Opening a request yourself

Most quote requests do not arrive through a form. Someone rings, stops you on site, or asks in an email thread. This opens the same thing Open a quote request opens from a form — an order waiting in pricing and a request record — from details you type in.

1. Use the same Seller offer as your form requests: active, priced unspecified.
2. Give the request your own reference, for example q-2026-014. Letters, digits, dashes and underscores only, up to 40 characters; it is stored in lower case.
3. Type the customer's email, what they asked for, and optionally who to address the quote to.
4. The card prints the request reference, manual- followed by yours. The quote board lists the request with everything else, and its Price it button carries that reference to Price and send a quote.

Nothing is emailed at this step. You already spoke to the customer, so an automatic "we have your enquiry" would only be noise; the first email they get from this pack is the quote.

Why the reference is yours to choose

core.seller.order.open is deterministic in (offer, reference): it CREATES on the first run and returns the same order on every run after it. So the reference is what makes running this twice safe — a second run with the same reference finds the order and the record it already made, and changes nothing.

⛔ A reference already used for a DIFFERENT customer is refused before anything is written. Otherwise the second request would quietly converge on the first customer's order, and the quote meant for one person would be priced and sent to another.

⚠ The reference is prefixed manual- so it can never collide with a form request: those are keyed on the submission id, which is a UUID and so never contains manual-. Price and send a quote reads the same prefix to know where the customer's address lives.

Where the customer's address comes from

For a form request, Price and send a quote sends to the address on the accepted response. A request you opened by hand has no response, so it sends to the address you typed here, which is stored on the request record. That makes the record load-bearing for these requests: pricing one without it refuses before anything is written, rather than guessing an address.

⚠ The address is exactly what you typed, trimmed and lower-cased. Nothing checks that the customer can receive mail there — read it back on the card before pricing. There is no edit: a wrong address is fixed by opening the request again under a NEW reference, and the first one stays on the board in pricing until you cancel its order.

⚠ requested_at is when you opened it, because there is no submission time to take. Sort the board on it for when requests came in.