote page (the /q/ link they were emailed) changes in one specific way. The Accept quote button goes, and the panel says:

This quote has lapsed. It was valid until 4 Aug 2026. Get in touch and we'll gladly put a fresh one together for you.

Everything else stays exactly where it was. Request changes / Ask a question is untouched, and becomes the main button on the page, so a client who has finally made their decision is one click from telling you rather than staring at a dead page with nowhere to go. Their message threads into your Leads inbox like any other reply.

The document itself, the lines, the totals, the terms and the PDF download, all still render. The quote is not withdrawn or hidden. It ran out, which is a different thing from being cancelled. If you do want a quote pulled from the client entirely, that is what voiding is for, covered in voiding a quote or invoice.

You are not blocked

Your side of a lapsed quote works exactly as it always did. Mark accepted still accepts it, still creates the confirmed booking, still seeds the charges. Decline still declines it.

This is deliberate. Expiry exists to stop a client quietly accepting stale pricing months later, not to stop you doing your job. When a client calls to say yes on day 32, making you edit a date field before you can take the booking would be friction protecting nobody.

What you get instead of a block is a Lapsed badge next to the Valid until field, so you know the pricing you are about to commit to is older than you meant it to be, and can bump the figures first if they need it.

Spotting lapsed quotes on the Quotes list

The Quotes page carries a Valid until column. Rows that have run out show the date with a Lapsed badge beside it, and quotes with no date at all read "No end date".

The badge sits beside the date rather than in the Status column on purpose. Lapsed is not a status the document holds, it is a date comparison, so it does not belong next to Draft, Sent, Accepted and Declined. Beside the date is also where you are already looking when you are asking "why can't they accept this?".

Lapsed is offered in the status filter all the same, because a planner narrowing a list does not care about that distinction and should not have to. Picking it narrows the sent quotes to the ones that have run out. A draft sitting past the same date is not lapsed, because it was never issued to anyone.

The combination worth knowing: filter to Lapsed, sort through what is there, and you have your list of dead offers to either re-quote or write off. On most accounts it is longer than expected the first time.

How a lapsed quote reads on the lead

The five step pipeline gauge on each row of the Leads inbox (quoted, opened, accepted, agreement, paid) used to show a lead whose only quote had lapsed as green through "quoted" and orange on "accepted", which reads as an offer sitting with a client who is still thinking about it.

That step now goes neutral instead of orange, and its hover tip says so plainly: "Quote lapsed 4 Aug 2026: they can no longer accept it". Orange across that gauge means "still to go", and once a quote has run out there is nothing left to go for without you doing something about it.

It is a small change that matters on a Monday morning, because an orange step invites you to wait and a neutral one invites you to act.

The Quotes report

The Quotes report is where this mattered most, because it was quietly overstating the pipeline. Outstanding was every quote with a status of Sent, with no regard for the date, so a quote that ran out two years ago was still counted and its value still summed into the money you had in play.

The Outstanding bucket now splits in two:

Outstanding (still open), sent and still inside its Valid until date, so genuinely awaiting a decision.
Lapsed (ran out), sent but past that date, so the client can no longer accept it.

Both are stored as Sent, which is why they were one bucket for so long, and the two partition it rather than overlapping, so the totals still add up.

The win rate deliberately does not move. A quote that ran out was never accepted and never declined, so folding it in as a loss would change what that number has always meant and every figure previously read alongside it. Instead the count is named right beside the rate: "12 ran out without an answer, not counted either way". That does the useful job anyway, which is telling you whether the rate you are looking at is flattered. A 70 percent win rate with two lapses is a healthy business. The same rate with forty is a follow-up problem wearing a good number.

The detail table carries a Valid until column with "(lapsed)" against the rows that ran out, since Status alone cannot tell them apart. The CSV export carries two extra columns for the same reason, Valid until and Lapsed, plus a "Lapsed (not counted as a decision)" line under the win rate at the foot. Every other money report (revenue, sales pace, aged receivables, deposits, tax, and the home dashboard) reads off invoices or events rather than quotes and was never affected by any of this.

Chasing a quote before and after it runs out

Two automation triggers hang off the same date, in the Invoices and payments group when you pick a trigger:

Quote running out, a set number of days before the Valid until date, if the quote has not been accepted. This is the one that wins work. A deadline the client is reminded of is close to the only honest urgency there is in a sale, and "your quote runs out on Friday" is a far easier email to write than a third "just checking in".
Quote ran out, a set number of days after it lapsed, if it still has not been accepted. The last ask. Pair it with an offer to re-quote, since that is what the client's own page now invites them to ask for.

Both work like the invoice due and overdue pair. Type the number of days into the sentence, and the email addresses the quote's bill-to contact. They send straight away with no 24 hour review hold, because a reminder that something runs out tomorrow is wrong by the time a day's hold expires.

Each fires once per quote, and stops as soon as the quote is accepted, declined or put back to draft. To build a ladder, add a second automation on the same trigger at a different interval: 7 days before, 1 day before, 3 days after. Only sent quotes are ever included, never drafts.

The emails these send now show up in Recent activity on the Automations page alongside everything else, which invoice reminders and receipts did not do until this shipped. See automations for the full picture of triggers, actions, merge fields and the review queue.

A note on "today"

Whether a quote has lapsed is worked out against your account's today, not the server's. A quote valid until the 4th is still acceptable all day on the 4th wherever you are, rather than dying at 10am because it is already the 5th in UTC. That comes from your calendar time zone, set on your Account page, which is worth checking if you have never set it.

Quotes and invoices covers raising and sending the quote this date is stamped onto, and the Tax & invoicing defaults it comes from.
Chasing a lead that goes quiet covers the other half of the follow-up story: the three automations that watch for a lead stalling between funnel steps.
Automations covers building the automation that a quote chase lives in.
Working the leads inbox covers the pipeline gauge a lapsed quote now reads differently on.
Reports covers the Quotes report and the rest of the reporting set.
Voiding a quote or invoice covers pulling a document from a client entirely, which is a different thing from letting it run out.