The Link Your Client Opens Without a Login: Quotes, Orders and What the Page Shows
A quote is often finished at an awkward hour. The prices are in, the lines are right, and the client is awake with a phone in hand. Sending a PDF means the client replies “we take items 1 and 3, not 2”, and someone retypes the quote on Monday. Firmspace has a different last mile: a personal link that opens one document in the browser, without an account, and lets the client accept exactly the lines they want.
The link starts with /c/ and carries a long random token; it is created from the quote or the order screen with one button. The link opens one document and nothing else. It is valid for 90 days by default, and a second click on Share reuses the existing valid link instead of minting a new one. The page is marked noindex, the /c/ path is closed in robots.txt, and the page metadata carries no document data.
On a quote, the client sees the company header — legal name, phone, e-mail and site, plus the logo if one is set — then the quote number, the customer name, the validity date and the line table. Each line shows the description, quantity, unit price and sum; the total sits under the table in the document currency. There is no CRM navigation, no customer list, no note from the sales call. The page is a document, not a window into the account.
The selection is the part a PDF cannot do. Every line has a checkbox and starts selected. Unticking a line removes its sum from the total immediately. The accept button is disabled while nothing is selected. When the client accepts, the server keeps only the selected lines in the quote and sets its status to accepted; the rest are removed from that quote, not hidden in a separate view. The number and the customer stay, so the document remains recognisable.
After acceptance the page shows a confirmation, and the checkboxes stop responding. A second click is not an error: the server answers that the quote is already accepted. The team is notified at the same moment through the CRM notification channel, with the quote number and a link to the quotes tab, so the person who sent it does not learn about the deal on Monday. Every opening of the link also increments a view counter stored with the link and updates the last-view time.
It is worth being precise about what this is not. The click is not an e-signature: there is no one-time code, no identity check, no signed PDF. Possession of the link is the permission. A contract that must be signed goes through the contract flow, not through this page. The quote page records acceptance of a commercial offer; it does not pretend to be a qualified signature, and it should not be described as one to the client.
An order link uses the same page for a different job. The client sees the order number, the status badge, the line table and the total. If a waybill exists, the page shows the carrier — Nova Poshta or Ukrposhta — the tracking number and the carrier's status. If an invoice is linked, the page shows its number and whether it is paid; when it is unpaid and a payment link exists, the client gets a “pay invoice” button that opens the acquiring page. There is no accept button on an order.
What the page does not show is as deliberate as what it does. The server builds a narrow view: company contacts, document number, status, customer name, currency, lines, validity, delivery and payment state. Costs, margins, internal notes, other documents, the contact database and the activity feed never enter that object. The company header comes from the finance settings, not from whatever the browser session could see. The link is a permission to one document, and the code keeps it that narrow.
Links do not live forever. The default life is 90 days; an expired token or an unknown one leads to a neutral page that says the document is no longer available, while the API answers 404. The page does not reveal whether the document was deleted, expired or never existed. That neutrality is intentional: a wrong token should not become a way to probe which quotes a firm has.
The page also speaks the client's market. For a Ukrainian firm the headings switch to “Рахунок” and “Комерційна пропозиція”, and an order can carry the contract number next to the document number. The browser title stays neutral in German, English, Ukrainian and Uzbek, because the metadata should not leak the document contents into a tab, a preview or a search result. The amounts are formatted by the page itself rather than by the server's locale, so the figure does not flip between two separators while the page loads.
The assistant's role ends one step before this page. It can draft a quote from a conversation, add lines with quantities and prices, choose the currency and create the draft after confirmation. It has no tool that presses Share. That is not an oversight: publishing a document to a loginless URL is a decision about exposure, and the person who owns the customer relationship should make it. The assistant prepares the document; the human decides who gets the key.
From the client's side, the difference is small and important: no attachment to download, no account to create, no reply e-mail with a list of line numbers. From the firm's side, the link turns “sent” into something observable — opened, accepted, paid — without opening the CRM to the client. Treat the URL like the document it carries: send it to the right person, do not post it in a public channel, and remember that the 90-day clock starts on the first share.