For the quoting desk
A salesperson quotes confidently, without ever seeing cost.
You do not need the cost basis to price well. You need the floor, what this customer has paid before, and to know before you send that the line is going to stand. PIE gives you those three and withholds the rest — the server omits cost and margin from what it sends you, so there is nothing to read out of a network tab and nothing you have to be careful about repeating.
An enquiry arrives the way enquiries actually arrive
A forwarded email, a photograph of a fax, a line of WhatsApp from somebody standing at a machine. Paste it in as it came. PIE reads it into lines and resolves each one against your own catalog, you confirm anything it flagged, and you price. Where it could not place a line it says so rather than guessing — an unrecognised token is kept verbatim, never quietly turned into a part number.
What the salesperson sees
- The negotiation floor on each line, and the recommended price
- What this customer has paid for this item before, and at what quantity
- Whether a line will need approval before you send it — and that it will be held rather than going out and being unwound afterwards
- The alternatives it found in your own book — and, on a catalog whose designations it decodes, which attribute contributed what
What never reaches you
- Purchase cost, on any line, anywhere in the product
- Margin — per line, per quote, per customer, in any aggregate
- Purchase spend and the supplier side of the book
- Any rule whose boundary is cost: a held line tells you it needs approval, and not which cost-based rule fired
Three things, on your own numbers
Deterministic arithmetic over rows your ERP already wrote, stamped with the version of the policy that judged it. The AI reads those numbers and phrases them; it never produces one.
The enquiry, in one pass
Pasted text to resolved, priced lines without re-keying. Resolution is deterministic — the same enquiry resolves the same way every time — and it runs against your own catalog rather than a generic product database.
A floor you can quote against
The guardrail is on the line while you are pricing it, not in a review afterwards. You will not send something that gets unwound, and you do not have to interrupt a manager to find out.
Held, not blocked
A line that breaches the floor routes to somebody with the authority to sign it, with the rule that stopped it named. The platform holds it — that is not you having to argue for it.
The limits, before you find them in week three
Each of these is a thing the product does not do for salespeople today. They are on the page because the alternative is you finding them after a pilot.
- Quantity on a quote line cannot be edited once the line exists. Changing a quantity means deleting the line and re-pasting it. This is an open product decision rather than a limitation anyone is defending.
- There is no activity log and no follow-up entity — no call, visit or email is recorded against an account. If that is your daily tool, PIE is not it.
- Manual entry of a product that is not in your catalog is not reachable from the screen. A line resolves against what has been uploaded, or it stays unresolved.
- Your accounts have to be assigned to you inside PIE — salespeople are not imported from any ERP, so until that is done everything routes to management.
Why it can be trusted
The AI never computes a single number.
Your business data and your rules determine the number. AI explains it.
Same inputs, same answer, every time — with a paper trail.
- Deterministic calculations — every figure is arithmetic on your own records; turn AI off and every number still works
- Auditable decisions — each number names the policy that produced it, so a price you quoted last quarter still explains itself
- Your data — read from your own books, used for you alone, exportable and erasable on request; AI runs on your own account
- Your rules — you set the floors and thresholds, and PIE holds every quote to them
- Provenance — every row carries the connector, the connection and the id it came from, so nothing in PIE claims a source it did not have
What salespeople ask first
Can I work out the cost from the floor?
With algebra, partly — the floor and the recommended price are both cost times a policy multiplier, which leaves two equations in three unknowns. That is an accepted, documented trade-off rather than an oversight: coarsening those two numbers would blunt the screens you use to decide. What is ruled out is a cost or margin field, a count or flag that answers a margin question, and any rule you could walk a price against to find where the answer changes.
Does it work on a phone, in a customer's factory?
Customer lookup, customer context, product lookup, price and availability are the tasks built for that, one-handed and on poor signal. The full quote-building flow is a desk task.
Will it tell me which substitute to offer?
It ranks what it found and shows which attribute contributed what. It does not decide, and where nothing discriminates between the candidates it abstains rather than returning the least-bad one. On a catalog whose designations it does not decode it will find the line in your own book by description, which is not the same thing as proposing an equivalent.
Is my quote going to be second-guessed?
Only where it breaches a floor somebody set on purpose, and then by a named person against a written policy rather than by whoever happens to look. The sign-off is append-only and carries the policy version in force when it was given, so the reasoning survives the quarter.
Three people, three screens, one set of numbers
The same rows, projected differently and enforced in one place. Reading the other two is the fastest way to see where the line actually falls.
PIE for sales managers
Every quote line checked against your policy before it goes out, breaches held for your sign-off with the rule that stopped them named, and the accounts that changed raised as a short list rather than a dashboard. Every figure opens into the rows beneath it.
PIE for owners and finance
You set the floors and the thresholds; the platform holds every quote to them and records who signed what against which version. Read-only against your ERP, deterministic by construction, and honest about the months it could not measure.
Your books already know where the margin went.
30–45 minutes, your own numbers on the screen, and an honest answer about what PIE can and cannot see on your book.