How designs become orders

A design is a room laid out in the Room Planner: its walls, its doors and windows, and the cabinets placed in it. A design lives in one of two places, and where it lives decides who sees it, what saving it does, and whether you can still change it.

On the Designs page, before there’s an order

You start a design from Designs in the left menu. It belongs to you, and nobody else sees it, not even the Order Managers at your organization or manufacturer.

A design on the Designs page has a catalog, presets, a room, and optionally the customer, project, and area it’s for. It has no line items, no price, and no status. It’s for working out a room before there’s a quote: trying a layout, or planning a kitchen before the customer has committed. It stays on your Designs list until you create a quote from it or delete it.

Creating a quote

Create quote makes a new quote from the design. The quote gets the design’s catalog, presets, room, and link, and a line item for each cabinet.

What you’ll see afterwards:

The design leaves your Designs list.
You carry on with the room on the new quote’s Design tab.

This can’t be reversed, and it always makes a new quote: a design can’t be added to an order that already exists. From then on, the quote’s rules apply. Other Order Managers can view it, and it’s shared or not like any other order. See Seeing, editing, and sharing.

On a quote’s Design tab

A quote’s Design tab holds its room. It gets there by creating a quote from a design, or by starting the room on the quote’s Design tab directly, with no Designs page involved.

Here, the design is part of the order, and every cabinet in it is also a line item. Saving keeps the two in step:

placing a cabinet adds a line item with a quantity of 1
changing a cabinet’s options updates its line item, and its price
deleting a cabinet removes its line item

This happens only when you save. Until then, the Line Items tab shows the design as it was last saved.

The design is where those cabinets are managed, so their line items are locked on the Line Items tab: you can’t change their quantity or options there, or delete them. A cube icon marks them, and takes you to the cabinet in the design. Two cabinets are two line items even when they’re identical, because each is a separate physical cabinet in a separate place in the room.

The line items table still manages everything else about them: their ID, labels, notes, and position in the list. Products you add on the Line Items tab instead, such as parts that don’t go in the room, aren’t in the design at all, and saving the design doesn’t touch them.

After the order is submitted

Once the quote is submitted, its design is read-only, like the rest of the order. You can still look at every view and export the drawings, but nobody can change the room.

Walls come first

A room starts with its walls. The Room Planner builds the room from them when you select Generate, and everything after that is placed against those walls: cabinets snap to them, face away from them, and are measured from them.

For now, walls can’t be changed once the room is generated. Getting them right first matters for that reason.

Presets

The cabinets in a design are built from its presets, like any other line item. When the presets change, the matching options update on every cabinet, which can change their size, materials, or style. So the Room Planner shows a preview and asks you to confirm before anything is saved. Confirming saves the presets and the design together, applying the new preset values to every cabinet and replacing any changes you’d made to those options on individual cabinets.