Inbox

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Overview

Your Inbox is where all quoting activity lives. Initiate quotes, respond to requests, negotiate with partners, and track the full quote lifecycle from inquiry to order — all in one place. Every partner you quote with is a separate, private thread. Send one RFQ to five suppliers and you get five independent conversations: each partner sees only their own thread, quotes are never shared between partners even when they’re quoting the same line, and you compare them side by side here.

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Views

The Inbox offers two layouts. Switch between them from the Settings dropdown in the toolbar. Your choice is saved to your profile and persists across reloads.

• Comparison view — the default. A collapsible sidebar lists your threads; selecting one opens a side-by-side comparison of the quotes on that listing. Alongside the quote attributes, the comparison table shows Reference Data and Program Data sections with the listing’s own mapped fields, so internal context sits next to competing quotes.
• Table view — a dense, spreadsheet-style grid of every thread. Best for scanning, sorting, and acting on many quotes at once.

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Sidebar controls

In comparison view, the sidebar’s Filters dropdown holds the controls for the thread list:

• Date range — narrow the list to a window of activity (defaults to the last 60 days)
• Sort — order the list by a quote field, ascending or descending (available when quotes aren’t consolidated)
• Columns — show or hide quote attribute columns, plus the Reference Data and Program Data columns, in the comparison table
• All filters — open the advanced filter modal described in Filtering

The button shows a count when a filter or sort is active, so you always know the list is scoped.

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Consolidate Quotes

Toggle Consolidate Quotes in the Settings dropdown to switch between two ways of grouping activity:

• On (consolidated) — one row per listing, rolling up every quote on it. This is the default.
• Off — one row per individual quote.

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Status Tabs

In comparison view, organize your workflow using the status tabs at the top. Each tab shows a live count:

• Awaiting Response — RFQs you’ve sent that a partner hasn’t answered yet
• Unassigned — open quotes awaiting pickup
• Not Actioned — open threads pending your response — either the partner responded last, or the thread was assigned to you
• Actioned — open threads where you responded last, awaiting a partner response
• Pending — one party has accepted and is awaiting the second acceptance, or the thread is awaiting approval
• Closed — completed (mutually accepted) or rejected transactions

In table view the same set of tabs appears — All, Unassigned, Not Actioned, Actioned, Pending, Closed — and each row also carries an Inbox Status column so you can see where a thread sits while filtered to All.

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Awaiting Response

Traditionally an RFQ disappears the moment you send it: nothing shows up in your inbox until a partner replies, so the quotes you’re still waiting on are invisible. The Awaiting Response tab closes that gap — you no longer wonder what you haven’t heard back on. Every RFQ you send appears here immediately, before any partner reply. The tab has two panes:

• Sent Lists (sidebar) — one card per list × partner, showing the partner, the list name, when it was first sent, and a coverage bar with a responded / sent count. Cards with no reply at all are flagged so the silent ones stand out.
• Drill-down (main pane) — select a card to see its lines split across two tabs: Awaiting reply (lines the partner hasn’t quoted — your chase list, showing what you asked for) and Quoted (lines they’ve answered). The header shows how long it’s been since you sent, e.g. sent 6 days ago.

Rows in Quoted open the live quote thread wherever it currently sits, so you can respond without hunting for it.

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Quote Response

In comparison view, each quote row has an Action dropdown with everything you can do to that quote:

• Counter Quote — send a revised quote
• Send Message — reply without changing terms
• Accept Quote / Reject Quote — respond to the offer
• Edit Quote — revise a quote you sent that’s still editable, rather than countering
• Send for Approval — route the quote through an approval workflow
• Set Thread Status — apply or clear a custom thread status
• Assign Thread — assign the thread to a teammate

Accepting or rejecting opens the response drawer, which shows the original quote details alongside your response form:

• Review material specifications, pricing, and terms
• Add a required message explaining your decision
• Company and contact info are pre-populated from your profile

When both parties accept, the quote automatically converts into an Order . If either party rejects, the thread moves to Closed.

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Staging responses in the Response Basket

Counter, Accept, Reject, and Message drawers each offer Add to Basket as an alternative to sending immediately. The response is staged in your Response Basket with everything you entered — quantity, unit price, timing, attributes, message, and attachments — and nothing goes to the partner until you send the basket. Staging is how you batch: work a whole list quote by quote, then review the full set in one place and dispatch it as a single pass. It’s also a natural checkpoint if you want a second pair of eyes on pricing before anything leaves the building. See Baskets.

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Add a Quote Manually

Not every offer arrives on the platform — a supplier may phone one in or send it through a channel Seminode doesn’t monitor. Click Add Quote in the toolbar to record it yourself:

1. Select the partner the offer came from
2. Search for the listing it applies to by MPN or manufacturer
3. Enter the offer details — quantity, unit price, timing, and any attributes or an alternate part
4. Optionally record who sent the offer and how in Message / Notes

The quote is attributed to the partner and enters your Inbox as a new thread, exactly like a quote received by email — it can be countered, accepted, compared side by side, and routed through approval workflows with no separate handling.

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Bulk Actions (Table view)

Select one or more rows in table view and open the Action menu to apply an operation to the whole selection at once:

• Counter Quote — send revised quotes
• Send Message — reply without changing terms
• Accept Quote / Reject Quote — respond in bulk
• Edit Quote — revise a single editable quote (single selection only)
• Send for approval — route the selection through an approval workflow
• Set Thread Status — apply or clear a custom thread status
• Assign Thread — assign the threads to a teammate
• Ask AI — open the AI assistant with the selection as context

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Thread Status & Assignment

Custom thread statuses are labels your team defines (in settings) to track work beyond the built-in tabs — for example Sourcing, Waiting on customer, or Escalated. Apply one from the Action menu’s Set Thread Status submenu, or clear it. Assign a thread to a teammate from the Assign Thread submenu. The thread becomes that person’s pending action and appears in their Not Actioned tab.

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Part Stats & History

Every part number in the Inbox is a link into its own quoting history, so you can price against what you’ve actually seen rather than a single quote in isolation.

• Part Stats drawer — in table view, click a part number to open a side drawer with average unit price and its low–high range, last activity date, quote-thread count, open vs. closed split, a price trend chart, and a breakdown by partner. Click Open full history to go deeper.
• Part History — the full page for a part, with the same summary cards plus a complete table of every quote thread that has touched it. Reachable directly by clicking a part number in comparison view.

Both work on either the manufacturer part number or your internal number.

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Internal Comments

Each quote in a thread carries its own internal comment trail, visible only to your team and never sent to the partner. On a quote row:

• adds an internal comment
• opens the existing comments, newest first, with author and timestamp

Use comments to record pricing rationale, escalation context, or what a colleague should do next — the reasoning stays attached to the quote instead of living in a side channel.

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Filtering

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Quick settings

Use the Settings dropdown in the toolbar to toggle:

• View email — open the source email for the selected quote (when one is selected)
• View all Quotes — see your whole team’s quoting activity instead of only your own
• Consolidate Quotes — switch between listing-level and quote-level rows
• Table View — switch between comparison and table layouts

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Advanced Filters

Open the advanced filter modal for multi-criteria search across four categories:

• Partners & Status — filter by partner type, specific partners, and approval state
• Product — search by material number, internal number, manufacturer, or commodity
• Pricing & Qty — set ranges for margin percentage, margin value, unit price, unit cost, quantity, and lead time
• Team — filter by program, site code, or region

A dot appears on any category tab that has an active filter, so you can see at a glance where the current scope is coming from.

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Approval Workflow

Send a quote through an approval workflow using Send for Approval in the comparison view Action menu, or Send for approval in the table Action menu. The modal lets you:

1. Select an approval flow to determine the review process
2. Choose an email template or use the system default
3. Pick a recipient from extracted contacts or enter a custom email
4. Review the auto-generated subject and message body
5. Send for approval

When mandatory approvals are active, quote responses are blocked until all required approvals reach a terminal success state. The approval status badge appears directly in the thread.

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Baskets

Baskets let you stage work and send it in one deliberate pass instead of firing off messages one at a time. Open the Baskets dropdown in the app header — it carries a badge with the total staged across both baskets:

• Response Basket — staged responses to partners: counters, accepts, rejects, and messages you added from the Inbox. Review and send them together from the Response Basket .
• RFQ Basket — listings staged for partners, ready to go out as a combined quote request. Review and send from the RFQ Basket .

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AI Assistant

Click Ask AI to open the AI sidebar with your current thread (or selected rows) pre-loaded as context. The assistant automatically switches between buyer and seller agent modes based on the listing type. Use it to:

• Analyze pricing and margins
• Get market intelligence on materials
• Discuss negotiation strategy

Click View in Playground to expand into the full AI Playground for deeper analysis.

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Automations

Configure rules that pre-process arriving quotes automatically — rejecting or noting quotes below a margin floor, countering on price comparisons, or flagging lines that miss your qualification criteria — from Settings → Automations . Matching actions are staged for a human to review, never auto-sent. See Inbox Automations.

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Email Integration

The toolbar shows connected email providers (Outlook and Gmail) with a green status indicator when active. A yellow badge appears when there are failed email processing attempts that need manual review. If no inbox is connected, a Connect button links to connector settings.

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Processing Failures

Click the failed notifications badge to review emails that couldn’t be automatically processed. Each failure shows the sender, timestamp, error details, and the original email content so you can understand what went wrong. Common failure reasons include:

• Cannot tie quote back to listing — the email doesn’t match any existing listing in your inbox
• Not from a recognized partner — the sender’s email domain doesn’t match any of your partners
• Invalid or missing fields — quantity or pricing data couldn’t be parsed from the email

For emails that failed to match a listing, you can manually tie them back by selecting the correct listing from your inbox. Select one or more failures and use Mark as Closed to clear them from the queue, or Delete to remove them permanently. While reviewing a single failure you can also:

• Reply — respond to the sender directly, for example to ask for a corrected quote
• Add Partner — onboard the sender’s company so future emails from that domain are recognized