Quotation for Financial Needs

I recently did a quick and dirty project for a friend’s friend’s company - just proofreading a presentation slide deck. I quoted an hourly rate upfront, tracked my time, sent them an invoice, and asked my bookkeeper to send over a fapiao. All good.

My contact window at the client company acknowledged receipt of my fapiao, and wrote:

have received the invoice and will process it as soon as possible,
and can you please provide an quotation for financial needs?
Thank you!

I have written back asking for clarification on what this could be given that I already sent both (1) an invoice (where the hours, rates, and payment details are explicit) as well as (2) a fapiao.

Any thoughts on what they have in mind? That first project was really easy, and my friend’s friend (not the contact window) thinks that there are more projects like this that they will want to send me, so I would like to smoothen things out.

You’ll have to get clarification from them, which you’ve already asked for, but a couple of guesses:

  1. Perhaps for outsourced projects they like to record both an initial quotation, and the final price? It seems silly to get a quoted price after the fact, but it wouldn’t be the first time record-keeping becomes silly. “I initially quoted a price of $5,000 based on $1,000 per hour and an estimated five hours of work, but actually it took me six hours of work, so I charged you $6,000”.

  2. “Financial needs” could be actual expenses (e.g., I dunno, buying PowerPoint to be able to access the file, but I doubt you could claim that - or taxi fare, or whatever).

  3. Is there an Excel or spreadsheet buried somewhere in the attachments, and they want you to fill that in according to the company’s standards?

  4. How’s your Chinese? Maybe just ask them to give you the Chinese and then you can get someone else to translate it.

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When dealing with larger companies, typically you have these documents:

  1. Quotation
  2. Purchase Order
  3. Invoice
  4. Remittance Advice
  5. Receipt

In fact, many companies will not accept an invoice for payment unless it is sent with a purchase order (their explicit request to order your services, in document form). For them to make a purchase order, they need a quotation.

(NB: this is not a Taiwan-specific thing)

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Thank you.

I got an answer back right away but I am still trying to figure it out

Our finance needs to know the charging standard,
like how many for one minute or hour,
the example are as follow:

image

I guess they did not see my invoice, which I sent to my friend’s friend, and maybe only saw the fapiao that they received in the mail from my accountant. I have re-sent them the invoice.

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Thank you. I combined #3 and #4 in your list of documents and sent it to my initial contact (my friend’s friend), and my accountant sent #5 to the contact person. I did #1 via email, and since they gave me literally one day to do what I initially estimated to be a 4-day project**, I did not send any formal quote.

The PO (#2) was skipped completely because I forgot, but for a simple project like this, could it be optional? More importantly, shouldn’t the client be generating the PO?


** The actual sequence of events was
A. they gave me the slide deck to review,
B. I told them this is going to take me 4 days because of the rest of my workload,
C. they said, “we forgot to mention we are leaving for the US tomorrow”

Correct, the purchase order and the remittance advice are generated by the customer. The supplier provides the quote, invoice and receipt.

Looking at your reply above, it looks like you’ll have a smooth ride for future projects :slight_smile: The 5 step process is a bit unweildy for smaller ventures, but it does help guide a discussion to converge on accounting standards. Often the procurement department and the actual team consuming the services have different expectations of the requirements here :slight_smile: it looks like you’ve got to a good place anyway!

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