Sponsors accepting a package quote online
How a sponsor accepts a sponsorship package quotation on a link in the Events pack, what is recorded when they do, and the invoice acceptance drafts.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Events businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Sponsorship deals have a habit of stalling at the last step. The brand manager loves the gold package, says yes on a call, then the yes has to travel through their procurement team, their finance team and their own manager's inbox. Weeks later, you are still not sure whether you have a sponsor.
A quotation the sponsor can accept on a link shortens that last step, and leaves you with a clear record of who said yes, to what and when. In the Events & trade shows pack of Achekam's Industry CRM, accepting a quotation also starts the paperwork that follows. Here is how it works, and where its limits are.
Building the quotation from your packages
The Events pack comes with a starter catalogue: tickets, workshop seats, sponsorship packages, exhibitor booths and booth extras. None of them carries a price. No starter catalogue item in any industry pack has one, so the business sets its own prices before anything is quoted.
That is deliberate, and for sponsorship it is sensible: a headline package at a regional food festival and one at a national conference have nothing in common but the name. Switching the pack on adds the industry's revenue accounts to your chart of accounts and its unpriced starter items to the catalogue. For events, sponsorship packages post to Sponsorship and exhibitor revenue (4590) and tickets to Ticket revenue (4580).
Before sending the first quotation, set your prices for each package and decide which benefits each includes. A quotation that lists "Gold package" with no description invites the question "what do we get?", which brings you straight back to e-mail.
A link, a typed name and a ticked box
The sponsor receives the quotation as a link. To accept, they type their name and tick a box. There is no account to create and no app to download, which matters when the person accepting is a busy marketing director reading on a phone between meetings.
Acceptance confirms the commercial deal: this package, at this price. The binding terms of the sponsorship, such as cancellation, exclusivity and what happens if a benefit cannot be delivered, belong in the sponsorship agreement, which the pack's onboarding sends for electronic signature as its own step.
How much weight a typed name carries in law depends on your country. UNCITRAL's Model Law on Electronic Signatures sets reliability criteria for treating electronic signatures as equivalent to handwritten ones and underlies many national laws. Ask your adviser how a click-to-accept quotation stands in yours, and rely on the signed agreement for anything you might need to enforce.
The sponsor's IP and browser kept
When the sponsor accepts, Achekam keeps their IP address and browser with the acceptance, along with the name they typed. The link's token is stored only as a hash. If a dispute arises months later about whether the gold package was ever agreed, you can show when it was accepted, by what name, and from which connection.
That record is only as useful as the details on the quotation. Send it to the person with authority to commit the budget, not to a coordinator who forwards it on, and the acceptance points at the right person.
Revisions instead of edits
Once a quotation is sent, it is frozen. If the sponsor asks to swap the stage banner for an extra hospitality table, you do not edit the sent quotation; you issue a revision. The sponsor then accepts the revision, and the original stays on record as what was first offered.
Revisions protect both sides. The sponsor cannot be shown different terms from the ones they accepted, and you cannot be told the price was lower than the one on the link. For long negotiations, name revisions clearly in your covering note so the sponsor's procurement team knows which one is current.
The invoice drafted in receivables
Acceptance drafts the sponsor's invoice in receivables. It is a draft, not an issued invoice, so someone on your team checks it before it goes out: the right billing entity, the right purchase order number from the sponsor's side, the right payment dates for a package paid in stages. Each invoice line names the revenue account and product it sells, so the package lands in sponsorship revenue rather than a general sales account.
Issuing the invoice straight away, at the moment of acceptance, needs an administrator's recorded authority. Without it, the draft waits for a person. For sponsorship that is usually the safer default, because the sponsor's finance team tends to need details on the invoice that only surface after the yes.
Once issued, the invoice posts to the ledger as debtors, sales and output VAT and can be e-mailed as a PDF on your letterhead. From there the onboarding carries on: the sponsorship agreement for signature, the request for logo and artwork, and a checklist for every benefit.
Your own prices on each package
The quotation is only as good as your price list. Before the season:
- Price every sponsorship package and booth in the catalogue.
- Write a short description of each package's benefits.
- Decide whether any administrator should have authority to issue invoices on acceptance.
- Have the sponsorship agreement reviewed, since it follows straight after.
For everything that happens after acceptance, read onboarding a sponsor and tracking every benefit, and for the full detail of what an acceptance records, see what is recorded when a customer accepts a quote.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
