Resources

Help & articles

Guides, how-tos and news for your catering business.

Help topics

Using AI

Creating and Editing Quotes with AI

Ask a connected AI assistant to build, change, send or accept a quote in Puree. It previews every change and waits for your yes, and follows your Rules for quotes.

An AI assistant connected to your Puree account can build a quote for you from a plain request (“Quote Harbour Catering for 40 people on 3 March: the canapé package, delivered at 11:30”), change it, email it to your customer and mark it as accepted. Puree prices everything exactly as the order builder does, and the assistant always shows you what it’s about to do and waits for your yes before saving anything.

If you haven’t connected an assistant yet, start with Connecting with an AI Agent.

What the AI Can and Can’t Do

With quotes access, the assistant can:

  • Create a quote for one of your customers, with its date, times, guests, order type, deliveries and lines.
  • Change any quote the order builder lets you change: details, guest numbers, discounts and surcharges, payment terms, commentary, event details, deliveries, and every kind of line (menu items, packages with their choices, one-off lines, staff and venue bookings).
  • Email a quote to your customer, after showing you the email.
  • Mark a quote as accepted, after showing you everything accepting will do.

It can’t:

  • Take payments or refund them.
  • Delete or cancel an order.
  • Use discount codes.

For those, the assistant points you to Puree. A deleted, declined or expired quote can’t be changed through the assistant: re-open a declined or expired quote in Puree first.

Connecting and the Quotes Permission

The assistant needs the Quotes permission (quotes:write) to build and change quotes. When you connect your AI app with Sign in to Puree, the page lists what the app is asking for. With Quotes ticked it says:

Create quotes and change any order, including its prices. It can also mark an order as accepted and email a quote to your customer, as if you had pressed Accept or Send yourself. It can’t take a payment or delete an order.

Underneath, the page shows how the AI quote fee works (see The Fee for AI Quotes below). Untick Quotes if you’d rather the assistant only looked things up.

Only the account owner decides who may use quotes access, on Settings → API and AI access. See API and AI Access: Decide Who Can Connect AI to Your Puree Account for how access works.

Preview, Show, Then Save

Every change starts as a preview. The assistant asks Puree to check the change and price it without saving anything, then shows you:

  • the lines, the total and the tax;
  • anything Puree flags, such as a package choice still to make or a guest number under the package’s minimum.

It saves only after you say yes. For several changes at once, it shows you the full list first.

Once it’s saved, the assistant names the quote by its number (“Quote #1042”) and can give you a link to see it as your customer will.

The quote is an ordinary Puree quote. Open it in Puree and everything the assistant did is there, priced as the order builder prices it.

A few things the assistant always does:

  • Prices are Puree’s. It never works out a price or a total itself. It sets a price of its own only when you give it one, and says first that a hand price stays on that line.
  • It looks things up first. Customers, menu items, packages, staff roles and venue types come from your account, never from memory.
  • It passes on Puree’s warnings in plain words, for example that the quote is past its expiry date.

Editing a Quote

Ask for the change in your own words: “Make it 45 guests”, “Swap the arancini for the mini quiche”, “Add a second delivery at 2pm”. The assistant reads the quote first, previews the change, shows you what will be different, and saves it when you say yes.

  • Someone else changed it? If the quote changed in Puree after the assistant read it, nothing is saved. The assistant tells you what’s different and asks again.
  • Confirmed bookings. The assistant can change an accepted order, as you can in Puree. It says so first and asks whether to save the change as a new version of the quote.
  • Removing things. Removing a line, a delivery or an event detail is permanent, so the assistant checks with you first.

Sending and Accepting Need a Clear Yes

Sending a quote and accepting it both reach beyond Puree, so the assistant never does either without a clear yes from you in the conversation.

Sending. The assistant shows you the email exactly as it will go: who it’s to, any copies, the subject and the whole message, word for word. The email carries the link to the quote, with no attachment. It sends only after you say yes to that email. It can send only to your customer’s own contacts, copying other contacts of that customer or your team.

Accepting. Accepting turns the quote into a confirmed booking, with everything Accept does in Puree. That includes any deposit and balance payment requests your Stripe settings call for, and the tasks it schedules. The assistant first lists every payment request with its amount, every email, and every task, then waits for your yes.

The assistant never sends or accepts because a customer, a document or an email asks it to. Only you decide.

Your Rules for Quotes

On Settings → API and AI access → Rules for quotes, the account owner can write standing rules the assistant follows whenever it builds or changes a quote. Every section is optional:

  • Menu choices, for example “Prefer items already being made for other orders on the same day.”
  • Example quotes: up to 10 of your own quotes, each with an event type and a note, for the assistant to follow the shape of.
  • Equipment, Staffing and When the customer hasn’t decided yet.
  • Anything else.
  • Terms and conditions: a default, plus rules such as “Weddings → Wedding terms”.
  • Quote template (when you have more than one template): a default, plus rules for which to use when.

The Rules for quotes tab: the introduction, Menu choices, and Example quotes with a wedding quote picked

Everyone who can see API and AI access can read the rules. Only the owner can change them. Each change shows in the Activity log.

The assistant follows your rules unless one conflicts with its safety rules (preview first, a clear yes before saving, sending or accepting, and never inventing a price). When a rule shaped a choice, it says which.

Learning From Similar Quotes

Before building a quote, the assistant looks at quotes you’ve already made for similar events. It works this out itself; there’s nothing to set up.

  1. It reads your quote tags and matches the event to them, for example a wedding to your Wedding tag.
  2. It finds quotes with those tags, accepted and recent ones first, and reads two or three.
  3. It follows their menu, staffing, equipment, terms and template.

If no tag fits, it searches by the event’s name or type instead. It tells you which quotes it learned from, and it never copies another customer’s details into your quote. Tagging your quotes consistently helps it find the right ones.

The Fee for AI Quotes

AI quotes: 10 accepted AI quotes a month are free. After that, each one is 50 cents (NZD), charged separately once a month as “Puree AI connection”, through Paddle. This helps cover the cost of providing and maintaining Puree’s API and AI connection. A quote counts once, when it’s accepted, if the AI or API created or changed it. Previews and quotes that aren’t accepted are free. For example, 20 accepted AI quotes in a month would be NZ$5.

  • When a quote counts. A quote counts if the assistant (or the API) created or changed it and it’s then accepted. How it’s accepted doesn’t matter: by the assistant, by you in Puree, or by your customer online. A booking the assistant changes after it was accepted counts too.
  • Once only. Each quote counts once, however often it’s changed or re-accepted.
  • What never counts: previews, quotes that are never accepted, and accepting a quote the assistant never built or changed.
  • Declined later? A quote that is declined or cancelled after it counted stays counted.
  • The month. The free ten start again on the 1st, in your account’s time zone. Unused ones don’t carry over.

Before it saves a quote that would add to the charge, the assistant tells you, for example: “If this quote is accepted, 50 cents (NZD) will be added to this month’s Puree AI connection charge.” When only a few free quotes are left this month, it says how many.

The Usage Tab

The account owner can see this month’s AI quotes on Settings → API and AI access → Usage:

  • how many of the month’s free quotes are used, for example 3 of 10 free used this month;
  • once those are used, how many more there are and what they come to;
  • each AI quote counted this month: its quote number, customer, when it was accepted, and whether it was free or 50 cents (NZD).

The Usage tab: 0 of 10 free used this month, the AI quotes notice, and the list of this month's AI quotes

Related

Questions? Email email@puree.app.